I was really looking forward to Return to Blood by Michael Bennett. It's the sequel to Better the Blood which really wowed me. See my review of Better the Blood here. Return to Blood was a good deal less engaging.
There were point of view switches that sometimes confused me because it took me some time to determine who the point of view character was, and when it was taking place within the novel's chronology. I suppose there might be readers who enjoy trying to figure out what's going on in a book. The only thing I want to figure out in a mystery is whodunit. I suppose that makes me a traditional mystery reader. I don't want to find the book's entire structure mysterious, as I occasionally did while reading Return to Blood.
Narrative confusion causes me to lose my involvement with the characters. If I don't know who's speaking, I can't integrate it with what I'd previously learned about the character or identify with what the character is experiencing.
The protagonist Hana Westerman has left the police, but she has had a long-term involvement with a man who remains a police officer. At one point he tells Hana that "blue is in your DNA". This is a reference to blue police uniforms.
There
is an important Maori character who had left his tribe and is described
as always trying to find a place where he can fit in. We're never told
why he left his tribe. I would think that this would be a key to
understanding him.
I think that I was supposed to be engaged by the fact that the victim, Kiri, was in recovery from drug addiction. Lorraine, who was a police investigator assigned to Kiri's case, spoke to her recovery group. She wanted to be supportive toward the group. The perpetrator was known early in the process, so Lorraine didn't have to treat them as suspects. Lorraine needed to clinch the case against this killer and arrest him before he killed again. That was the suspense aspect. I'd imagine that the recovery group was regarded by police as a pool of potential victims. That would have been a very predictable direction for the plot. There was enough predictability in the development of the killer's past without that.
Return to Blood is peppered with Maori vocabulary. The word Muru is said to mean justice in this book. Yet when I looked it up on Wikipedia, the article stated that it meant compensation for offenses which is much more specific. It made me wonder whether I wasn't understanding these Maori words correctly.
Another example is that the Maori god Tahirimatea is called the god of thunder and lightning in Return to Blood, but Wikipedia says that he is the Maori god of weather in general. So Michael Bennett might not be portraying the connotations of Maori words with exactitude.
Bennett tells us that Maori consider yellow the color of serenity. This clashes with my view of yellow. I primarily associate it with the yellow traffic light that warns me that it will soon turn red. I also associate it with sunlight which increases visibility. Brighter sunlight means that I know more about what I'm seeing. So the color yellow is a complex concept for me with more than one meaning.
A poem written by victim Kiri is included in the book. I particularly liked the line "so we make homes out of each other". This resonated for me. I do believe that people consider certain individuals a personal "home" even if they live in a place that they call home.
There is an incident in which the perpetrator chased a religious girl with a scarf on her head. She hit him on the head with a hockey stick. It seems likely to me that this girl would have been Islamic. A Jewish girl with a scarf on her head wouldn't have played hockey. In a Jewish context, the scarf means that she belonged to a particular type of extremely devout separatist community called Haredim. She wouldn't have been anywhere except home, or in a religious school for girls where they didn't play sports. An Islamic girl with a scarf on her head could have been attending public school.
I wasn't nearly as impressed by Return to Blood as I'd been by Better the Blood. This sequel lacks the intensity of the previous novel, and the plot needed more organization. Toward the end, I was turning pages wishing that Return to Blood would be over.
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