Review: Blood and Bullets

Blood and Bullets by James R. Tuck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Book Info: Genre: Urban Fantasy
Reading Level: Adult
Recommended for: Fans of dark, male-oriented Urban Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: mass slaughter, torture

My Thoughts: I was very amused by the way Tuck references several other well-known urban fantasy series when discussing other monster hunters. It's a sort of meta-fiction with fiction.

This is very fast-paced and dark, with lots of slaughter and blood and shooting. The editing could have been better—for instance Appollonia's eyes change from honey yellow to pale blue back to amber within just a few pages—but generally speaking the action is too fast to really stop and pay very close attention to those sorts of things. I was a bit flabbergasted to see the claim that Highway 75 was up to sixteen lanes each way; I've been on Hwy 75 and while it might be a total of sixteen lanes where it intersects with I-85, including the offramps, I'm fairly sure it isn't sixteen lanes each way.

I was a little freaked out by the idea of a brown recluse werespider, although my husband insists it would be impossible for a spider to be that large and still be able to move. I pointed out that this is a magickal spider, but he was still unimpressed. He's really no fun.

Anyway, overall I liked it. It could have been a bit cleaner, and it had more than one use of the dreaded “stand to his feet” redundancies, but overall it kept moving and was entertaining, and that's what a person reads Urban Fantasy for, after all. If you like fast-paced, darker urban fantasy that is male-oriented, then you really can't go wrong with Deacon Chalk.

Series Information: Blood and Bullets is Book 1in the Deacon Chalk series
Book .5: That Thing at the Zoo, review linked here where formatting allowed.
Book 1.5: Spider's Lullaby
Book 2: Blood and Silver
Book 2.5: Circus of Blood
Book 3: Blood and Magick

Disclosure: I bought this book for myself. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis: He lives to kill monsters. He keeps his city safe. And his silver hollow-points and back-from-the-dead abilities help him take out any kind of supernatural threat. But now an immortal evil has this bad-ass bounty hunter dead in its sights. . . 

Ever since a monster murdered his family, Deacon Chalk hunts any creature that preys on the innocent. So when a pretty vampire girl "hires" him to eliminate a fellow slayer, Deacon goes to warn him—and barely escapes a vampire ambush. Now he's got a way-inexperienced newbie hunter to protect and everything from bloodsuckers to cursed immortals on his trail. There's also a malevolent force controlling the living and the undead, hellbent on turning Deacon's greatest loss into the one weapon that could destroy him. . .



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