#BookReview: Mystery: Bay of Blood by A.M. Potter

Hello fellow humans! This is an honest review for the novel published in February 2019, ‘Bay of Blood‘ of the detective Eva Naslund series by A. M. Potter. First of all, a thank you to Mr. Potter for sending me an ebook copy in exchange for my sincere thoughts for the same.

Blurb (from Goodreads): World-renowned painter Thom Tyler is murdered in Georgian Bay, Canada. The consensus is that Tyler had no enemies. Why would anyone murder him?
Detective Sergeant Eva Naslund goes to work with a homicide team from OPP Central. They find no useful blood, print, or DNA evidence. They turn to financial forensics and criminal psychology. Tyler’s paintings are worth millions, yet he’s deeply in debt to banks and his art agent. Just as the investigation opens a new lead, courtesy of Tyler’s friend, J.J. MacKenzie, MacKenzie is murdered. The team is back to ground zero—with two murders to solve. 

Review: In a nutshell, Bay of Blood is one of those page-turning mysteries that get you thinking about who the perps really are and I’d have loved to give it a higher rating if I didn’t have certain complaints that I’m going to talk about later in the review. Despite the book being placed in the mystery genre, I believe it would fit better in the crime procedural book as it mainly centers on the investigations by Detective Eva Naslund and Inspector Moore. The A. M. Potter book of 350 pages is written simply in the third person narrative and does contain a few profane words as well. As you can see, the interesting plot pulled me into the book which was managing to keep me hooked very well till like 70% of the thing, but after that, I kind of felt like it was being dragged. Really short sentences make up the whole book, which is exactly how I prefer fiction, so bonus points for that, and the dialogues were snappy at times, which is cool too. If you’re interested in boats and docks related jargon, you could pick this up for that as like the name suggests, the murders take place at the bay, which gives plenty of scope to include water and boats.

It won’t be much to give out that family acceptance and greed are discussed in this one as we see that the main motive to kill the renowned artist, Thom Tyler could only be money-related. And then comes the topic of not liking it. Now everywhere that Naslund goes, grown-ass men are present to flirt with her, and wtf was Tatyana even (read the book to know who and what I’m talking about). I see no man/woman, for that matter, hitting on inspector Moore, so is he unattractive, or is this plain sexism where a woman police officer isn’t taken seriously and is kept just for the sake of it? I would have loved it if the officer were represented properly; doing her job nicely. The ending fell a little, little flat for me, as it was an extremely abrupt disclosure that didn’t last long, but I did enjoy getting to know who the culprit was, the execution of the plan, and where the killer came from.

I had fun imagining the chemistry between Eva and her love interest, Hal and their dialogues added humour to the otherwise serious scenes. In the end, I’ll suggest it to anyone in search of a breezy mystery and even if I didn’t like certain aspects of the story of Tyler and Mackenzie’s murder, I won’t back away from recommending it to my readers, and hence I look forward to reading more from this writer.

I Rate This: 3.4 bloody stars

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

About the Author: A. M. Potter

A. M. Potter

From website: I write detective fiction, which I call North Noir, aka Canuck Noir. You know what I say? “Leave your Scandinavian Noir in the sauna. It’s time for North Noir.” On the bio side, I grew up in Canada and the USA (Nova Scotia and Boston). I’ve traveled the world, working dozens of jobs. Like any good detective, I know both sides of the thin blue line. I’ve used numerous aliases (for non-nefarious purposes, of course). You’ll have to take my word on that.