Customer Reviews

Bloodprint: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ms. Sewell has captured her characters on paper with expertise. The story blends the concept of "Santeria" or ritual magic, mental illness and domestic violence with the practicalities of everyday life in such a way as the reader remains `in' the story to the very end. Highly recommended.

Diane Davis White,
Author: Moon of the Falling Leaves

Psychotherapist Madeleine Frank's husband loses his life in a Hurricane, so she leaves her home in Key West, crossing the ocean to Bath, England. England is also the country where Madeleine's mother, a Santera priestess is institutionalized, a victim of paranoid schizophrenia. Now there's a mom for you, a priestess of a really strange African based religion who's gone round the bend, what's that gonna do do your psyche?

Madeleine sets up a practice and hopes to get on with her life, even though she knows it's almost impossible to get over some loses, but unknown to her, her life is going to take a very unpredictable turn when Rachel Locklear shows up looking for therapy.

As Madeleine's trying to put the past behind her, dealing with Rachel seems to put it front and center. Rachel is a caring mother who used to be a lady of the evening and she's trying to shed her life of some not so nice characters, including the pimp father of her child. Bad things are swarming around her client and they threaten to engulf Madeleine as well as the lives of these two women become intertwined.

This story is crammed full of plot twists, especially as you approach the latter part of the book, so you might feel as if you're being jerked around. You are, but don't worry about it, because this is a roller coaster of a read that will have you burning the midnight oil as you hurriedly finger through the pages.

Madeline Frank is a psychotherapist who lives in London but yearns for her native America. Madeline lived the majority of her life in Key West Florida but after the death of her husband she decided to return to London where her parents both lived,of course they are divorced, which is common now days. Madeline's mother is very eccentric, she is what people call a "witchy woman"- but in her homeland she is referred to as a "Santeria". Madeline's father is a well known artist whose paintings have earned him great wealth. Madeline's mother is now in an institution,we call it a nursing home, she has long since lost her ability to function on her own. Madeline must face the secrets of her past which are now haunting her, she must also deal with her patients' ,one of which is an imprisoned murderer,another which is somehow familiar yet distant from her. As she deals with her life, her Mothers care and continued loss she must also find the one thing she gave up many years ago,her daughter. Madeline's life is intertwined with with her patients much more than she is aware of.This book would make a really good movie. I enjoyed reading this book although it took me a little while to get caught up in it. There was a few surprises between the pages. Even Madelines poor decrepit mother is full of surprises.

This book had me mezmerized. For nights on end I stayed up way past my bed time unable to put it down. This book looked intriguing but that is certainly an understatement. Kitty Sewell has certainly arrived with BLOODPRINT and stands up there with the best writers of psychological fiction.

The book started a little slow for me and then it kicked into gear and never let up. This is one of those stories where giving away more than a little will ruin the shocks and surprises for other readers so I will be brief on that. The novel is a story of two women - Madelaine Frank and Rachel Locklear - whose lives become intertwined at random and then there are unique similarities that bond these very different women. The book starts dramatically with Madelaine loosing her husband to a hurricane in Key West and moving to Bath where she has become a therapist. Rachel has a very troubled marriage and is abused by her husband. She comes to see Madelaine for help in removing herself from her husband for the sake of her son.

These two women are more than believable. They are very rich three dimensional characters with secrets and depth that creates great psychological suspense. All the other characters in each of their lives are just as real. This book will grab you as you care about these characters and are enthalled by the plotline. The author also does the difficult task of making Key West and Bath so real and descriptive that they become characters in their own right. This book also encompasses Cuban sorcery, prostitution, street life, a relationship with a convicted killer and murder. All is believable. This novel would have succeeded had it merely been a psychological profile of these two women and their lives but it goes even further and becomes a full fledged A++ thriller. You will be at the edge of your seat and quickly turning each page with anticipation.

There is much pop fiction in this genre out there. This is in no way pop fiction. Kitty Sewell is a gifted author and this piece of literature rises a level above the genre. Often with these novels the endings can seem a lttle convoluted but here everything rings true. The story here is very complex and very well crafted. There is no disbelief as the story unfolds. If you a a fan of psychological suspense this book is a must for you. So unique and following no standard formula this story with all its sorcery and magic included will enthrall you.

Kitty Sewell is now on my list of favorite authors.

I wholly enjoyed this book and read it cover to cover in just a few days. It was difficult to put down and I felt compelled to keep reading. It was a believable and extremely well-crafted fiction ride. I was caught up in the events described and connected well with the main characters depicted. If you like fast, complex stories this one will suit you well!

There's so much set up in this novel that promises a lot. But in the end, it becomes bland and banal, more like a TV movie than a real thriller.

Madeleine Frank is a therapist working in Bath, England. She was born and raised in Key West but left there after her husband was killed in a hurricane. She's also a talented painter, visits her mentally-ill mother twice a week in a nursing home, and also visits an imprisoned serial killer once a week, in a sort of effort to help him. Oh, and her mother had been a practitioner of Santeria and has psychic flashes.

Sound interesting? There's lots of potential in this set-up, especially as a new factor emerges. Rachel, a slatternly former prostitute, walks into Madeleine's office, looking for help in dealing with her attraction to Anton, her boyfriend/pimp and the father of her seven-year-old son, Sasha. But as time passes, Madeleine begins to wonder if Rachel is really the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager...

There's so much set up and promised in this novel, but ultimately it all degenerates into a "oh no, my abusive boyfriend wants to kidnap my child!" plot, which seems a poor usage of all the setup that's gone on here. And it takes forever to get there; the book's nearly half over before the story gets moving. And there's a number of disappointments...some significant revelations (one worthy of an entire book in and of itself) are dealt with in an offhand, dismissive manner, and one very important issue is dropped and forgotten about. And her serial-killer friend is such a blatant ripoff of Hannibal Lecter that I almost stopped reading the book right then and there. It's almost offensive to the reader's intelligence.

Madeleine is almost impossibly noble and self-sacrificing when she's not being overly narcissistic in her suffering over her lost husband. She's hard to get involved with as a central character, and Rachel is too defensive and edgy to really like all that much, despite her dire circumstances.

And the supernatural content is kept on the back-burner, limited mainly to psychic flashes, until something rather significant at the end which felt out of sync and almost deus ex machina.

It's decently written, but it feels as if Sewell threw together a number of plot elements and then didn't know what to do with them or how to make something truly exciting out of the assemblage. I was glad for it to be over and glad to leave Sewell's world behind. It's not that it was unpleasant, just uninteresting.

BLOODPRINT: A NOVEL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE starts off with a lot of potential. BLOODPRINT is the story of Madeline Frank who is the daughter of a famous British artist and a Cuban priestess of Santeria, had a child out of wedlock at 16, was forced to give her child up for adoption, lost her husband in a hurricane, gave up her art to become a therapist, has two parents who are now rapidly declining and becoming dependent on her, and is looking for her long, lost daughter who, it turns out, has a lot of serious troubles of her own. Any one of these threads would make for an exciting and tension-filled story. But in throwing all of these ingredients into one big bowl and stirring them together has produced a story that feels manufactured and is actually quite difficult to get through.

There are a number of problems with BLOODPRINT. The character development is almost nil. The reader gets glimpses of insight into the characters, but never a real look, and thus, is never able to develop a connection with anyone in this story. The reasons given or implied for the characters' actions are superficial and not always believable. There is no meat, no depth to these characters, nor to the practice of Santeria, which is integral to this story. The constant flashbacks interwoven with the main thread are also a distraction. While this literary device works very well in some novels, it falls very short here in BLOODPRINT. It convolutes the story even more than it already is, and that is something this novel does not need. And in spite of all of this unwarranted intricacy, BLOODPRINT is actually very predicable. I knew exactly what was coming next, every step of the way. There is very little suspense and almost no surprise in BLOODPRINT.

Author Kitty Sewell clearly has a lot of good story ideas. Unfortunately, she tried to tell them all at the same time here in BLOODPRINT. In the future, I hope that Ms. Sewell can be a little less ambitious in her writing and will concentrate on telling one single, cohesive story at a time. It should not be this difficult to tell a story, nor be so hard to read it.

The first third of BLOODPRINT is entertaining enough and I enjoyed the primary setting of the historic city of Bath, England as well as the flashbacks to the well described Florida Keys. Madeleine, the heroine of BLOODPRINT has some interesting attributes. A forty something widowed psychotherapist with a hobby of watching and painting ants, she has an institutionalized Cuban mother who practices Santeria, a famous artist father who is going blind and a daughter she gave up for adoption years ago who she reunites with about the time the daughter and her son find themselves in some big trouble. Some other interesting major characters in the book include a Ukrainian born pimp, an incarcerated mass murderer, and Madeleine's boyfriend a younger archeologist with problems committing to monogamy. It seems these characters and their circumstances could combine to make a suspenseful and interesting book. Unfortunately they don't and after the promising beginning I had to force myself the finish the last portion.

Madeleine Frank is a psychotherapist and we all know that a psychotherapist's role is to help clients deal with conflicts, inner issues, confusions, mental turmoil and personal inner demons and help them to chart a course to the comforting shores of mental stability. But when the psychotherapist's background is jammed to bursting with a chaotic, bewildering variety of personal psychological baggage, readers will justifiably wonder whether Madeleine Frank is capable of maintaining a solid Chinese wall between her personal and professional lives.

Life has not been easy for Madeleine Frank. She lost her loving husband to the anger of a savage hurricane in Key West Florida. Her mother, a former priestess of Santeria, a dark and mystic Afro-Cuban religion, hovers on the edge of madness in an asylum. Her father, living a Bohemian but wildly successful artist's life in Bath, England, with a younger woman, ignores both Madeleine and her mother. Madeleine's daughter, virtually hi-jacked away from her when Madeleine was only a teenager in a very questionable administrative procedure, was given up for adoption. The daughter has not been seen or heard from since.

As low and weak as it already is, that wall between Madeleine's personal and professional lives threatens to crumble to powder when Frank meets Rachel Locklear, a Russian immigrant telling a story of sexual slavery, prostitution, beatings, murder and threats on her life from her ruthless, controlling partner and his psychopathic brother. As Rachel's terrifying story unfolds in the course of therapy, Madeleine Frank recognizes some chilling coincidences and becomes convinced that Rachel is the long-lost daughter that she had never been able to reach.

"Bloodprint" is a wonderful blend of suspense thriller, psychological thriller and romance with more than a hint of the paranormal thrown in for good measure. The characters are flamboyant, powerful, complex and exceptionally well-crafted. Whether the story is unfolding in the quaint, Georgian countryside of Bath, England, or on the humid, sun-drenched, storm-tossed shores of Key West, Florida, locations are vividly brought to life with deliciously, descriptive prose.

"Bloodprint" is a chilling story with that proverbial ability to glue you to your seat and keep you turning pages until you reach the end. Other reviewers have suggested that "Bloodprint" is a weaker effort than Sewell's first novel, "Ice Trap". If that's true, then I can hardly wait to get my hands on it!

Paul Weiss

The author provides an excellent story line with lots of details about the Santeria religion. Psychological details also abound, since the heroine is a psychologist. I found the character development in particular to be very good. The writing style is plain and direct, with flashbacks being written in italics - a device which is quite useful in keeping the present plot separate from the past, and still provides the details needed to understand the story. Some authors do not provide enough connection between these "look backs" and the plot, but this book does it in excellent fashion.

I found myself increasingly drawn into the story line, and the mystical subplot worked well, turning what would be a typical suspense thriller into something with more mystery and depth. There is more to this story than just a narrative of events - it is fully fleshed out and carries the "unknown" right into the last pages of the story. Well done.

This book has a lot of graphic language, violence, and sexual situations, although the last item is tastefully done - this is not erotic fiction. Thus it is completely inappropriate for children and young teens.

If you like your story to have depth, beyond the obvious plot lines, this is a story that will be of interest.