Author: Anne Perry
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Violence
Captain William Monk of the London River Police and his deputy are on the Thames one night, enjoying the sunset and the view of a pleasure cruise boat when the boat suddenly bursts into flames, and Monk springs into action, rescuing as many survivors as possible. But when the night is over, nearly 200 people are dead. Within days, the case has been taken from Monk, and he smells a conspiracy that he, his wife Hester, and his disgraced friend Oliver Rathbone work to uncover.
Initially, I thought that Blood on the Water did a nice job doing what so few sequels do well-- introducing the regular characters in a way that got new readers up to speed without bogging down the story for regular readers. However, as the story wore on, I found that I was so bored. Perry spends a lot of time with Monk and Hester, but not much time at all with the potential villains. The story quickly becomes bigger than just finding a bad guy, because there are many bad guys, but none she makes me care about. And I'm going to be a spoiler here, so don't read the rest of this if you want to read the book and be surprised, but it turns out that the major villains are people that dedicated William Monk fans already know-- they already care about them. But me? Not at all. And if I don't care much about the villain, and there's not a lot of character development going on for the heroes, then it's not a book I care much about.
1 comment:
I thought she had some really lovely turns of phrase and she wrote the courtroom scenes incredibly well--lots of tension and drama. But the mysteries themselves were kind of weak. The suspense depended on people forgetting key stuff and then remembering later, especially Monk, like suddenly remembering the guy jumping off the boat, or Hester suddenly figuring out the mystery by using the passenger list and information that the detectives had all along. Yeah, the mystery was no bueno.
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