Book Review: Rush Of Blood by Mark Billingham

SERIES: Stand Alone

GENRE: Thriller, Suspense, Murder Mystery

FORMAT: Paperback

REVIEW ALSO POSTED ON: GoodReads

BOOK SYNOPSIS:

Perfect strangers.
A perfect holiday.
The perfect murder…

Three couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on their last night, their perfect holiday takes a tragic twist: the teenage daughter of another holidaymaker goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves.

When the shocked couples return home, they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another better. But they don’t always like what they find: buried beneath these apparently normal exteriors are some dark secrets, hidden kinks, ugly vices…

Then, a second girl goes missing.

Could it be that one of these six has a secret far darker than anybody can imagine?

A brilliantly plotted, utterly gripping thriller about the danger of making friends on holiday, Rush of Blood is Mark Billingham’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

REVIEW:

When you read the book, it will introduce you to three British couples out on vacation, and by a twist of luck, they were staying in the same resort for days. As the story goes on, the three couples become friends with each other and hang out mostly by the pool. Everything went smoothly, and couples were talking about random stuff. and then a girl went missing and was found lifeless weeks later. Everyone was a suspect, and no one slipped the authorities interrogation. All three couples had such different characteristics; one had a hobby of acting, another had anger management issues, etc. When the three couples went to their homes, each couple would invite their friends to come over to their house for dinner; more or less, they would show off their houses and cooking skills. While this went on, another girl went missing; this time, the girl that was abducted wasn’t from Florida. and throughout the book, you will wonder whether they’d find the girl dead or alive and if they’d find out who the murderer was. Is the best part of this book. All I could think of while reading was, “Who was the murderer?”

I liked one character in the book, and that was Jenny. The only thing I would say about Jenny is that I like how her character has this dedication towards her job.

Rush of Blood is the first book that I have read from Mark Billingham’s line of work. (AGAIN! This is only my opinion about the book. I am such a fan of thrillers, suspense, and murder books and shows, and while reading this book, it had this Criminal Minds feel to it, which I liked very much. So here it comes: The book has sixty-five chapters; it seems to have quite a lot more chapters than the usual book. So I just went with it. The thing that surprised me was how unpredicable the chapters were. It was like one chapter was nineteen pages long, then suddenly there would be a chapter that had three pages. It confused me a little as to why it would be written in that format. Why make a chapter for a three-page scenario when you could squeeze it into one chapter and separate the two different scenarios with an asterisk? Don’t get me wrong, the book was great. It had a very nice plot twist that you could figure out. but in my case I didn’t, and I like that about the book.

Overall, the book was great. The last couple chapters with only conversations were great. The plot twist was nice. The writing was awesome; the characters were so different, and how they handled what happened was much different than what I expected.

WOULD I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK?

Yes. The book was great, both in terms of the story and the characters. This is the first book of Mark Billingham’s that I have read. Maybe the short chapters were his thing, but I will keep that in mind when I read Good as Dead, another book by Mark Billingham.

I hope everything will go smoothly as planned, Mr. Billingham. If you are reading this, I hope you’d accept an interview to be posted on my blog. Interview about Rush of Blood and yourself as well.

I give this book a:

NOTE: THE PICTURE USED IN THIS REVIEW IS NOT MINE; AGAIN EVERYTHING I SAID IN MY BOOK REVIEW IS MY OWN OPINION.

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