Agents of Blood Book 1: The Ruby Agent

Review originally posted at Squirtoon's Bookish Blog

I read this as an Advanced Review Copy from NetGalley. The premise suggests an interesting story, with the characters being the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. The book follows Valentine as he learns what he is.

Unfortunately, I struggled to get into this. The first few pages were sending me to sleep, as I don't actively seek out romance, so it wasn't for me. I persevered through the start, knowing it couldn't be the soppy romantic stuff for long. I was right, the romantic stuff passed, but the writing still wasn't working for me. This bit from only a few pages in expresses some of my issues:

“Valentine looked around and noticed the wind was no longer blowing and the trees were no longer dancing.” Why did we have to know that Valentine looked and then noticed? Why couldn't the sentence just be, “the breeze no longer rustled through the trees.” Or something along those lines. I'm sure something better could be thought of if someone put more than 30 seconds thought into it. Also, super repetitive, and not in a way that works and emphasises the point.

The flow was off for me because every sentence was too wordy. I feel like this book needed to go through a few beta readers and a solid editor before publication.

Continuing on the wordy theme, dialogue was the next issue I found. See this:

“What was that?” Sabrina exclaimed.
Lots of words here.
“Call the police when you get close enough to town.” He whispered. More words here. “Go. Go now!” He suddenly exclaimed.

That's all from a single page. I left in the fact the H in he was capitalised when it shouldn't have been. and there's a period instead of a comma... All the dialogue I've read had a dialogue tag. And the dialogue tag was frequently paired with an adverb. Lord, help me.

I think this book didn't see an editor, and I'm afraid it shows. There's grammar issues, there's lots of words, and there's plenty adverbs. I just suffered through the first couple of chapters.
The characters didn't help either. Besides the main character, everyone else is forgettable. These are supposed to be relatives of the horsemen of the apocalypse, wouldn't you expect some strong personalities to go along with their crazy powers? I'd have thought so, but I didn't see a hint at that anywhere.

I stuck with it long enough to realise the plot could have some potential. It seems like a great idea for a novel, and with a rewrite and a real publisher, could be popular.

I couldn't get this finished though, I couldn't drag myself through it any longer.

So, it's a 1 star from me, and I hate giving out low ratings on ARCs.