The Blood Card
The Blood Card by Elly Griffiths
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Oh, how I wanted to love this book.
Now let me explain–I ADORE Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway. Her writing is stellar. The plotting, the characters, the way she evokes emotion from atmosphere, the sense of place…Griffiths is a wonderful writer. I recommend her all the time to my mystery book group.
So why do I so hate the Stephens and Mephisto series?
I tried, I really did. I had attempted the first in series, the Zig Zag Girl, about a year ago. I was all caught up on my Ruth Galloway installments and was eager to try Griffiths’ second series.
I couldn’t make it through the book–gave up early on. Plodding, amateurish…just not hitting the right notes.
But I was looking for a “palate cleanser” after reading a somewhat intense mystery that was filled with grit and violence.
I picked up The Blood Card, hoping that my dislike of The Zig Zag Girl was due to first-in-series-not-great syndrome.
Nope. Just didn’t like it at all.
Too many characters with no distinct personalities. Emma, who works with Stephens, is the most fleshed out character, but too little too late. She really only shines towards the end. And Tol, the Romany chef who was “good with knives,” was enjoyable. But just try to keep all the performers straight…they are interchangeable. And we meet most of them only through other people describing them, not first hand.
No sense of London and her treatment of Brighton only slightly better. But no where NEAR as awesome as how she describes Norfolk in the Galloway series. Yeah, there’s rain. Yeah, there’s the sea. That’s about as atmospheric as it gets.
The plot was ludicrous. What really struck me was its similarity to the Dr. Who episode I had just watched. The Idiot’s Lantern (aired 10 years before The Blood Card was published) was set in the days prior to the Queen’s Coronation, focused on the newness of television and how many people bought one just to watch the Coronation, and subliminal messaging through this new device. But Dr. Who–even though it was aliens (!) rather than anarchists did a way better job.
And the very end; look, whenever an author is compelled to spend the end of the book explaining what happened, something is wrong. The reader should be able to understand what happened through the course of events, not needing a blow-by-blow re-cap to make sure we understand.
So my advice? If you want to continue to enjoy the brilliance of Elly Griffiths, stick to the Ruth Galloway mysteries. She shines. And if you want to read a fun mystery about the Romany and secret agents, and be enchanted by a fanciful but fun series, go straight to The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax.