Blood Lines

Blood Lines (1993) Tanya Huff

In the third book in the Victory Nelson Private Investigator series, an ancient mummy is released from his bindings and takes up where he left off–gathering power and souls for his God. Several strange deaths draw Mike Celluci, and then Vicki Nelson and Henry Fitzroy onto the case.

I did not like this book nearly as well as the previous two. I am still enjoying learning about Henry Fitzroy, and it’s still interesting watching Vicki come to terms with her continuing loss of sight, and I didn’t even mind the sniping between Henry and Mike. What bothered me was the amount of violence in this book.

Vicki has gotten hurt in previous books (which must be why the books are set in Canada, so that she isn’t in life-long debt after her first hospitalization) but I really do not like it when authors do lots of awful things to their characters, for reasons that I’m not certain I believe. It was just too much, and I found myself skimming through much of it, and hoping that I wasn’t missing any important plot points.

I realize that there are bad people that do bad things–in fact I realize that horrible things happen to people all the time. I suppose I just wasn’t convinced as to why these bad things were happening, other than to make us feel sorry for Vicki, and to show us how strong and resilient she was. It just felt over-the-top and unnecessary.

As for the rest of the story, I did like the idea that modern humans would unknowingly release terrible evil upon the world, because we were unable to recognize–or believe–the ancient warnings. If magic does exist, then in unearthing ancient tombs and treasures would most likely bring doom or evil or bad things or whatever into the world (If I remember correctly, were there not stories about tragedy befalling those involved in unearthing Egyptian tombs?). That seems reasonable.

And I liked the way that she made the ancient mummy able to deal with the modern world. Although I think the mummy might still have had a harder time dealing with things than he did, but I didn’t find the way he dealt with the modern world unreasonable.

However, I just wasn’t excited about this story. Like Blood Price, this story was not a mystery–we know who the bad guy is from the start. And I just didn’t find the mummy as interesting as the werewolves or the summoned demon from the first two stories. I also don’t understand why Vicki doesn’t see that maybe she’s being unfair to Mike Celluci. (Boy was I hoping that Celluci would end up seriously involved with Rachel. But apparently, no dice.) I also didn’t care for the ending, with the “there is still evil out there and it knows our name” bit. Ugh.

So… Blood Lines was okay. There wasn’t anything really awful, but neither was there anything really great. And I just couldn’t get into the story. So you’ll of course want to read this if you want to read the whole series, but I would not recommend this as a starting point, despite the fact that you could read this separate from the previous books.
Rating: 5/10

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