A Rush of Blood

I’m rather a fan off David Mark’s writing. The Zealot’s Bones was a stand-out book of 2017, that did not get the recognition it deserved. The Mausoleum, another stand-alone novel, was a beautifully conceived and well executed historical tale full of exceptionally well-drawn characters, with a tense and claustrophobic setting.

What Mark does really well is inject full on atmosphere into whatever he writes and in A Rush of Blood, he returns to more of a gothic horror theme.

This time it is a contemporary story, but with echoes of the days of Jack the Ripper. We are in the East End of London and ex-cop Molly runs a Jack the Ripper themed pub, the Jolly Bonnet, in Whitechapel. Molly’s best friend is Lottie, a pathologist who is also a vlogger, maintaining a somewhat macabre vlog called The Coffin Club on the quirkier aspects of death and the paraphernalia of death, which has a huge following. Lottie dresses with all the flair and flamboyance of a bright blue haired steampunk. Molly has a 10 year old daughter, Hilda who lives with her, but who can also be found hanging out in the pub with Lottie, whom she finds fascinating.

Hilda attends a dancing class and her friend there is a similarly aged Lithuanian girl named Meda. One day, Meda simply fails to show up and after Hilda badgers her mother into going to Meda’s home to find out what’s wrong, the pair realise that they are in the midst of something rather more serious that they could have suspected.

Meda’s family have wrongly assumed that she is the subject of kidnap for ransom, a practice that is seemingly not uncommon to these Eastern Europeans. They think that setting some home-grown heavies on the kidnappers will get Meda back safe and sound and do not need well-meaning people like Molly sticking their noses in.

Unfortunately, what Molly and Hilda have stumbled on is altogether more sinister and far creepier.

Hilda and Molly are our narrators, with additional interventions from Lottie and a strange and deeply creepy character, Mr Farkas, adding their voices.

Mr. Farkas was once a noted academic, now he, like Lottie, is a collector of death artefacts. He lives in a dilapidated three story house in Spitalfields. It does not take long before the reader realises that sanity and Mr Farkas have only a nodding acquaintance…

David Mark has an interesting mind and a very different way of looking at crime which appeals to my love of all things dark and horror filled. Here he plays with gothic themes and gives them a contemporary slant, all the way transporting the reader into a world we never wanted to inhabit. This is not a whodunit, rather it is a portrait of cruelty and madness leavened by loving relationships and some fearsomely good straight talking.

Mark’s characters are glorious; Lottie in particular, and his crimes are tainted with the macabre and the obscene, in the sense that they are outside the realm of human decency. He manages to paint detailed portraits and tinge them with sepia, all the while ensuring that we know who the warm blooded lovers of life and laughter are.

Verdict: A dark, horror imbued read with some sexy and warm, life affirming moments to pierce the darkness. Recommended.

David Mark assembles an eccentric bunch of characters for his latest standalone book outside of his DS Aector McAvoy series (which isn't exactly conventional in its characterisation either). Actually A Rush of Blood is populated almost exclusively with characters who are not just eccentric, but rather all of them have to one degree or another an element that leans towards downright weird or disturbing. East End Londoners evidently, and Mark puts them all to good use in the cause of a suitably dark tale on streets once stalked by Jack the Ripper.

Most of this bunch congregate around the Jolly Bonnet, a gin bar in the East End that is also a kind of museum of historical medical curiosities (and I'm not just speaking to the clientele). There's the proprietor Molly Shackleton, an ex-police officer who fantasises about being a Victorian prostitute stalked by Jack the Ripper. Her 11 year old daughter Hilda is relatively normal, but she's afraid that something terrible has happened to Mesa, her Lithuanian friend from dance class. In the Jolly Bonnet you'll also find Dr Lottie, a friend of the family as well as a client, she's a renowned pathologist who is also something of a YouTube celebrity making death sexy for those morbidly obsessed with the paraphernalia of death. The bar inevitably also attracts all manner of collectors and enthusiasts of the bizarre.

Then there's Mr Farkas, a book collector, a doctor and academic with an interest in collecting historical medical equipment and paraphernalia. He's also a schizophrenic who suffers from hallucinations and has substituted his medication for laudanum. Farkas has come into possession of an interesting tome written in 1665 by Jean Denys revealing the secrets of soul transference through blood transfusion. It's a subject of particular interest to Farkas, who subscribes to the belief that certain types of blood from youths, animals, even those who have died a sudden violent death can have properties to enhance human capacity and extend life. Farkas is clearly of a mind to test those theories for himself.

A Rush of Blood gives David Mark the opportunity to indulge in the macabre in a way that perhaps might not sit so well in his brilliant DS McAvoy series, but there are certainly commonalities. The last time we came up against a bunch of Russian gangsters in a DS McAvoy novel for example (Scorched Earth) things got extremely violent. Given the title, the additional element of horror and the involvement of Lithuanian gangs who have their own ideas about how justice is served, you can count on things turning dark and bloody in A Rush of Blood, but the most essential feature that is common here is the brilliance of Mark's writing which is just as rich and colourful as his characters.

This is consequently as thoroughly dark and entertaining as the best of David Mark's writing with the additional quality that he understands what makes people tick, and in many ways (as with the last DS McAvoy book, the eighth, Cold Bones) what is often most important to them is blood, as in family. Located further south than usual, A Rush of Blood is also about London and Londoners, contrasting the old East London streets once menaced by Jack the Ripper and the Krays with the new London which has a very different kind of society and cultural identity, but which in many ways is just as violent and holds other dark secrets.

A Rush of Blood is a standalone horror thriller by David Mark. Released 7th Jan 2020 by Severn House, it's 224 pages and available in hardcover and ebook formats. The ebook format includes an interactive table of contents with chapter headings. I've become very fond of interactive ebooks lately.

This is an extremely creepy horror-tinged thriller. I've seen everyone calling it atmospheric, and I think that's apt. Although it's set in modern day Whitechapel, the prose calls up foggy London of more than a century ago. There's a sense of creeping dread throughout and several places in the book where I got literal chills, almost a visceral reaction. The author uses alternating PoVs to great effect and the parallel narratives intertwine to an -exceedingly- creepy denouement which felt inevitable in retrospect. It's less of a 'whodunit' (the reader knows fairly early on) and more investigative crime thriller.

I will say that it took me a few chapters before I caught on to what was actually happening, and the author is very talented at holding back information which would tip the book definitively over into the supernatural horror genre. The writing is spare and beautifully descriptive. I loved Lottie (the youtube pathologist sensation), Hilda (10 year old wunderkind), and her mum Molly (former police officer and current pub manager in the Whitechapel area where Jack the Ripper plied his gruesome trade over 100 years previously).

I'm generally not a horror fan but this one is so expertly written that it was impossible to resist. This is a talented author at the absolute top of his game.

Five stars.

A really interesting, unusual, and gripping storyline, together with a very quirky set of characters make this a great read!