Blood Lines by Tania Huff
01/03/2005 . Source: Jennifer Howell 

pub: Orbit. 358 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-84149-358-9.

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Or 'The Mummy Takes Toronto!'

There's something so likeably 'B' movie about Tanya Huff's 'Blood' series that at some point it just moves beyond irony and it's just fun. Corny fun at some points, but in this third instalment, there's no reason not to sit back and enjoy all the elements of some classic horror films mixed in with vampiric soul searching, a bit of a female prison movie homage and even some traditional police work. Of course, the mummy's also taken over the head honchos of the Toronto Police as well, but hey...

In the classic tradition, an unopened ancient Egyptian sarcophagus is bought up by the Museum of Toronto and shipped back from the dusty attic of an English mansion. Of course, no one notices that the Egyptologists working on opening the coffin start acting strangely. More ominously, no one thinks anything is strange when a museum cleaner apparently dies of fright whilst alone in the room with the sarcophagus. No one except Homicide Detective Mike Celluci, that is - only, at that point, every witness he speaks to starts to mysteriously 'forget' they ever told him anything.



Normally, the first person Celluci would call at a time like this would be Vicki Nelson, his ex-police partner and on/off lover. Only Vicki has her hands full with a couple of other things - not only is her eyesight still deteriorating further, but her other romantic entanglement is with Henry Fitzroy, the 500 year-old bastard son of Henry VIII, who's now a romance-writing vampire (are you keeping up?!). After nearly half a millennium in the dark, Mr Fitzroy is suddenly having visions of the sun. That would be the kind of visions that seem to be driving him to suicide, then...

Complicated doesn't even nearly cover it. Manage to keep the complex character relationships straight Henry is sleeping with and feeding from, not only Vicki but also Tony, a former street kid he rescued and rehabilitated. Vicki, meanwhile, has never really stopped sleeping with Celluci and the next twist of the plot will make you lose the thread again. The horror element has been seriously stepped up this time around, what with the rapidly mounting death count, as our mummy apparently has a penchant for sucking the souls from young children with sickening ease. That's before he starts taking over the people in charge of the police force so that he can consolidate his power base.

There's some pretty imaginative torture in store for Vicki, even after she's spent most of the first half of the book trying to make sure Henry doesn't accidentally kill himself by stepping into sunlight. While Henry is unravelling though, Celluci is starting to work out that his rival could actually be...a romance writer!! Celluci being incapable of saying the words 'vampire' or Henry's preferred 'child of the night', 'romance writer' does nicely as an entertaining variation.

Tanya Huff basically re-writes all the best horror movie clichés with this book, throws in hideously tangled love life and leaves it all to stew for a few hundred pages. There's a definite move towards darker, nastier themes starting with 'Blood Lines' and with Vicki's character losing the softer edge she had as her sight worsens. While it does feel a little 90s at moments, it's done a great job of surviving the 12 years since it was originally published, considering all that has happened in this kind of genre fiction since then. When it's not being retro, it is a great slice of mixed genre thriller/mystery/vampire/mummy kinda thing and adds nicely to the series so far.

Jennifer Howell