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A review by krilves
The Blood by E.S. Thomson
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Historical crime novel that is also queer?? Sign me up! Picked this up in oxfam after I finished reading The Way of All Flesh because it had a quote on the back from Kirsty Logan that included the words “unapologetically queer”.
I didn’t know this was the 3rd in a series but it works as a standalone, I think - I’m just now deeply curious about some of the past events hinted to and will probably pick up the rest of the books in the series eventually.
This is also a Victorian era historical crime novel, with medical men at the centre - I say “men” but the main character Jem (an apothecary) is a woman in man’s guise. She does have ruminations about gender as she sees herself as a man through life long conditioning but also a woman due to her physicality and there’s a lot of acting to blend in - she could easily be interpreted as a trans man or at least a genderqueer person.
Set in London. It really really does not let you forget how foul and filthy the city and the river was at the time. I live in modern London and I struggle with the smell of the Thames on the worst of days, I would not have lasted long in the 1800s…
I liked the plot (mysterious murders leading to a secret society and a fanatic experimenting doctor obsessed with recreating life - the chilling thing is the doctor is *right* and that by shocking people with electricity they can sometimes be brought back - that’s what defibrillators are today - but at the time he is considered mad. Well he did also kill people in his experiments, so there’s that…) and I loved the characters - particularly Jem and Will, and I now need to know everything about how they came to be friends and live together.
I’m realising that when it comes to crime I do not want protagonists who are cops or even amateur sleuths, I want protags who have a profession they’re passionate about who happen to stumble into something they need to solve. I also don’t care for modern settings because for me reading fiction is largely about escapism (it’s why I read so much SFF and romance) and modern crime/thrillers are like, the stuff you read about in the news. There’s no remove or distance. So the historical setting works really well for me because it has the distance of time but because it’s fiction there’s also an element of fantasy there. Both this and The Way of All Flesh are very meticulously researched as best I can tell, and it works to ground rye stories in a tangible, but removed, setting. And finally…I want it to be queer, lol. I’m tired of heterosexual nonsense and this was such a nice change, it essentially eliminated the one quibble I’d had with The Way of All Flesh.
I didn’t know this was the 3rd in a series but it works as a standalone, I think - I’m just now deeply curious about some of the past events hinted to and will probably pick up the rest of the books in the series eventually.
This is also a Victorian era historical crime novel, with medical men at the centre - I say “men” but the main character Jem (an apothecary) is a woman in man’s guise. She does have ruminations about gender as she sees herself as a man through life long conditioning but also a woman due to her physicality and there’s a lot of acting to blend in - she could easily be interpreted as a trans man or at least a genderqueer person.
Set in London. It really really does not let you forget how foul and filthy the city and the river was at the time. I live in modern London and I struggle with the smell of the Thames on the worst of days, I would not have lasted long in the 1800s…
I liked the plot (mysterious murders leading to a secret society and a fanatic experimenting doctor obsessed with recreating life - the chilling thing is the doctor is *right* and that by shocking people with electricity they can sometimes be brought back - that’s what defibrillators are today - but at the time he is considered mad. Well he did also kill people in his experiments, so there’s that…) and I loved the characters - particularly Jem and Will, and I now need to know everything about how they came to be friends and live together.
I’m realising that when it comes to crime I do not want protagonists who are cops or even amateur sleuths, I want protags who have a profession they’re passionate about who happen to stumble into something they need to solve. I also don’t care for modern settings because for me reading fiction is largely about escapism (it’s why I read so much SFF and romance) and modern crime/thrillers are like, the stuff you read about in the news. There’s no remove or distance. So the historical setting works really well for me because it has the distance of time but because it’s fiction there’s also an element of fantasy there. Both this and The Way of All Flesh are very meticulously researched as best I can tell, and it works to ground rye stories in a tangible, but removed, setting. And finally…I want it to be queer, lol. I’m tired of heterosexual nonsense and this was such a nice change, it essentially eliminated the one quibble I’d had with The Way of All Flesh.