Bloodlinks by Lee Killough

SPOILER ALERT!

Bloodlinks, a novel by Lee Killough, is a sequel. This review contains information which will give away much of the plot of Bloodhunt; the first in the trilogy.

I haven’t read the first volume yet, so you might wish to leave off reading this. I’m guessing that the first one is fine.

If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Wild garlic, for preference.

This is a good-guy vampire novel, in which the hero with the drink problem has external worry upon worry piled onto him from all directions, whilst dealing with his own growing angst as the thirst grows within him, and as he grows further apart from his mortal friends and relatives. He has not told most of them that he has been transformed, and he lives in a practical, cynical world that does not believe in the supernatural. He is a cop; a San Francisco detective living in exile by doing the night shift in a small town police service in the Midwest. The Kansas town concerned is the one in which he at last found the vampire woman who had attacked and turned him (in the first part of the trilogy), and in which he buried her; albeit under a different name.

Garreth Mikaelian suffers from nightmares in which his doubly-dead assailant taunts him about the lies that he has to tell to colleagues, lovers, friends and family, in order to disguise his new, undead nature. How do you date when you can’t eat or drink? How to avoid giving to the blood transfusion service? A couple of years after the investigation that turned deadly for him, he is drawn back from his rural existence as the trail of the vampire warms up once more. His entombed tormentor seems to be in San Francisco, and he must join his big-city colleagues again.

The problems start to pile up from the start. His former partner and his wife; his closest friends from that past life, can no longer be fobbed off with the excuses with which he left them when he moved to Kansas. In their Oriental home food and drink are abundant and delicious and sharing them is regarded as an essential sign of friendship – a sign that he can only feign. His camouflaging behaviour soon wears thin; which is exactly what his hard-drinking and hearty-eating former SFPD colleagues think that little old blood-drinker Garreth has done. His old partner’s new partner has never served with him and owes him nothing and is suspicious of him from the start, and his old boss is just too plain clever to believe in his evasions for too long.

Much of the man’s suffering is compounded by his sense of duty. He was and remains an honest policeman who wishes to preserve the lives of the innocent, but since his nocturnal habits and diet compel him to make evasions to those who formerly trusted him. He is quickly alienated from the law enforcement machine that should be helping him find whoever or whatever is killing both humans and vampires across the city.

This is a fun detective novel. Solidly detailed (other reviewers point out it’s a fine police procedural, but what do I know? – I work in an office). How his dead and staked creator has escaped from her rose-covered grave in Kansas to build up a brand new body count in San Francisco forms the mystery at the heart of the novel. The tension is produced by the widening gulf that his afterlife obliges him to place between Garreth and the truly living. The SFPD with its Kansan former colleague as a ridealong proceed to investigate the apparent re-emergence of Garreth’s secretly dead ‘attacker.’

He plunges back into the world of city cops and city crimes and soon discovers things that he had not had time to notice in his last, dying days in San Francisco; at least two different and unconnected-seeming vampire milieux and the criminals and respectable people amongst whom the undead live; local doctors who notice some strangely altered cadavers on their dissecting tables over the years; blood storage charities. Tantalizingly, whenever he encounters a vampire-related clue or witness statement, the local cops pursue it from a law and order perspective, and Garreth is once more obliged to use subterfuge to misdirect or delay them so that he can follow it up himself.

In the end, his only choice is to team up with an English thriller writer (and former horror novelist) who is on a PR junket with the police, but whose life too has been touched by one of Garreth’s creator’s aliases. It is a prickly relationship at first, emphasizing Garreth’s alienation from his human friends and his growling loneliness, but the novelist is resourceful and intelligent enough to be worth riding along with.

The book is no slaughterhouse as some horror novels go, but there is a good balance between the ordinary and the supernatural to keep vampire fiction fans engrossed in the action and suspense, and this is balanced against not-too-much of Garreth’s angst at drifting away from human company.

The villainous monster is nicely drawn; believable enough and human enough to be more than a mere grotesque, and Garreth’s showdown with the killer is intelligently and imaginatively done. Garreth’s partial resolution of his trust problems with former friends and some of his family is touchingly done, and bode well for the third volume in the trilogy.

I have a confession to make; I did not enjoy the Anne Rice vampire books.

Nothing wrong with her ideas, her secret history and vampire politics and the like, but there was something about her prose style that just…annoyed me. This was a shame because I learned very soon to dislike poor, tormented Louis who, after all, had even more to feel angst-ridden about than Garreth Mikaelian. Louis’ vampirism obliged him to kill, if memory serves. The only problem is…I wanted to clout him one and tell him to pull himself together and buy a ranch - or a whorehouse - and stop mooning about all the time. Garreth’s reaction to his pain is more measured; perhaps it appeals to the stiff upper lip Englishness I still admire. No grieving and gloomy widower he: Garreth’s pain is concerned with losing living friends to his need for secrecy.

Just as the routine nature of human life in the Alaska of 30 Days of Night and the dusty routine of those wide open spaces in Near Dark offer us a real-seeming world for vampires to threaten, so Garreth’s Midwestern and Californian homes are ordinary enough to recognise as being inhabited by real people.

People for whom we can be afraid, when the monsters come calling.

AB

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