A Perfect Blood by Kim Harrison
This is the second-to-latest book in Kim Harrison’s Hollows series, featuring the redheaded witch Rachel Morgan and her cast of friends and enemies. I strongly suspect that if you haven’t been following along the whole time, you’ll be hopelessly lost, so don’t try to pick this up mid-series.
This one reminded me of the Anita Blake series by Laurel Hamilton. It began with a series of horrific murders in which witches who had the same genetic disease as Rachel were partially transformed into demon-like mutants. Innocent people picked up off the street and held captive, then tortured until they died? Ewwww. Harrison doesn’t pull any punches with the gore. Rachel herself doesn’t pull any punches. In one scene, she beats a man in the head until he loses consciousness, just to prove she’s not willing to hurt (kill?) people. It also reminded me of the Anita Blake series in that Rachel is working with and sometimes against two different government detective agencies who are trying to find (or secretly hindering) the hate group behind the murders.
The other way in which it reminded me of the Anita Blake series was the amount of time that Rachel and her friends sit around talking to one another. Pages and pages (or, actually, minutes and minutes, since I listened to an audiobook) could go by with nothing more than Rachel noticing the emotions playing out in the eyes and gestures of the people around here. There are a lot of characters in this book. Characters who do almost nothing in this story are brought in for cameos, probably because readers remember them from other novels, for example, Bis, Belle, and a dryad named Darryl (the latter of whom I don’t remember at all) Personally, I could have done without the walk on parts from secondary characters, but I’m sure there are readers out there who love Bis or Belle or whomever and will complain if they don’t show up.
Some of the tension has left the series, because there used to be a lot of people that Rachel was in constant conflict with, and it’s not quite the same. It used to be that Rachel was worried that Trent would kill her or turn her over to the cops if she snuck into his house. Now it feels like all they’re going to do is get in an argument. (Rachel picks pointless fights a lot, which is probably why she always feels 23 to me, no matter how old she’s supposed to be in the series.) The horrific demon Al is an ally in this series. Even Ceri seems to want to let bygones be bygones with Al, which is kind of hard to swallow, considering that he kept her a captive and used her brutally for a thousand years. It’s like Rachel is a halcyon who makes everyone she knows get along with each other. It probably helps that 90% of the characters introduced are fit, young, and hot, even if they’re a thousand years old.
There is external conflict, however, because Harrison sets up the bad guys to be very bad indeed. Rachel begins the novel wearing a charm that prevents her from using magic, and it’s proved that she’s virtually helpless without her magic. She can’t take it off by herself, and we’re told that when she takes it off she’ll be taken to the Everafter and not allowed to return to earth. Naturally, this gets her into trouble. Rachel careens from one disaster to another. She gets beaten up a lot. She eats a lot of pizza.
It’s not the best of the Hollows series, but it’s not the worst either. It’s fun and fast-paced, and my version was narrated by Marguerite Gavin, who is absolutely splendid as narrator.
