Innocent Blood

⚖The case for it

A girl who was adopted finds the file on her birth parents, and James spends a single London summer building two strands separately before letting them approach each other. It works on psychology rather than puzzle, “an extraordinary slow burn” with “understated prose, leaking out the secrets one at a time.” Late-seventies London is the other achievement, the markets and the Underground and the restaurant meals rendered specifically enough to be “a living, breathing world that the reader can disappear into.” James makes a compromised woman sympathetic without excusing her, and Hilda the adoptive mother lands harder than her page count suggests.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Almost nobody here is bearable. One reader would have been “much happier if meteor crash wiped them out,” and Philippa in particular is “so insipid I’d happily have stabbed her,” with an interior monologue readers call overwrought rather than felt. The descriptive passages amount to “detailed report on every building, every street,” stalling the first third. A critic finds that “everyone thinks and speaks in the same cultured voice” with “cold pomposity” over the top. Readers sold a thriller get a bleak character study and “an awful time in the company of bad people.”

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings