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A Matter of Blood (2010)

di Sarah Pinborough

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1666163,299 (3.95)4
The recession that grips the world has left it exhausted. Crime is rising in every major city. Financial institutions across the world have collapsed, and most governments are now in debt to The Bank, a company created by the world's wealthiest men. But Detective Inspector Cass Jones has enough on his plate without worrying about the world at large. His marriage is crumbling, he's haunted by the deeds of his past, and he's got the high-profile shooting of two schoolboys to solve - not to mention tracking down a serial killer who calls himself the Man of Flies. Then Cass Jones' personal world is thrown into disarray when his brother shoots his own wife and child before committing suicide - leaving Cass implicated in their deaths. And when he starts seeing silent visions of his dead brother, it's time for the suspended DI to go on the hunt himself - only to discover that all three cases are linked . . . As Jones is forced to examine his own family history, three questions keep reappearing: what disturbed his brother so badly in his final few weeks? Who are the shadowy people behind The Bank? And, most importantly, what do they want with DI Cass Jones?… (altro)
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I have been waiting to read this until I new the next two books were going to be released in the U.S. Now I wish I had waited until they were all released because waiting to see how the story is going to end is going to drive me crazy. A great mix of thriller, police procedural, and horror. Read it on a dark and rainy night. ( )
  cdaley | Nov 2, 2023 |
"A Matter Of Blood" is a well written serial-killer book with a supernatural twist. The characters are deftly drawn. The scenes are delivered with cinematic clarity. The dialogue works and the plot unfolds at a confidently slow pace that increases the tension.

I stopped reading about halfway through. I just couldn't take the world Sarah Pinborough was describing.

The main character is a broken man who seems to have betrayed himself, his wife, and his brother and who continues his work as Detective in the MET as a form of atonement. He sees himself as beyond redemption and, after being in his head for half the book, I tend to agree with him.

The shadowy, potentially supernatural, killer is a well-conceived, life-denying entity that truly believes nothing is sacred.

The violence is graphic, extensive and ultimately pointless. The sex is tortured by guilt and failure. Even the strongest relationships are tainted by doubt. The economy is failing, creating the kind of grinding poverty that destroys hope.

I didn't find any of this incredible. It seemed very real and very plausible to me. I just didn't want it in my head.

There was a time when I had to finish every book I started. It was an unexamined rule that I'd had since childhood. Stopping would be a failure to finish. Failure was bad. So I would read on.

Perhaps I've just become more accustomed to the inevitability of failing from time to time, or perhaps I'm more aware that I will never have enough time to read all the books out there that will delight me, or scare ,me or teach me something, or make me laugh, or love, or cry, but I now understand that stopping reading a book before I've finished it is a valid choice. It's just not one I make lightly.

Right now, I want reading that gives me hope, not reading that strips it away by fueling the plot with violent, pointless death and pitting people so deeply flawed they could shatter at any moment, against a powerful evil that sees life as worthless and love as self-delusion.

Perhaps I'll go back to Sarah Pinborough when I'm in a more positive frame of mind, but "A Matter Of Blood" will be staying in my "Did Not Finish" pile.
  MikeFinnFiction | May 16, 2020 |
So I ordered this from my trusty local bookseller and when I picked it up she gave the blurb at the back a read, went quiet, and then said 'Jaysus Christ.' Why, yes, this is dark. It's crime dark and it's horror dark and even a touch of dystopian sci-fi dark. The writing combines psychological tension with grimy physicality and the plot is a police-procedural serial killer story that gradually reveals itself to be murky urban fantasy. It'll darken your mood, but it's a great read. ( )
  Nigel_Quinlan | Oct 21, 2015 |
Sarah Pinborough makes it clear from the first page of her prologue in A Matter of Blood that we’ll be seeing plenty of blood — and worse. The novel opens on the scene of a corpse squirming with maggots. An unnamed man stands in the doorway and declares that “This has to stop,” but the noise of the flies only grows louder. It seems, though, that the man is talking to someone — not to the corpse, not to himself, not even to the flies, though maybe he is speaking to someone through the flies. And maybe, we think, we’re on to something with that last thought, because as the speaker continues, the flies gather together and form into a shape that is nearly human.

It’s the last glimpse of the supernatural we get for a long time, though. Instead, Pinborough’s novel reads like a sharp, nicely detailed police procedural for most of its first half. The protagonist is Detective Inspector Cass Jones, who works in the Paddington Green precinct of a near-future London (as of the time the book was published) subtly different from the one in the real world. Cass is finely drawn: he is exceptionally smart, but has a strong tendency to self-defeating behavior, including ugly fights with a wife he loves, affairs with the wrong women, too many cigarettes and the occasional use cocaine. He has high friends in low places, but that’s not the reason most of his fellow officers despise him; he ran into some trouble while undercover a few years earlier, and some think he got off too easy. It seems that only his sergeant, Claire May, has any regard for him. Partly that’s because he’s good at what he does, and a good boss besides; partly it’s because they have a brief physical and emotional relationship in their recent past.

Cass has been assigned to the latest serial-killer murder; this is the fourth victim in two months. “Nothing is sacred,” say the words written on the latest female corpse in her own blood. He’s also working on the murder of two young boys who were the victims of a drive-by shooting, while the apparent intended victim of the shooting, another criminal, walked away. The cases are sufficiently all-consuming, but when a personal tragedy intervenes, Cass comes close to being overwhelmed. And even then, there is more real-world horror to be heaped on Cass’s head. It seems it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse, and worse keeps coming.
About midway through the book, though, Pinborough begins to make explicit what she has merely been hinting at thus far, and the supernatural takes a role in the events swirling about Cass. The doings of his brother’s employer, known merely as “The Bank,” begin to seem more far-reaching than the public realizes, and we wonder who is running the world that Pinborough has created. Pinborough subtly injects the supernatural into her tale as merely one more element in a straightforward mystery, so that the reader is hip deep in alligators before she even knows she’s walked into a swamp.

As a longtime mystery reader, especially one with a love for English mysteries, I was entranced by this novel from the outset. As a longtime horror reader, I quickly recognized that Pinborough was dealing with horrors worse than those humans inflict on one another. Pinborough skillfully deploys the science fictional elements of the near-future effects of the 2008 Great Recession with the police procedural set in the nitty gritty world of police work with the horrors that can only be wreaked by ancient gods fighting one another, and the forces of entropy, for their very survival.

A Matter of Blood is the first in the FORGOTTEN GODS trilogy. It is, however, largely self-contained. You won’t find any explicit cliffhangers here, and Pinborough gives us solutions to the major crimes Jones is investigating in this novel. Still, threads are left hanging — a sufficient number of them to lead a reader to grab the second book in the trilogy as soon as she closes the covers on this first one. Turn off the phone, lock the doors, leave the lights on, and read; once Pinborough captures you, you are enthralled to the end.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/horrible-monday-a-matter-of-blood-by-sa.... ( )
1 vota TerryWeyna | Mar 24, 2014 |
A Matter of Blood is an interesting mix of police procedural, noir, horror and what looks like fantasy - though that last only shows up as hints through the book. It was the requisite flawed police detective hero hunting a serial killer and getting involved in other cases that become surprisingly tied up in his own. But as we go, there's darker stuff going on - with a plot that thickens nicely.

Frankly, I almost gave up on this one. Through the first 2/3 of the book, I really didn't like the hero. Then some things happened that I won't tell you about, and suddenly I did. Fortunately, the writing's pretty good -no literary masterpiece, but nicely done. Plus at the end of the day, I'll pick up the sequel to see how the overarching storyline plays out. Recommended, but some graphic violence occurs. ( )
  drneutron | Dec 28, 2013 |
I've added Pinborough to my list of "Best Horror Authors". Her third and final novel in the Dog-Faced Gods Trilogy, THE CHOSEN SEED, is an incredible end to an incredible Horror series. I put it right there with my absolute favs. The Repairman Jack series. The Matthew Corbett series. The Harry Keogh novels. Yeah, for me Pinborough's Cassius Jones trilogy is in the same league....
What more can I say? The writing is accessible while not being dumbed-down. Again, the pacing is slower than the prior novels, but it doesn't hurt the story in the least. The characters are the natural evolution of what they started at in the first book, A MATTER OF BLOOD. When all the answers start coming to light, they are big, epic, and perfectly handled.

I don't often get that feeling of warm fuzzies when I finish a series. Finales are usually a let-down if the author even gets to the finale in the first place. THE CHOSEN SEED is, in my opinion, a near perfect ending to a near perfect series. I don't know what more I could even ask for. This is Horror where we see how under-prepared characters deal with an impossibly huge situation. In the end, I was left feeling completely satisfied.

THE CHOSEN SEED, and the whole Dog-Faced Gods Trilogy, is all about characters and story. It doesn't get any better than that.
Recommended Age: 18+
Language: As in the prior novels, there is a ton.
Violence: Not quite as visibly violent as the prior novels due to Cass not investigating murders.
Sex: Nothing shown, but talked about quite a bit.
 

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The recession that grips the world has left it exhausted. Crime is rising in every major city. Financial institutions across the world have collapsed, and most governments are now in debt to The Bank, a company created by the world's wealthiest men. But Detective Inspector Cass Jones has enough on his plate without worrying about the world at large. His marriage is crumbling, he's haunted by the deeds of his past, and he's got the high-profile shooting of two schoolboys to solve - not to mention tracking down a serial killer who calls himself the Man of Flies. Then Cass Jones' personal world is thrown into disarray when his brother shoots his own wife and child before committing suicide - leaving Cass implicated in their deaths. And when he starts seeing silent visions of his dead brother, it's time for the suspended DI to go on the hunt himself - only to discover that all three cases are linked . . . As Jones is forced to examine his own family history, three questions keep reappearing: what disturbed his brother so badly in his final few weeks? Who are the shadowy people behind The Bank? And, most importantly, what do they want with DI Cass Jones?

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