Black Heart: A totally gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Dan Riley Book 1)

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Still grieving the devastating loss of his girlfriend and unborn child in a car accident two years ago, Dan throws everything he has into the investigation. Yet just as Dan begins to piece together the clues of this complex case, the body of a woman is found in her bed with identical wounds.

Black Heart Book - Robert Galbraith The Ink Black Heart Book - Robert Galbraith

There must be."Another thing I found interesting was how the POV kept recovering his memory through dreams as visions of events millennia in the past as he continued recovering his shattered stone heart through walking the Obsidian Path. Sadly the story didn't live up to its potential. The main character barely seemed to develop except in his knowledge of things long lost. He has an ongoing internal ethical debate ("Am I the bad guy?") that doesn't progress; he merely recirculates the same thoughts ad nauseum. The plot progression has a certain litRPG quality to it, which is fine if that's your bag but it doesn't make for great epic fantasy. Technically it's a progression fantasy, a term some apply to stories featuring significant character power growth, but the character barely uses the knowledge and abilities that level him up from his original state. Overall the story arc felt very flat, with a couple of unsurprising twists near the end in place of a satisfying payoff. I can see potential in the sequels for exciting story, brutality, and mind-blowing magic, but I didn't have a good enough experience to push me forward. Creatures called from a hundred different realities stood waiting. Massive beasts, some dwarfing even the Deredi giants, held formation beside winged nightmares from some distant hell. Many, hailing from closer realities looked human, differing only in some small detail. Purple skin, horns, claws, too many or two few fingers. With this army, he had bound the world under a single rule: His. And now, with this army, he would lose the world."I would highly recommend this to readers of GrimDark Fantasy. Here are some beautiful quotes... Ahora, en cuanto a la novela en sí, me gustaría decir muchas cosas, pero, siento que destriparía parte de la historia y lo que esconde. Así que voy a intentar ser lo más breve posible porque lo dicho siento que cualquier cosa que se diga pueda considerarse como “spoiler” sobre todo para mí, que a la mínima que se me comenté algo sobre el contenido del libro, por muy banal que sea me molesta. Llámenme “rancia” como se diría coloquialmente, pero soy así y es algo que no soporto.Another prominent character that deserves attention is Henka, the necromancer. She becomes Khraen’s companion later in this book, and the more you see her, the more dangerous she seems. She’s cunning and manipulative. Henka knows how to steer Khraen in a desired direction, though, we don’t really know her true motives (yet) I was drawn in right from the very start of the book…I found that I raced through…desperate to know how it would end.’ Go Buy the Book As he is exploring the world and slowly but persistently assembling the bits and pieces of his memory, the MC discovers the pretty lies wizards feed to everybody else and oh boy, he won’t put up with it. As I broached the subject of the world-building: the world might seem a bit overwhelming at first, as there are gods, demons (who used to actively interact with people), hence, also parallels worlds, where they dwell, necromancers, elementalists, shamans, sorcerers, wizards, demonologists (also dragons; mountains and lakes can be woken up and driven into fury, Kraken can be summoned,too) All the tiny details (especially from not long after the mc’s awakening) that can be easily overlooked make sense at the end.

Black Heart (Detective Dan Riley, book 1) by Anna-Lou Weatherley Black Heart (Detective Dan Riley, book 1) by Anna-Lou Weatherley

I'm retroactively adding a star after reading the rest of the trilogy. My original review stands below, but the next books redeemed the series for me. In truth, Fletcher gifted us with a wildly original dark fantasy concept and executed it with brutal flair. That might have been part of my initial dislike; it was just so different, standard epic fantasy expectations didn't properly apply. Anyway, it's an interesting ride and I highly recommend the series to grimdark fans.

The water elemental cowered. It remembered me. It remembered how I brought it here, how I bent it to my will. I think this book is marketed as adult fantasy, so expect relatively descriptive sex scenes and (not relatively) graphic violence.