Review: The Weight of Blood

The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When the dismembered body of one of her friends is found, Lucy Dane goes down a rabbit hole of sex trafficking, a rabbit hole that nearly claimed her missing mother decades earlier. Will Lucy discover her mother's true fate before she meets her own?

I've had this book for at least a couple years but forgot about it until I started chewing through my backlog due to my wife's commandeering of the Kindle. It was a gripping read.

The Weight of Blood is told in two threads, one in the past when Lila Petrovich came to Henbane, the other in the present featuring her daughter Lucy. Henbane is a flyspeck town in the Ozarks and I feel like Laura McHugh did a good job capturing the small town way of life, complete with distrust of strangers. The two plot threads were like speeding trains heading toward each other on the same track. You know the end result isn't going to be pretty.

The two mysteries were fairly engaging, although I preferred the Lucy thread. Crete Dane is as rotten as they come but still cares for his family in a twisted sort of way. I felt bad for all the bad stuff that happened to Lila, especially since I knew the worst was yet to come.

The book reminds me of The Roanoke Girls more than anything else, although I preferred The Roanoke Girls. The characters were pretty thin and didn't have a lot of life to them. Lucy and Lila were so alike I forgot which was which a couple times. The writing didn't have much of a spark either. It was pretty basic. While the plot was good, the rest of it could have used more juice.

The Weight of Blood was very readable and I liked it but ultimately didn't have a whole lot of weight to it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.


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