A review by tessisreading2
The Blood Royal by Barbara Cleverly

2.0

This is the first Joe Sandilands novel I read, and it will be the last. The plot meandered along for the first several hundred pages, and while the mystery really picked up and became compelling in the last fifty pages or so, for me it was too little, too late. The series (to judge from this volume) depends, in part, on a vast number of supporting characters, many imported from previous books - too many for a new reader to have any sort of emotional attachment to them - and a lead character (Sandilands) whom all the women want and all the men want to be. The dialogue is frequently in paragraphs and seemed stilted to me, and there were too many plot threads, many of which were unrelated. Just not the book I thought I was picking up, at least not until it was almost over.