Customer Reviews

Fresh Blood II (Bloodlines) (No. 2)

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While these fifteen stories representing "the cream of Britain's new wave of crime writers" comprise a stronger collection than the standard mixed-bag anthology, they are decidedly more mainstream and less edgy than the stories in the first "Fresh Blood" collection. The only ones worth totally skipping are John Tilsley's San Francisco-set tale and the throwaway coda contrivance by RD Wingfield. The cream of the crop (somewhat surprisingly given the mainstreamedness of his novel Not the End of the World) is probably Christopher Brookmyre's "Bampot Central," a hilarious tale of two idiotic Scottish bank robbers. Phil Lovesy's "Stranglehold" is a tight little story, done in real-time. Both the editors turn in strong stories, although it would be nice if Jakubowski could weed out the Anglicisms from his U.S.-set stories. For some reason I quite liked John Baker's "Defence," even though it's not apparently a crime story until the last two paragraphs. John Williams provides another quality story in his ongoing series on the Cardiff underworld (the story was later reprinted in his collection, Five Pubs, Two Bars, and a Night Club). Mary Scott and Lauren Henderson's stories fine, though nothing special, and Ken Bruen (Rilke on Black, The Hackman Blues) once again doesn't do anything for me. Two homages, (Charles Higson's to "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Christine Green's to "Psycho"), are quite effective, as is Carol Anne Davis's (Shrouded) typically creepy "The Ghosts of Bees." Iain Sinclair's "No More Yoga at the Night Club" is an East End number whose appeal will largely lie in the reader's own affinity for that particular place (cf. Jake Arnott's The Long Firm).