Being Human: Bad Blood book review

I’m a big fan of supernatural TV shows, films and books, so this appealed to me from the off. Now, I haven’t watched the TV show of Being Human, though I plan to, so my review here is based purely on the book.

Bad Blood is the third book in a recently released trio of Being Human books. However, I think that it works perfectly well as a standalone novel, too.

For those who haven’t seen the show, here is a rough outline. Mitchell, George and Annie are three friends that live together. They’re also a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost, respectively. Bad Blood begins when an old friend of Annie’s turns up on their doorstep. She’s been abroad, so has no idea that Annie is dead.

Denise is the kind of girl that isn’t backward in coming forward, so she ends up in the trio’s house, and amazingly, she can see Annie. Therefore, she still remains totally ignorant of her death, or how it happened. Annie is also in no rush to enlighten her, either.

After getting her feet firmly under the table, Denise decides that Annie has changed and needs to be brought out of her shell. In her opinion, the best way of doing this is to organise a bingo night at the local sports hall to raise money for charity. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, if things went smoothly, it wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?

Turns out, Denise is back in town for a reason. She’s an outpatient at the hospital where Mitchell and George work, but she won’t say why. The party girl is carrying on regardless of her mysterious illness and seems determined to drag Annie along with her hare-brained schemes. To complicate matters further, Bristol’s vampire population is behaving oddly, Mitchell included.

Everything seems to be happening at once, and George doesn’t like it. Trouble is, he can’t work out why. He’s a little suspicious of Denise and her motives, and is worried about Mitchell’s peculiar behaviour. The only upside is that Annie seems happier now someone else can see her.

George believes something is going to go horribly, horribly wrong and he sees no way of stopping it or even helping when it does…

Bad Blood was much better than I expected. I’m usually a little dubious about TV tie-ins, but it wasn’t half bad. It was a little slow to start, and I think perhaps fans of the show and people who have read the previous books will think this even more than I do, because they don’t need the background information.

However, once the action kicked in it was a good fun book with a nice pace. The writing lulled once or twice in places, but otherwise I’d recommend it, whether you’re a fan of the show or not.

Being Human: Bad Blood is out now and available from the Den Of Geek Store.