Blood Like Mine
Stuart Neville
384 pages
Simon & Schuster UK
published August 15, 2024
Thanks @SimonandSchusterUK and @thelikelysupsects for my advanced reading copy.
I love a good horror book but have some trouble finding one that is both believable to me and still horror. This one hit the mark. I started out reading this one and pondering why is this horror, but trust me you get there. It starts out slow and it gave me time to connect to Rebecca and her daughter Moonflower. They are on the run from an unknown something.
I was sucked in from the start. I may be a little biased in my love for this one since not only did I find a believable horror story, but it was meshed up with a crime story. Another of my favorite genres. Rebecca and Moonflower are pitted against Special Agent Donner in a high stakes cat and mouse game. The author does such a good job with the blend of the genres, the back and forth between the two sides and the slow flow of information that explains Rebecca and Moonflowers transgressions. That slow flow of information really doesn’t feel slow. The book moved at a quick pace and each new bit of the pair’s past allowed me to analyze how it fit with what I already knew. It really was a clever set up that always had me actively trying to figure out all the pieces.
I liked the letters Rebecca wrote to Moonflower that were sprinkled throughout the book. They added another layer of intrigue since they too seemed a little out of context and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them.
The relationships in this were well done. The love and protection Rebecca has for Moonflower was counter to how Donner’s job was tearing him apart from his family.
Trust me to not read too much about this one and pick it up if you are a fan of fast paced horror books.
In LA Times Book Prizewinner Stuart Neville’s daring foray into horror fiction, a mother takes desperate measures to protect her daughter in a sinister, blood-chilling highway pursuit across the American West.
On a snowy December night, single mother Rebecca Carter drives her van into a snowbank to avoid hitting an elk on a desolate mountain highway. She is at the end of her rope, out of money and food. Still, she refuses help from a man in a pickup truck—Rebecca’s adolescent daughter, Moonflower, is on the run from a grisly secret, and the last thing they can afford is to be remembered by anyone they meet.
Meanwhile, Special Agent Marc Donner of the FBI has spent the better part of two years hunting down a gruesome serial killer who drains victims of blood before severing their spinal cords, leaving a trail of bodies throughout the American West. As Agent Donner’s investigation brings him closer and closer to where Rebecca and Moonflower are hiding out, in the foothills of Colorado, the life that Rebecca has fought so hard to hold together for her daughter becomes increasingly imperilled.
In this deadly, high-stakes game of cat and mouse by the Los Angeles Times Book Prize winning author of THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, nobody is safe and nothing is certain—not even the line between predator and prey.
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