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Bloodshot (Cheshire Red Reports, #1)

Cherie Priest

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Mar 21, 2011 Mir rated it really liked it

Shelves: adventure

Cherie Priest has created a very human vampire. Raylene may be stronger and faster than a normal human, but she isn't smarter or sexier. Becoming undead cures your health problems -- including, in this case, allergies -- but it doesn't change your personality or give you super powers. Raylene lies to herself as much as the average gal and her judgement and foresight aren't always great. In fact, she does some fairly dumb things, especially for someone who is supposed to make a living as a thief ...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides rated it it was ok

Shelves: fantasy-fiction

So when I'm reading fantasy books especially ... okay, imagine an (x,y) coordinate plane. The x-axis is labeled reality and the y-axis is labeled joy. Reality is how real the author makes the setting feel and joy is how happy reading the book makes me feel. I need at least a little of each to stick with a book. Unfortunately this book scores 0 on the joy scale. I almost put it down halfway through because of that. The protagonist is an isolated bundle of neuroses. She wanders through the story k ...more

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Aug 18, 2020 Thomas rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: horror, 2020, urban-fantasy

I dig Cherie Priest's books. I really do. I liked most of the Clockwork Century, and the bulk of the Eden Moore series, but there have been what I've seen as missteps along the way (Fathom and her two novellas), so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Bloodshot was such a disappointment. It just seems to have so many fans.

To be fair, there are a lot of good moments in the book, moments that remind me of the best of what Priest can do. They just don't outweigh a lot of the problems I had with it I dig Cherie Priest's books. I really do. I liked most of the Clockwork Century, and the bulk of the Eden Moore series, but there have been what I've seen as missteps along the way (Fathom and her two novellas), so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Bloodshot was such a disappointment. It just seems to have so many fans.

To be fair, there are a lot of good moments in the book, moments that remind me of the best of what Priest can do. They just don't outweigh a lot of the problems I had with it. For one thing, the book feels very wordy and repetitive for the first two-thirds of the book. She draws out scenes too far, enough so that I felt like I could skip ahead a couple of pages and not miss a thing. Raylene, her narrator and main character, makes a lot of assumptions in her line of work, which is weird, since she's supposed to be some uber-PI. There were parts that she didn't seem to take seriously enough, and then other parts that she paid far too much attention to, like how a drag queen manages to tuck so well.

(I'm not kidding about that. It pops up over and over again, enough so that it feels like an obsession, and after a while, I felt like it was just plain insensitive, especially after she admits to copping a feel to see how much he had to tuck. I don't know if Priest added these asides as a means to make us dislike Raylene, but it certainly didn't endear her to me.)

(Speaking of not liking Raylene, Priest also includes a weird aside where she makes a joke about the name "J. Rowe", saying it sounded like an Asian pop singer. It felt forced, and more to the point, it was plain offensive.)

For the most part, though, my main problem with the book was how it tried to walk the line between a hardboiled crime novel and an irreverent horror fantasy. It never felt quite like either, and the presence of one side of the story only interfered with the other. It wasn't like getting chocolate in your peanut butter; it was more like getting boiled shrimp in your fruit salad.

I've committed to reading all of Priest's works, so I'll read the sequel to this book, but I won't go into it with as high hopes as I had for this one. Maybe once I hit the Lizzie Borden books, I'll find more of what I liked in the Clockwork Century books. ...more

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Jan 11, 2011 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: paranormal, vampires

I look forward to reading a book about a vampire that is not silly - I have faith in Cherie Priest, she is always a little off-kilter from what everyone else is doing. And I have to say, I did get a tiny little thrill by typing "Bloodshot Priest" into my library's search engine! I did NOT get a thrill from discovering that they do not have a listing for it :-( I might have to buy this one.

*

I really loved this, and I'm not sure if I can articulate why. All I can say is, it's got me so revved up t ...more

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Mar 29, 2011 Magda marked it as to-read

Shelves: a-library-cr-ladd

Oct 08, 2011 Phoenix rated it liked it

Shelves: vampire

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