Blood Echo: Book Review

Blood Echo by Christopher Rice

★★✰✰✰ 2 stars

I really enjoyed Bone Music, its action oriented plot made for thrilling read. Both Charlotte and Luke showed some actual character growth, and I came to like them both.
Sadly, Blood Echo is merely an echo of its predecessor. The beginning of this novel was promising enough, but it turns out that Charlotte’s hunt for a ‘serial killer’ was merely an appetiser and not the full course meal. The action-packed start leads to a long-winded back and forth between various characters.
This book consists in characters bickering and/or arguing with one another about the most inane things. I get that ‘tension run high’ when you are leading, or part of, a secret operation that could revolutionise the world as we know it but why waste precious time rehearsing the same arguments?! Cole, Charlotte, and Luke (as well as a lot of the side characters) will have these stupid ‘power struggles’ where one character feels the need to assert his or her authority over another character. There will be character A who says something along the lines of “you don’t want to mess with me” and character B will give a stupid reply like “is that a threat? ”
I wouldn’t have minded as much if these arguments made 1) sense 2) advanced the plot 3) revealed something about a character. But they don’t! They just came across as ‘pissing contests’ and they make up the MAJORITY of this forking narrative. What happened to the actual story?Is there a story? N-O! We just have characters questioning each other about every other sentence they say making each ‘conversation’ almost never-ending, they almost seem to parrot one another.
I grew tired of how stupid the characters were and Cole, who happens to have a bigger role in this book, was such a disappointment. I was hoping that his having the ‘limelight’ would show what sort of personality/history/character he has but no such luck. Towards the end he recounts a traumatic event in such a ‘I’m such a hard-core guy now‘ way that made what could have been a potentially emotional/distressing scene as flat as a pancake.
Charlotte and Luke seem to regress, becoming more immature by the sentence.

Overall, not only was this was a huge let down but it also made me dislike the characters and world I’d previously loved in Bone Music.

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