My grateful thanks to Sarah Mather at Titan for a copy of Invisible Blood edited by Maxim Jakubowski in return for an honest review.

Invisible blood is published today, 23rd July 2019, and is available for purchase here.

Invisible Blood

FEATURING A BRAND-NEW JACK REACHER STORY!

A collection of seventeen brand-new crime stories from bestselling authors Lee Child, Jeffrey Deaver, Stella Duffy, and more.

Open the files on an anthology of seventeen new crime stories to probe the brutal and complex hearts of criminals, and unravel the strangest of mysteries. Watch as a secretive group of intelligence community officers trace Jack Reacher through Heathrow in Lee Child’s Smile. In Mary Hoffman’s Fallen Woman, a journalist on the trail of a secretive drug lord gets caught up in the violent suicide of a young woman in Siena. And in Jeffrey Deaver’s Connecting the Dots, detectives follow the trail of clues in the brutal killing of a homeless man, wherever it may lead… Invisible Blood is a gripping collection exploring the compulsions of the criminal mind.

SEVENTEEN STORIES FROM TODAY’S FINEST CRIME WRITERS

Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Denise Mina, R.J. Ellory, Christopher Fowler, Stella Duffy, Ken Bruen, Lauren Henderson, James Grady, Jason Starr, Mary Hoffman, Cathi Unsworth, Bill Beverly, Lavie Tidhar, Johana Gustawsson, A K Benedict, John Harvey.

My Review of Invisible Blood

Seventeen stories and biographies from well known crime writers.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t read full length works by many of the authors featured in Invisible Blood which is why I wanted to read this book, but it means I don’t know how representative they are of their writing. To take that honesty a stage further, not all of the stories appealed to my reader taste and one or two felt slightly contrived and rushed as if they had been written too quickly for the volume.

That said, I found Invisible Blood an interesting and entertaining read. I wasn’t expecting the oblique approaches to crime that some of the authors took and I had anticipated a more visceral picture because of the book’s cover and the dripping blood motif at the start of every story. That’s by no means a criticism as I liked those less graphic tales most of all. In particular I enjoyed Borrowed Time by R’J’ Ellory because the ‘invisibility’ of the volume’s title has particular resonance and poignancy in this story. I loved the setting of this one too although you’ll need to read it yourself to see if you can guess why!

The themes of Invisible Blood range across countries and societies; with love, revenge, mental illness, suicide and abuse as well as expected murder all woven into them so that they often surprised me and made me think at the same time as entertaining me. My favourite in the collection was Johana Gustawsson’s In The Belly Of The Beast because she looks at relationships not just with others, but with our inner selves so eloquently too, so that I understood Marta and Anna only too well. This was the story I felt could easily become a full length novel because of the detail and depth it contains. I was very moved by In The Belly Of The Beast.

Invisible Blood is what I might call a Goldilocks book. For some it will be too violent, for others not violent enough and for the rest, just right. I think there is something within its pages for all readers, and especially those who don’t often read crime fiction as it is an effective way to discover the different styles of the writers with a view to reading their longer work. I thoroughly enjoyed the ability to read an entire narrative in a few minutes and this volume is a Godsend for those readers who are short on time, but who need high quality writing nonetheless. With an eclectic selection, Invisible Blood is definitely worth dipping in to.

About Maxim Jakubowski

Maxim Jakubowski is a noted anthology editor with over seventy volumes to his credit. A publisher for over twenty years, he was also the co-owner of London’s Murder One bookstore and the crime columnist for Time Out and then the Guardian. He is currently the Vice Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and a Sunday Times bestselling novelist in another genre.

You can visit his website for more information.