I would like to thank John Murray Press and Lisa McInerney for my copy of the ARC. Due to this kind gesture, I have decided to leave an honest review.

I am so sorry but I just can't put myself through this. I didn't find the first instalment amazing, but to make the second entirely about Ryan about made my head fall off.
Lisa is a great writer, but this for me was even worse than the first book. Unfortunately, I had to DNF it.

I found the first book was extremely overhyped but I managed to get through it. This one I just couldn't. It took forever to get into it and when it fell flat again I was like absolutely not.

I can see why some people would be into this sort of book, but it does not do it for me in the slightest. I feel the writing completely deteriorated here and Ryan was, even more, a loose cannon.

Due to this, I don't think I will pick up any more of Lisa McInerney books.

I loved The Glorious Heresies, and was looking forward to this second, sort-of follow-on, book, but I just couldn't get interested in it. Eventually I gave up. .

I really loved The Glorious Heresies (and this love has just grown with time) so it was with some trepidation that I approached The Blood Miracles. I thought it would be difficult for the second Ryan Cusack book to be as brilliant as the first and I had also read some reviews of disappointed readers pointing out that this book was darker and lacking a bit of the warmth and wit of the first. While I would not disagree with them, I think that McInerney's writing is as strong as ever, her characters fully fleshed out and hard not to care about. Strongly recommended.

Darker than The Glorious Heresies, Lisa Mcinnerney's sequel focuses on the now 20 year old Ryan Cusack, a more troubled and lost young man than the one from the first novel. The Blood Miracles lacks the wider angle on character and place that made The Glorious Heresies so enjoyable, but the quality of the writing is just as good in this novel. Although definitely bleak in many ways, there is a warmth and compassion there that makes this book worth reading and I await the third part eagerly.

Another captivating quirky novel by Lisa McInerney. Everyone should read her! She's a brilliant voice and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Continues Ryan's story from her first book. Full of the same wonderful ear for language, this time buried more deeply in the club music nightclub scene. I missed Ryan's family, who only briefly appear here. I think readers would need to read The Glorious Heresies first, as some characters develop here.I'm not sure I'd read another book about Ryan: kept hoping he would choose a different direction.

Great sequel to a fantastic debut! Still funny, great characters and brilliantly evocative of parts of Ireland.

The Blood Miracles is the follow-up to Lisa McInerney’s award-winning debut novel The Glorious Heresies and it doesn’t disappoint! While the first book focused on the intertwining lives of a cast of characters involved in Cork’s underworld, this time the focus is solely on one of those characters; namely Ryan Cusack, who at 20-year-olds still hasn’t quite figured out who he is and what the hell he doing. What he is doing involves drugs, both taking and the selling them, and that can’t possibly end well. Or can it?

A follow up to The Glorious Heresies, which I haven’t read, this was still a good read about Ryan Cusack, a young Irish man caught up in the criminal underworld. It had quite a slow beginning but when it got going it really got going. Quite a page turner.

I’m really sorry to say, but this was a sore disappointment after The Glorious Heresies. The character development as lacking, with questionable allegiances, and there is none of the humour which made her debut so warm… I abandoned the book halfway as I lost all empathy for the characters I loved so much.

As a person born and bred in Cork, I adored The Glorious Heresies and was happy to join back up with Ryan Cusack in The Blood Miracles. The second novel is quite different- less plot driven and a lot more focused on Ryan's development as an adult and his struggles as a young Irish man facing a whole lot of hardship in a world he might not really be made for. There are lots of complex emotions here, but McInerney is great at expressing them to the reader, bringing Ryan and his peers to life in full colour. Of particular note is the way Ryan's relationship with his father and memories of his mother impact on his daily life. There's something both victorious and bittersweet about this one.

Lisa McInerney follows the joy, wit and humour of The Glorious Heresies and its wonderful cast of memorable Irish characters residing in the port city of Cork with a more singular focus on the now 20 year old Ryan Cusack, a more troubled, disturbed and adrift man experiencing serious mental health issues in this sequel. The tone is darker as we follow the inevitable and tragic trajectory of Ryan's life in crime, his personal life a mess with his involvement with Natalie. It is barely surprising that Karine's patience with Ryan wears thin as her attempts to push him onto more fruitful paths in life fall on stony ground. The comic touches, heart, wit and the more complex characterisation of The Glorious Heresies have almost disappeared in this book with its greater focus on crime, drug deals, the forays to connect to Italy by using Ryan's Italian heritage, twists and crime bosses who exploit and betray. Ryan is a more frustrating character with his addictions, trapped, often his own worst enemy, and barely aware of what is going on around him. What I did appreciate was McInerney's writing and her portrayal of an Ireland where so many face such economic hardships as they struggle to survive. Many thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC.

Lisa McInerney's second book carries on from The Glorious Heresies continuing the story of Ryan Cusack, his drug-filled life and his on-off relationship with Karine.

The Glorious Heresies was a daring story, so fresh and funny alongside all the social comment. In comparison, The Blood Miracles has lost its sense of humour and I miss the variety of characters. I did enjoy it, but it doesn’t match success of the first book.

I do hope that the next book doesn’t continue Ryan's somewhat burnt-out story.

I LOVED The Glorious Heresies; we read it in my book club last year after it won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and all of us thought it was fantastic. A well-deserved winner. So, we had no problem picking the follow-up to read as one of our summer three and I had very high expectations.
The novel begins more or less where The Glorious Heresies left off with the central character, Ryan Cusack, embroiled ever more deeply in the Cork city underworld of drugs, money laundering and violence. McInerney has managed to keep Ryan’s character consistent - he has evolved in an entirely credible way – although, unlike in the first novel, there now seems almost no hope of the more refined, gentler side of his personality prevailing to choose a different lifestyle. He is more embedded in the criminal fraternity than ever but remains an engaging and attractive central character. If anything, his charisma grows as he matures; true, he does some pretty unpleasant things, and not always at the behest of his criminal masters, but you can see that McInerney, if this turns out to be part of a series of novels, is building him up to be the tormented gangster.
Other characters remain consistent too. There is Karine, Ryan’s long-suffering girlfriend; their teenage romance was a beautiful precious thing in the first novel, amidst the degradation of events. Their relationship continues in The Blood Miracles but with new twists and turns as they grow up and innocence is left well and truly behind them. The addition of another potential love interest, in the form accountancy student Natalie, brings some further complications to Ryan’s messy personal life. There is also Ryan’s father Tony, the broken man, an alcoholic who was widowed young with five children to bring up. Portrayed as pathetic and useless in the first novel, he plays a lesser part here, but in some ways his strengths and his importance to Ryan become more apparent. I was puzzled by the title of the novel until almost near the end when an exchange between father and son on Ryan’s birthday makes it clear – blood, family, can drive the greatest and most profound acts in all of us.
The remaining characters include the two senior gangsters – Dan Kane, for whom Ryan works as a dealer, and Jimmy Phelan, who was so prominent in The Glorious Heresies – and their various acolytes, including Maureen Phelan (Jimmy’s mother) who once again plays a pivotal role. The city of Cork also looms large in the novel, as does Ryan’s love-hate relationship with it:
“This city, like all cities, hates its natives. It would rather be in a constant state of replenishment than own up to what it has warped.”
The basic plot is a drug deal, a major shipment of MDMA from Italy to Ireland. Ryan’s mother was Italian and he speaks the language. This has made him an instrumental part of the deal with the Camorra in Naples. The drugs go astray in what appears to be a theft from Dan Kane’s girlfriend after she’d picked up the shipment and was moving it to a safe house. The rest of the book is about solving the mystery of the missing merchandise and the accusations and counter-accusations.
I found the novel a bit slow to start and I was worried that it wasn’t going to live up to the promise of The Glorious Heresies, but about a quarter of the way through the pace changes quite significantly. So, if you’re struggling initially, persevere at least to page 100! You realise that in the first part of the book there is a lot of scene-setting going on and the author is working hard to recreate the settings, themes and characters from her earlier book. If you hadn’t read The Glorious Heresies this would help set the context for you, but you will enjoy this book more if you’ve read the first. As the plot around the missing drugs thickens, it becomes completely compelling and the denouement is utterly brilliant – I could actually feel my heart beating faster!
Can’t tell you more without giving too much away, I’m afraid. Suffice to say it is a page-turner. It’s earthy and visceral with plenty of sex, drugs, booze and swearing! The writing is incredible, particularly the dialogue. It is narrated almost like one of those old-fashioned 1950s gangster movies, with smoke-filled rooms, seductive women and a lilting sax in the background! Like the title of the first Ryan Cusack novel it’s also glorious!
Highly recommended.

I need to be upfront from the start: I still haven't read "The Glorious Heresies," Lisa McInerney's first acclaimed (and multiple prize winning) novel. It's possible that omission in my reading experience has influenced my rating-- maybe it would have been four stars if I'd read her first novel-- but I don't know that now.

Saying that, I feel pretty strongly that books should be able to stand on their own, especially if they are part of a series. To use a film analogy, you might enjoy "Godfather Part II" more if you'd seen "Godfather Part I", but "Part II" is still a masterpiece and it's not necessary to have seen "Part I" to enjoy it.

"The Blood Miracles" is a good book. In fact, I would award it 3.75 stars, but I can't get that specific here. The writing is lyrical, the characters jump off the page and I got fully involved in Ryan Cusack's life.

I was lucky enough to see Lisa McInerney at the Greenwich Book Festival earlier this year. She was so utterly charming that I'll buy anything she writes in the future. I definitely want to read "The Glorious Heresies" now.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Glorious Heresies was one of my favourite books last year so I was looking forward to picking this one up too. We're introduced to the main character, Ryan, in the first book and while you can pick up this book without having read the first one, it's worth reading The Glorious Heresies for the background.

Ryan had it all. A job dealing drugs that gave him lots of money and kept him away from his father's violent hands, on the good side of his boss and an adoring and beautiful girlfriend. But his head wasn't in the right space. After being given time to get it back in order, his boss has decided it's time for Ryan to buck up and what better way to get back into things but to use Ryan's Italian heritage to open up a new black market trading route. But shit hits the fan and everything starts to unravel, starting with his girlfriend leaving him and a fuck up in the new trading route. Ca Ryan keep it together or is it just time for him to admit that he was living on borrowed luck?

There's a lot of differences and similarities between The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles. The main difference is this focuses on one character in a shorter time span while TGH had many different characters who's lives were all interconnected over a time period a 5 or so years. Ryan was definitely one of the more interesting characters in TGH but he fell a bit flat here. Maybe it's the mental health issues, maybe it's because it was set in a shorter time frame, maybe Ryan isn't that interesting after all, maybe it's because it was lacking the magic of all the interconnecting characters. Some of the characters do pop up in this book but it wasn't the same. What was the same was McInerney's dark wit, it did make me laugh at times and I love how the humour has such a dark edge to it. McInerney also nails the Cork voice really well, you can hear the accent float up from the page and the turn of phrases completes the authenticity of the characters and setting. I also didn't like the manic pixie dream girl character of Natalie. Overall, while there was elements I liked, if you're looking for a follow up to The Glorious Heresies, you might be disappointed by this

Loved the first book, unfortunately I didn't like Ryan so I was disappointed to hear the second book was all about him. I didn't care about him, wasn't rooting for him. If you liked Ryan and Corrine from the first book, you might like this - it was an abandon from me.

The Blood Miracles zooms in on Ryan Cusack, one of the characters from the Glorious Heresies.
Four years on, now firmly ensconced as Dan Kane’s right hand man, he sees this business as a temporary if lucrative career, but has no concrete plans for digging himself out of it. He still owes one to Jimmy Phelan, so he has to have eyes in the back of his head. Karine, the love of his life, dumps him, and when Natalie happens along, well, he just can’t help himself.
For readers of The Glorious Heresies, the opening of this book feels tame. Blood Miracles has less in the way of subplots than the first book, and while there is still a huge cast of characters, many of whom feature in The Heresies, the focus is on Ryan. By midway, the coincidences and twists and turns are developed to a point where this book gets impossible to put down.
It’s an excellent book, rather than an incredible one like Heresies is.
If you don’t love Ryan, you will at least be willing him on, and the wonderful descriptive writing inspires envy of the agony and ecstasy of Ryan’s relationship with Karine. The scams are smart, they didn’t feel predictable, but I wasn’t so sure about whether conversations with the dead Italian mother worked. The little reminders of events from The Heresies scattered here and there worked well, and more of Maureen could never be too much.
Thanks to Netgalley and John Murray Press for this book

Around this time list year, I was waxing lyrical about McInerney’s perfectly titled debut novel ‘The Glorious Heresies.’ The book rightly won the 2016 Baileys Prize and now its sequel, ‘The Blood Miracles’, has come out just in time to be read before I jump into my 2017 shortlist readings.

‘The Glorious Heresies’ was a madcap and surprisingly poignant romp through Cork’s squalid underlife. Amongst the mayhem of plot lines and numerous protagonists, it was grounded by the coming of age story of young Ryan Cusack. Caught up in the madness of everything around him, Ryan’s attempts to grow up and find his place in the world were highlights in an already dazzling debut.

‘The Blood Miracles’ picks up Ryan’s story a few years later. He’s now in his twenties and, poor soul, has benefitted little from the passing of time. Potentially suicidal and consistently self-destructive, Ryan works as an enforcer, translator, seller and surrogate son for a small-time crime lord who wants to expand his operations. His secret talents for music, languages and tenderness that shone through ‘The Glorious Heresies’ have become bitter obsessions, constantly returned to as Ryan tries to reconcile his depressed present with his promising past.

Previous events are referred to throughout ‘The Blood Miracles’, but don’t be mislead, McInerney has produced a very different book for her second novel. ‘The Glorious Heresies’ was a frenetic view of a city with a past that was catching up with it and a present that was swirling out of control. Despite references to previous events, ‘The Blood Miracles’ exists in a different world, a different genre. Instead of being a novel of the city with moments of laugh-out-loud comedy and heart-rending pathos, it’s a tangled crime story about drug dealers, their multiple girlfriends and their confused loyalties. There are double-crossings, stunning coincidences, exotic locations, madonnas, whores and lots of drug and nightclub scenes. The characters are depressingly realistic, but evoked without the sparkle and humour I had been looking forward to. As this review shows, I’m still actually far more interested in ‘The Glorious Heresies’ than in its sequel; it’s frustrating to find yourself constantly wanting to re-read an earlier book by an author when you’re trying to enjoy the new one.

I’m intrigued to see what McInerney writes next. I’m hoping of course for a return to the shocking splendour of ‘The Glorious Heresies, but ‘The Blood Miracles’ has shown that she has a interest in other genres – and also that she can write books extremely quickly. Who knows, there may be another Cork-set Women’s Prize contender in 2018…