DNF Review: Blood Will Tell

Blood Will Tell (Point Last Seen, 2) by April Henry, June 16, 2015. 272 pages. Published by Henry Holt and Co. BYR. Source: Received for review.

What happens when someone who’s only ever wanted to be a hero becomes a suspect?
When a woman’s body is found in a Portland park, suspicion falls on an awkward teen who lives only a few blocks away, owns several knives, loves first-person shooter video games, and doodles violent scenes in his school notebooks. Nick Walker goes from being a member of a Search and Rescue team to the prime suspect in a murder, his very interest in SAR seen as proof of his fascination with violence. How is this even possible? And can Alexis and Ruby find a way to help clear Nick’s name before it’s too late? 

First Sentence:

Freshly spilled blood is wet, shiny, and startlingly crimson.

Well, I wanted ever so much to love Blood Will Tell, and yet I could not even get more than forty pages into it before I had had enough. UGH! I really enjoyed the first book and was hoping that the sequel would be just as good, or preferably better, then The Body in the Woods. Alas, that was not to be.

• I'll tell you straight, my problem with  Blood Will Tell started pretty much from the get-go. First off, it seemed that the characters had lost all semblance of growth and depth that they had in the first book. It was really frustrating to see everything slide back to square one; to top it off, it made it impossible to care about the characters.

• If I were to look past the backsliding of the characters growth from the first book to the second, there would be one more thing that sat unsatisfactorily with me. The first being that within the first chapter or two, there was nothing left to drawn me into the plot as I had already surmised who the culprit was. If you know me, it is never fun when the mystery is so easily solved before all the pieces are even laid out. 

• My only hope is that perhaps there would be improvement in the story when it was released. My thoughts are based off of advanced reader copy, so, maybe, just maybe there were some changes between this and the final version because the writing was just not even on par with the first one. It was almost like the author wrote their self into a corner with the end of the last book...or something. 

• Really, I wish that Blood Will Tell would have been more enjoyable as I was quite looking forward to more.this book failed to It was disappointing because the premise, teens working SAR, was innovative and, you know, different. Yet, the thread of innovation was lost in the second book; it also seemed that the characters had lost their reason for joining SAR and, even though they were/are teenagers, seemed less capable of handling the stress of the situations that it brought them into than in the previous book. Perhaps they were still messed up from what happened in the first book (as they did get more than they bargained for in the case they handled). I am still rather cross that it was not enjoyable. 

Final Verdict: Blood Will Tell- I'll be honest, it was like watching a TV show were the writers wrote themselves into a corner and had to unravel all the character/plot development to move forward. I'm still disappointed because the series had so much promise.

 Blood Will Tell earns

A copy of this book was received for review consideration from the publisher. All thoughts are my own.