Anyone not expecting a book about serial killers, or in this case, clones of those serial killers, to not be sick and twisted is fooling themselves. What we have here is a solid first novel that is genuinely creepy and not for the squeamish.

What's also a little creepy is the encyclopedic knowledge about serial killers, their lives and their 'careers' demonstrated by (and freely acknowledged by) the author. He uses this knowledge to build a world where he can freely explore the issues of nurture vs. nature and the consequences of unfettered scientific inquiry and military avarice along the lines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The characters and settings here are well-drawn. The prose is strong and the plot well-developed.

What knocked me out of the story from time to time were the glaring inconsistencies and implausibilities in the science. Is this about cloning and genetics and free will? Or is it about a nerve gas that overrides all three? It tried to be about both, using the latter to provide a (superfluous) ticking clock to add urgency to the story about the former.

It will be interesting to see what this author does in the future. He's already published a young adult novel that is a companion to this book.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review.
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Good premise, but the writing style was a bit strange, with sentence fragments and parts that I had to read a few times in order to figure out who was saying what.
The story also bogged down in the middle, and the appearance of the strange creatures towards the end just made it too unrealistic for me. I so wanted to like this book more, but could not. ( )

Started out great, awesome thought provoking concept interesting plot, then it went down hill and got stupid. ( )

52 WEEKS 52 BOOKS 2014.30

What an interesting concept for a book: take the scariest serial killers(at least their blood), a scary group of scientist that are creating a military weapon. What could possibly go wrong with this picture?



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Holy cow is this book intense or what?! It had been a while since a book got me scared the way Cain's Blood did. Needless to say I loved it! It's a mix between Michael Crichton and John Ajvide Lindqvist. In Cain's Blood, a bunch of scientists working for government development and research come across a way of cloning the worst serial killers the world has seen. Now, several of them have been successfully cloned; like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Albert Fish and David Berkowitz among others. When things get out of hand and the lead scientist goes bonkers and releases the worst of the batch, Shawn Castillo -ex Special Ops- is called in to clean up the mess. Teamed up with one of Jeffrey Dahmer's clones, Castillo goes out in the most gruesome man hunt ever. In a race to catch and stop these sick, demented clones, Jeff and Castillo find themselves in serious danger and fearing for their own lives. This is a hell of a read: dark, gory, scary and frighteningly real. It kept me up more than one night. ( )