Thursday, October 8, 2015

A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson Book Review



Title: A Line of Blood
Date Published: September 29, 2015
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Source: TLC Book Tours

Purchasing:


Whose secrets cut deeper?

Your family's.

Whose secrets do you fear?

Your neighbor's.

Whose secrets can kill?

Your own.

For Alex Mercer, his wife, Millicent, and their precocious eleven-year-old son, Max, are everything—his little tribe that makes him feel all's right with the world. But when he and Max find their enigmatic next-door neighbor dead in his apartment, their lives are suddenly and irrevocably changed. The police begin an extremely methodical investigation, and Alex becomes increasingly impatient for them to finish. After all, it was so clearly a suicide.
As new information is uncovered, troubling questions arise—questions that begin to throw suspicion on Alex, Millicent, and even Max. Each of them has secrets it seems. And each has something to hide.

With the walls of their perfect little world closing in on them day after day, husband, wife, and son must decide how far they'll go to protect themselves—and their family—from investigators carefully watching their every move . . . waiting for one of them to make a mistake.

A Line of Blood explores what it means to be a family—the ties that bind us, and the lies that can destroy us if we're not careful. Highly provocative, intensely twisty and suspenseful, this novel will have you wondering if one of them is guilty—or if all of them are—and will keep you on edge until its shocking final pages.

You will never look at your loved ones the same way again. . . .


When I first read the description of this book, I had high hopes for it. I know how much my family (husband and two girls) mean to me, and looked forward to seeing how Alex, Millicent and Max would go to protect themselves. And boy, I wasn't disappointed.

When Alex and Max are looking for their missing cat, they stumble on their dead neighbor. It appears a suicide, but as the investigation continues, the death leads more and more to foul play. The most intriguing point of the story for me was the different suspects, and what their potential motives might have been for wishing the death. And, at the center of all the drama is the Mercer family.

What you see from Alex in the beginning of the book morphs into a totally different personality as you see what his life is really like. There is betrayal and revenge that is an imminent threat on the core of his family and all of his relationships. Alex is a character that I both felt empathy and anger towards. Without giving away spoilers, what he puts up with in his home life from both his son and wife are horrible. But, the way the story and characters are developed, I loved it. A wonderful tale and beautifully written. 


Ben McPherson is a television producer, director, and writer and for more than ten years worked for the BBC, among other outlets. He is currently a columnist for Aftenposten, Norway's leading quality daily, and lives in Oslo with his wife and two children.

Find Ben on Twitter and Facebook.


1 comment:

  1. I'm pleased to see that this book surpassed your expectations! Thanks for being a part of the tour.

    ReplyDelete