|
|
Genealogy Book Store > Genealogy books beginning with B
|
Bloodline (Natasha Blake, Ancestor Detective, Book 2) |
Author: Fiona Mountain
Published: 2006-09-05 |
List price: $6.99
Our price: $4.00
|
As of: January 06th, 2009 01:45:02 AM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Bloodline
Another great one by Fiona Mountain. If you are as interested in genealogy as myself or even an amateur sleuth this is a great read!
 A decision to make
I actually liked this second novel better than the first. For some reason it was much easier to read.
Mountain takes a good premise and runs with it using genealogy to get to the heart of the matter. Natasha Blake is one of those needy people you want to slap on the side of the head and say "get on with it girl" in her personal life but professionally she is excellent.
If there is a problem in these mysteries it is Mountain's indecision as to whether she is writing a mystery or a romance novel. She has to lose those hokey younger couples which she insists on sending off into the sunset living happily ever after. I guess the reader is suppose to see this as a reflection of some kind of Blake's sorry personal state. For the most part they are ridiculously uninteresting and frankly not endearing as hard as Mountain tries to make them to be. If anything they add an amaturistic slant to the story. If Mountain wants to write romance than write a romance,otherwise stick to the mystery and how Blake gets to the solution-she does that very well. These side characters (including her dysfunction family) for the most part are irritating distractions. A good mystery writer knows that when it comes to crime there are few happily ever after endings.
 Good premise spoiled by heavy-handed storytelling
Fiona Mountain had a good idea for a mystery with Bloodline, but she ruined it with her ham-fisted way of telling a story. She seems never to have heard that the cardinal rule of good writing is "Show, don't tell", but repeatedly hits the reader over the head with the points she wants to make. She insists on calling attention to the parallels between Natasha's life and the mystery she's investigating, as if she (the author) were afraid a reader wouldn't be clever enough to notice them on her own. For example, in describing a scene that takes place in a garden, she says, "The exposed and tangled roots of the weeds were pale through the covering of dark soil", and then feels compelled to add, "The analogy of roots being ripped up wasn't lost on her." Trust me, if you make it to page 262 (where this passage appears), the analogy wouldn't be lost on you either, even without the authorial intervention.
In my review of Mountain's previous book (Pale as the Dead), I commended her for not letting her research get in the way. Unfortunately, that isn't the case with this book. Too often, reading it felt like reading the author's research notes. She even has one character -- an elderly woman who isn't an academic -- say that, in a conversation which took place many years ago, another character "quoted J. Hooper Harvey's Heritage of Britain". I find it hard to believe that the character would have remembered not only the title of the book, but also the author's full name, right down to the "J. Hooper". Sounds to me more like the author, fresh from the library, speaking.
The Natasha Blake mysteries are a bit like Sarah Stewart Taylor's Sweeney St. George mysteries (O' Artful Death, etc.), in that both series are about a young woman with an unusual job that causes her to get involved in solving mysteries from a different angle. If that concept sounds intriguing to you, I would recommend that you spend some time with Sweeney St. George. After reading Bloodline, I can't say the same for Natasha Blake.
2nd in genealogy mystery series. Fun read!
Bloodline by Fiona Mountain is the second book in the Natasha Blake genealogist mystery series. After an elderly man hires Natasha to investigate the family background of his granddaughter's fiance, he is mysteriously murdered. The man's son hires Natasha to find out why. Mountain does a much better job this time of connecting with the reader. Natasha's connections to her friends and family deepen and develop as well. There are loads of subplots, including Natasha's insomnia which occasionally makes her take actions that had me shaking my head in disbelief. The story takes an unexpected dark turn as Natasha finds out that sometimes finding the answers to questions only creates more questions with answers no one wants to hear. This was a fun read that made me think a bit too. I look forward to the next in the series.
 Lebensborn
Young, attractive genealogist, Natasha Blake has been commissioned by a charming but strange old man, Charles Seagrove, to research the family tree of his granddaughter, Rosa's boyfriend. Her search reveals a murderess and a series of criminal types in the boy's background, causing Charles to forbid Rosa to have any further contact with the boy.When Charles is murdered by a shotgun blast, his son Richard asks Natasha to continue with the genealogical search as he feels that there are answers to be found in Charles's past history, which was bound up with his farm and a number of Land Army girls who worked for him during WW2. What follows is a fascinating series of revelations, all connected to the Nazi party's policy of Lebensborn, the plan to populate Germany, and eventually the world, with genetically and racially pure children, all of Aryan descent. It's a chilling indictment of racial purification and all that it entails. It was an interesting read with a heroine whose exploits I intend to follow in her other books.
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our Genealogy book picks:
|
|
Search the Genealogy Products Store
LCS Amazon Store 2.5 © 2009
|
|
|
