Customer Reviews

Blood Vines

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a keeper! From page 1 until the end, I did not want to put the book down. The ending was great, in only it matched the middle and the beginning. This is a really good book.

I generally like Erica Spindler's books but couldn't get into this one. The info on wine country was great and not excessive. But the characters had no depth. I really didn't care about any of them and the ending was stupid and not everything was resolved. Plus I don't get the thing with Alex and Reed. They never went out in public together and half the time Reed thought Alex was a murderer. There were three or four sex scenes which totaled, not kidding, about two pages. Borrow this one from the library.

As always, Erica Spindler does not disappoint! Blood Vines was a great book that kept me waiting on the edge of my seat. Set in Sonoma California, the ending has a twist that you don't expect. Just as I thought I had it all figured out, I was wrong again! I love that her books are never predictable, I can never guess the ending no matter how hard I try. I've read all of her books and this one is as good as the first. You will enjoy Blood Vines.

I found it very good. I read it in just a couple of days.Some of the twists were unexcepted.Erica Spindler writes another good one.

This was given to me as a gift. Erica Spindler is my favorite author and this book did not let me down. Great read!

I love Erica Spindler - all stories I have read of hers have been very good. I like this one especially because it was in the Napa / wine country area.

This book was great. I couldn't put it down, it kept me wanting to see what would happen next.

An edge-of-your-seat, riveting read! Ms. Spindler always manages to outdo herself!

Alexandra Clarkson's mother, Patsy, has mental health issues and is an artisit who never completes her paintings. Alexandra is having nightmares with visions of cult activity and doesn't know where these dreams are coming from.

Alexandra and her Mom have lived alone since Alexandra was 5-years-old but her Mom would never tell her who her father was and it bothered Alexandra a great deal. One evening Alexandra arrives home to find her Mother dead, she had comitted suicide. Devastated and not knowing what to do with herself, she climbs into the attic and finds an old trunk with some memoribilia in it which leads her to Sonoma County, wine country.

Alexandra has gone there to try and figure out who she is and who her father is and why her Mother never told her. During her stay there, strange and terrible things begin to happen and the family she encounters appears very unhappy that she has sought them out. But why? The more Alexandra digs for information, things begin to happen; people are murdered, a house burns down, someone is found hung, and the wine caves seem to have some unknown power over Alexandra and she doesn't know why.

Alexandra hooks up with Detective Daniel Reed and they begin a love affair but will Reed end up having to arrest and charge Alexandra for some heinious crimes? The outcome will surprise you. You'll think you have this story figured out but believe me, you won't!!

This is a MUST read and make sure you have a few hours of free time ahead of you because once you begin, you won't be able to put this down, I know, I stayed up all night!!!

This book was a quick and easy read. I wasn't sure if I figured this one out until the very end. Nice edge of your seat read especially for vacation. I had the main suspect pegged but I wasn't sure how the other characters played into the crimes. Therefore, I went back and forth about some of the secondary suspects. I would however, liked more information and clarification on the use of the chopsticks (trying not to give too much away). I can't wait for Spindler's next book!!!

I've worked 15 years as a native San Franciscan hauling tourists by the busload up to Sonoma and Napa two or three times a week. It was with interest I grabbed this book from the book sale at the Yountville Library. For 25c, it was a good, quick read, full of local color and almost believable characters - just almost. Apparently Erica Spindler lives in the area or she couldn't know so much detail both in the city and in the wine country.

However, for readers unfamiliar with our Bay Area, here are some nitpicking remarks about the people and their situations:

1. Our heroine works in the Mission District as a bartender, doing the night shift, driving home at night. Any young white woman doing such a thing would be considered basically wild, a bit daredevil, and certainly playing with her life. The drug wars, the Mexican gangs, all of them come out at night. I've lived in the Outer Mission for years, pass through the Mission by day, sometimes shopping for groceries or at secondhand bookstores. But nighttime? Are you kidding? Even the police would just throw up their hands if she died there.

2. Our heroine is a serious academic, financing her own PhD. in religious studies, paying her bills by bartending in aforesaid bad neighborhood. This is not the usual white-girl transplant who is playing around in San Francisco, as can be found by the hundreds or, is it thousands? She can earn enough just from tips to have an apartment, have a Prius, and pay tuition. Well, a Prius is about $27K, as opposed to buying a cheap secondhand car, and an apartment is about $1500/month rockbottom price; perhaps a studio. A bartender earns how much in a month? I'm not sure, but for a serious student, it seems a long and hard haul to work fulltime, pay full rent, have no roommate, own an expensive car, and work on that Ph.D.

3. Although the heroine is shown as knowing about religious rituals and universal impulses towards worship, "we're hardwired for it" as she repeats often to the Officer Reed, her new lover in Sonoma, she seems to be terribly shallow about it all. No deeper impulse towards her own spirituality, and yet she is getting a doctorate in it? She does not come across as a true academic type, driven towards books and ideas; they do not seem to enter the author's description of her life at all. A quick move from her subletted SF apartment to a whole house up in Sonoma is done in a few bags. Where are all the books? How about her university?

4. To rent a complete house up in Sonoma, one and half blocks from the central Plaza, would be about $2,500-$3,000/month, unless the person gave her a great deal and halved the rent. That is a very desirable place to live as a whole, but the only real cheap places would be much further away from the Plaza, closer to the Mexican migrant worker housing. Yet she somehow has saved enough money, she declares, to quit working for six months. That does not jive with that Mission bartending job.

5. The Sommer winery with its very old caves, chiseled away by Chinese labor in the 1800's, sounds like Beringer's, now owned by Foster's Beer of Australia, next to Christian Brothers, up just past St. Helena, Napa. That is for you folks who'd like to go on a tour as she is describing when the heroine hears voices...

6. A vineyard, regardless if the vines are old, cannot have a hole dug up in it, no matter how deep, without someone noticing such a disturbance of the earth. Vineyard maintenance is ongoing; someone would have seen the strangeness of it back 25 years earlier when the baby was buried. The dirt would be softer, give way, when walking on it. A real solution to such a baby problem would be to either burn it or bury it up in the hills, in the brush, where NO ONE would be checking anything. Even better, get it far, far, far away from the scene of the crime, like in another county! Am I right on this? I know so. Think of the terror of someone who's trying to bury a dead baby!

7. I wondered now and then if our writer is not a man, perhaps Eric. The descriptions of the women were very typically male, always specifying age and beauty level, clothing, hair and makeup. Descriptions of male characters almost always omit these visual markers.

8. An officer who has rebelled against his father, a rich winery owner, leaving its operation and profits to his two brothers, would not be so casual about the huge difference in income as our Dan Reed is shown to be. He has sacrificed a great deal to quit that family and should have had major issues with it.

9. Dealing with a suicided mother, only 54, unemployed for years, with a trashed house from manic destruction of her artwork: these things are done awfully smoothly by the daughter in a very few days. She gets her mother's ashes into an urn, contacts the obituary section of the paper, and then... takes off for Sonoma. What about the house? No mention of a house, worth probably at least a million, left alone back in the City?

The house was an old Victorian, and since the book is written for 2010, then a million would be a low price. Would a bartending, scraping student really abandon that? I wouldn't!!!

10. The ex-husband Tim, who keeps appearing and re-appearing, is terribly unrealistic, as is her off-and-on sleeping with him, then subsequent rejection, then picking up the officer and never getting to know him at all. Has she no other friends to call than the ex and the new boyfriend? What kind of person is she???

11. The ending made no sense, to me. Perhaps I rushed to the end, but what a very quick wrapping up of details, plus offering our heroine in the family winery a new job. So she drops everything else? I suppose she didn't care much what she had done until age 30, and the Ph.D. didn't matter if she got her Mrs.