blacksundae

It starts off as the oldest story in the world, right? You spend three years running supplies to the front lines in World War I France, then finally return home with five or six war orphans under your arm and realize that it might be a good idea to get a job. What to do? Bootlegging!

I know what you’re thinking… you’ve heard all this before, right? Hell, it pretty much describes my life ’till now. But bear with me, it gets more interesting. Jayne Taylor, the subtitular heroine of Blood and Roses, doesn’t realize that her booze-trafficking partner is not really named “Rocco” (although who wouldn’t pretend to be?), and is actually a federal agent. She also doesn’t realize that the “booze” they’re trying to transport is actually plutonium and the “people” they’re delivering it to are actually extraterrestrial arthropods wearing holographic people-suits.

Yeah… different. But I can still relate to it. The undercover agent part, anyway.*

Anyway, promising stuff for a nerd like me…. Aliens among us! Alternate history! Badass dames in flapper dresses! The threat of nuclear annihilation decades before Hiroshima! Secret agents! Secret societies full of masked guys with kitanas! Badass dames in flapper dresses!

Too bad Blood and Roses doesn’t quite live up to that promise. The main problem is its comparatively small scope. The novel opens up in war-torn France, moves on to the United States, then quickly plops its characters down on an isolated Japanese island, never leaving until the denouement. Perhaps I’m too quick to judge based on expectations, but I think Blood and Roses could have benefited from a bit more globe-trotting. It just seems that the book is too uneventful for its own premise.

In the end, it felt like I had read the equivalent of a television episode. Our heroes find out something’s going on, they travel to an isolated place and discover what that something is, they have the final confrontation, then they go home and everything’s fine. The end.

Now, I’ve given this book three stars instead of two simply because of the subtitle: A Jayne Taylor Novel. I assume this is supposed to be the first in a series, and I can appreciate it as such. It introduces an interesting character in an interesting world, and sets up a series of tidy little adventure novels like this one. Like movie serials… or Tom Swift for adults. Here’s to hoping Zeddies is able to make the series work, because I want more dames in flapper dresses, goddamnit!

*I’ll never forgive you, Rocco!