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perfectlymisaligned's review against another edition
1.0
I am always looking for a good scary read, and I had high hopes for this one. But unfortunately, this was a huge disappointment.
FBI agent Jake Cole comes back to his hometown after his ailing father has an accident. He soon gets caught up investigating a series of extremely grizzly murders, and finds himself questioning what is what isn't reality.
This book is very dark and brooding, which works for the premise. However the author not only went overboard on the minute details, but the characters tended to ramble on to the point where I found myself skimming ahead several times. It is hard for me to lose myself in a book if i find myself getting annoyed by how much the story is dragging. Bloodman could have done with some heavy editing, and probably about 100 less pages.
Several people have mentioned how shocking the ending was. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, but I still managed to figure out where the story was going, and what the supposed "twist" would end up being within the first 20-30 pages. That probably had a lot to do with why I didn't end up enjoying this as much as some other reviewers have.
My YT Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bookgasmic
My blog: http://ravingbookaddict.blogspot.com/
FBI agent Jake Cole comes back to his hometown after his ailing father has an accident. He soon gets caught up investigating a series of extremely grizzly murders, and finds himself questioning what is what isn't reality.
This book is very dark and brooding, which works for the premise. However the author not only went overboard on the minute details, but the characters tended to ramble on to the point where I found myself skimming ahead several times. It is hard for me to lose myself in a book if i find myself getting annoyed by how much the story is dragging. Bloodman could have done with some heavy editing, and probably about 100 less pages.
Several people have mentioned how shocking the ending was. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, but I still managed to figure out where the story was going, and what the supposed "twist" would end up being within the first 20-30 pages. That probably had a lot to do with why I didn't end up enjoying this as much as some other reviewers have.
My YT Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bookgasmic
My blog: http://ravingbookaddict.blogspot.com/
bunnicula_'s review
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Gore, Addiction, Animal death, Death, Murder, Child death, Alcoholism, and Blood
Minor: Dementia, Drug abuse, Animal death, Vomit, Cursing, Injury/Injury detail, Sexual content, Grief, and Medical content
thanasisp's review
5.0
Δεν ξέρω αν τα αξίζει τα 5 αστέρια. Το σκέφτηκα αρκετά αν θα του βάλω 4 ή 5. Προς το 4,5 πάει. Αλλά εν τέλει σκέφτηκα ότι πέρασα σούπερ διαβάζοντας το, και έχει και μία σκατοψυχιά που πάντα με γοητεύει :) Οπότε πάρε 5! Επίσης... Δεν θα το έλεγα αστυνομικό. Ναι, έχει την δομή αστυνομικού, αλλά φλερτάρει έντονα με τον τρόμο και το μυστήριο.
velvetsun's review against another edition
1.0
I am always looking for a good scary read, and I had high hopes for this one. But unfortunately, this was a huge disappointment.
FBI agent Jake Cole comes back to his hometown after his ailing father has an accident. He soon gets caught up investigating a series of extremely grizzly murders, and finds himself questioning what is what isn't reality.
This book is very dark and brooding, which works for the premise. However the author not only went overboard on the minute details, but the characters tended to ramble on to the point where I found myself skimming ahead several times. It is hard for me to lose myself in a book if i find myself getting annoyed by how much the story is dragging. Bloodman could have done with some heavy editing, and probably about 100 less pages.
Several people have mentioned how shocking the ending was. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, but I still managed to figure out where the story was going, and what the supposed "twist" would end up being within the first 20-30 pages. That probably had a lot to do with why I didn't end up enjoying this as much as some other reviewers have.
My YT Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bookgasmic
My blog: http://ravingbookaddict.blogspot.com/
FBI agent Jake Cole comes back to his hometown after his ailing father has an accident. He soon gets caught up investigating a series of extremely grizzly murders, and finds himself questioning what is what isn't reality.
This book is very dark and brooding, which works for the premise. However the author not only went overboard on the minute details, but the characters tended to ramble on to the point where I found myself skimming ahead several times. It is hard for me to lose myself in a book if i find myself getting annoyed by how much the story is dragging. Bloodman could have done with some heavy editing, and probably about 100 less pages.
Several people have mentioned how shocking the ending was. I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, but I still managed to figure out where the story was going, and what the supposed "twist" would end up being within the first 20-30 pages. That probably had a lot to do with why I didn't end up enjoying this as much as some other reviewers have.
My YT Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Bookgasmic
My blog: http://ravingbookaddict.blogspot.com/
anne2021's review
5.0
4.5 stars, loses half a star because it's really, really gruesome.
Otherwise, it was fantastic and completely caught me off guard.
Otherwise, it was fantastic and completely caught me off guard.
mvvre's review
2.0
This was a pretty decent book but I'd been spoiled as to the plot twist before I started reading so I didn't enjoy it as much as I think I may have.
moreadsbooks's review against another edition
1.0
When I first started reading this book, I found it so sinister & gross I was sort of creeped out to keep it in my bag or next to me on the couch. It had me checking the locks on the doors on my day off. But then it became so laughably bad, my psyche was spared from further onslaught & the creepy parts retreated under the awful ones.
Jake Cole is an FBI consultant with an eidetic memory which allows him to memorize crime scenes. He can’t seem to remember how many times he’s told the story about his pacemaker to certain people but this gift does allow him to get inside the heads of serial killers. He’s gone to his old hometown to see to his Alzheimer’s-y father Jacob Coleridge & gets pulled into investigating some homicides that redefine yucky. And here's where it gets spoilery -Also he’s apparently in town to be a serial killer himself, since hometown sheriff eventually figures out that the as-yet-unidentified the bodies of the first victims are actually Jake’s wife & son. Hey, Jake, you know all week long while you were at your dad’s house & your wife & son were visiting? And your wife did all that cleaning around the house& you had that talk about whether or not you were doing a good job raising your kid? And you guys had sex while you choked her with your belt (but it was okay, that’s how she likes it)? Well, all of that never happened. How do we know? Jake only ordered one pizza for dinner. Apparently his mind can sustain the fiction that he didn’t skin his family alive & he’s been hanging out with them all week, but he can’t order a takeout meal for more than one person. And not only that, all those memories of how his mother loved him a lot & he loved his dog & it was his big asshole dad that killed his dog? Also false. Because Jake isn’t actually the son of his father & mother, even though Pobi uses tons of inferences & every word other than “DNA” to make you think so. When Jake was a little boy, he killed his real parents on a boat & then tried to sink the boat and the Coleridges found him & I guess that’s why he’s a serial killer now & at the point I was so confused & annoyed I threw the book across the room.
Unreliable narrators are one thing. They’re not my favorite thing ever, but there are instances when they work well. I’m thinking of Gone Girl or maybe John Dies at the End as pretty good examples. But when an author writes a whole book about a guy & his family & memories just to yoink it out from under the reader’s feet, I absolutely must cry foul. If as a writer you have to ask your readers to disregard the entirety of the book they’ve just read so you can pull off your killer reveal, I respectfully submit that you are not a very good writer. If you make your reader sit through 396 pages of a book which includes the disgusting murder & de-epitheliazation of four adults & two kids, you damn well better come up with an ending better than, “That guy who was trying to catch the killer? He did it.” Robert Pobi, you have failed. Try again.
Jake Cole is an FBI consultant with an eidetic memory which allows him to memorize crime scenes. He can’t seem to remember how many times he’s told the story about his pacemaker to certain people but this gift does allow him to get inside the heads of serial killers. He’s gone to his old hometown to see to his Alzheimer’s-y father Jacob Coleridge & gets pulled into investigating some homicides that redefine yucky. And here's where it gets spoilery -
Unreliable narrators are one thing. They’re not my favorite thing ever, but there are instances when they work well. I’m thinking of Gone Girl or maybe John Dies at the End as pretty good examples. But when an author writes a whole book about a guy & his family & memories just to yoink it out from under the reader’s feet, I absolutely must cry foul. If as a writer you have to ask your readers to disregard the entirety of the book they’ve just read so you can pull off your killer reveal, I respectfully submit that you are not a very good writer. If you make your reader sit through 396 pages of a book which includes the disgusting murder & de-epitheliazation of four adults & two kids, you damn well better come up with an ending better than, “That guy who was trying to catch the killer? He did it.” Robert Pobi, you have failed. Try again.
xterminal's review
4.0
Robert Pobi, Bloodman (Thomas and Mercer, 2012)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
It is on page 60, with the last sentence of Chapter 9, that Bloodman blows up in your face. At that point it turns from an average, if overly descriptive, thriller into a good (if still overly descriptive) thriller. At some point, I'm not exactly sure where, in the thirty pages that follow that, Bloodman turns into a very good thriller indeed, the kind of book that has you sacrificing all of your available free time to read. It gets overly twee (in that annoying “aren't I clever?” sense) in the final third, but given that Pobi manages to almost pull off everything he's trying to do, I was far more forgiving of it here than I have been with some books (the obvious example, if you've been following my reviews long enough to remember me writing it up almost ten years ago, is Everything Is Illuminated).
Plot: Jake Cole is an FBI agent, but as the book opens, that is less important than the fact that he has returned to his childhood home for the first time in a quarter-century in order to deal with his father's advancing Alzheimer's. Jake's plan is to get in, get the decisions made, and get out, but of course things don't ever really work that way; his first night in town, he gets a call from the local sheriff—two bodies are found in a local sublet house, skinned. (Weak stomach warning: one of them is a child.) Jake is not only the closest Bureau agent to the scene, but he also specializes in ugly cases like this; he has an eidetic memory for crime scenes, and as the son of a famous painter, he has the kind of unofficial training in scene composition that allows him to look at things in ways most forensics people don't. That'll come in handy, given there's a time limit on solving the case: a Category Five hurricane is projected to make landfall right outside Jake's father's house in two days. Even worse, Jake takes one look at the crime scene and knows he's encountered this killer before...
There's an Ebert Rule in movies that also applies to a lot of genre mystery/thriller novels. The Internet is currently failing me on the exact quote, so I'll have to paraphrase for you: once you have exhausted all the other possibilities, the last person left is the killer. (You could doll that up in Sherlock Holmes-speak: “the last person left, however improbable...”. It went through my mind while I was reading Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary, which may have invented the conceit.) These days, thriller writers who want to think outside the box are going to flaunt that rule—they will give you a number of scenarios that all seem quite plausible, including the real one, and tell you, subliminally, to take your pick before walloping you with the correct answer. You can see how this sort of thing could go very badly in the hands of an incompetent writer. Pobi, on the other hand, manages it with some panache, though if you're not paying close enough attention, you may find yourself asking a few questions at the end (I was paying close enough attention, and there were a couple of things that seemed a bit out of place). There's also one pivotal scene in the book that is told from two different perspectives, and it has the kind of clumsy handling that one sees in older mystery novels where the detective gathers everyone in the drawing room and explains how he solved the crime before dramatically naming the killer. (Again, we turn to Agatha Christie.) But to be perfectly honest, even though those things jarred me, by the time I got to page three-hundred-whatever and realized what Pobi was doing—another mark of a really solid genre thriller, for me, is that that one last piece of the puzzle doesn't click in my head until a few pages before the actual revelation, which is exactly what happened here—I didn't care as much as I probably should have. I had been thoroughly entertained by this book, and it had thoroughly entertained me in a way that was, if not novel, at least a sterling example of this new breed of wave-a-red-cape-in-front-of-your-audience mystery/thrillers. This is not a mystery that will change your life, but it is one that does its job, and does it exceptionally well; it's Mirage rather than The Usual Suspects. This makes it no less worth reading by any measure. If you're a fan of the genre, this is a must-read. *** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
It is on page 60, with the last sentence of Chapter 9, that Bloodman blows up in your face. At that point it turns from an average, if overly descriptive, thriller into a good (if still overly descriptive) thriller. At some point, I'm not exactly sure where, in the thirty pages that follow that, Bloodman turns into a very good thriller indeed, the kind of book that has you sacrificing all of your available free time to read. It gets overly twee (in that annoying “aren't I clever?” sense) in the final third, but given that Pobi manages to almost pull off everything he's trying to do, I was far more forgiving of it here than I have been with some books (the obvious example, if you've been following my reviews long enough to remember me writing it up almost ten years ago, is Everything Is Illuminated).
Plot: Jake Cole is an FBI agent, but as the book opens, that is less important than the fact that he has returned to his childhood home for the first time in a quarter-century in order to deal with his father's advancing Alzheimer's. Jake's plan is to get in, get the decisions made, and get out, but of course things don't ever really work that way; his first night in town, he gets a call from the local sheriff—two bodies are found in a local sublet house, skinned. (Weak stomach warning: one of them is a child.) Jake is not only the closest Bureau agent to the scene, but he also specializes in ugly cases like this; he has an eidetic memory for crime scenes, and as the son of a famous painter, he has the kind of unofficial training in scene composition that allows him to look at things in ways most forensics people don't. That'll come in handy, given there's a time limit on solving the case: a Category Five hurricane is projected to make landfall right outside Jake's father's house in two days. Even worse, Jake takes one look at the crime scene and knows he's encountered this killer before...
There's an Ebert Rule in movies that also applies to a lot of genre mystery/thriller novels. The Internet is currently failing me on the exact quote, so I'll have to paraphrase for you: once you have exhausted all the other possibilities, the last person left is the killer. (You could doll that up in Sherlock Holmes-speak: “the last person left, however improbable...”. It went through my mind while I was reading Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary, which may have invented the conceit.) These days, thriller writers who want to think outside the box are going to flaunt that rule—they will give you a number of scenarios that all seem quite plausible, including the real one, and tell you, subliminally, to take your pick before walloping you with the correct answer. You can see how this sort of thing could go very badly in the hands of an incompetent writer. Pobi, on the other hand, manages it with some panache, though if you're not paying close enough attention, you may find yourself asking a few questions at the end (I was paying close enough attention, and there were a couple of things that seemed a bit out of place). There's also one pivotal scene in the book that is told from two different perspectives, and it has the kind of clumsy handling that one sees in older mystery novels where the detective gathers everyone in the drawing room and explains how he solved the crime before dramatically naming the killer. (Again, we turn to Agatha Christie.) But to be perfectly honest, even though those things jarred me, by the time I got to page three-hundred-whatever and realized what Pobi was doing—another mark of a really solid genre thriller, for me, is that that one last piece of the puzzle doesn't click in my head until a few pages before the actual revelation, which is exactly what happened here—I didn't care as much as I probably should have. I had been thoroughly entertained by this book, and it had thoroughly entertained me in a way that was, if not novel, at least a sterling example of this new breed of wave-a-red-cape-in-front-of-your-audience mystery/thrillers. This is not a mystery that will change your life, but it is one that does its job, and does it exceptionally well; it's Mirage rather than The Usual Suspects. This makes it no less worth reading by any measure. If you're a fan of the genre, this is a must-read. *** ½
majormess's review
2.0
The book was written pretty well, but I did not like the story too much. The characters are overdrawn the story is sometimes conflicting, irrational and in general not convincing (e.g. why does the protagonist have a photographic memory but can not remember a big chunk of his lifetime, when somebody actually tattooed his entire body? Apart from "thinking about it", it seems there was not one minute spent on actual police work by the protagonist!).