Flesh & Blood by Ethan Stone
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
Flesh & Blood is the sequel to Ethan Stone’s In the Flesh debut novel. The strengths of the first novel were not the nearly non-existence romance but the pseudo interesting mystery and the author’s voice. Here the romance remains immaterial except for a lot of sex scenes while the mysteries are obvious, foreshadowed, and extremely cliché. The author’s voice is the best thing about this story which unfortunately fails in several ways. The writing tends to be abrupt and tells almost every time instead of showing. The actions are equally blunt with little descriptive prose. I didn’t mind that so much and actually like the brusque nature but the story is bland and too obvious, often gliding over incredibly difficult and complex problems in the blink of an eye. Sadly the sequel doesn’t stand up to the first book, although I’ll likely read the third book hoping it gets better.
three am 