I suppose it was sort of inevitable that I wouldn’t like this one as much as I enjoyed Terrier, but I felt Bloodhound (the second book in Pierce’s Beka Cooper trilogy) had some structural and pacing issues that hampered my enjoyment.
Bloodhound picks up a year and a half after the events of the last book. Beka has been an official Dog now for almost a year, but she can’t keep a partner. They’re either incompetent or can’t keep up with her. And then she gets saddled with a scent hound named Achoo when she catches her handler abusing her (not that she sees this as a problem, because Achoo is adorable). Things in the Lower City are on edge due to a bad rye harvest, and people are on the verge of panicking that a long and hungry winter is ahead of them. And on top of that, someone has been circulating forged silver coins (‘coles’), which threaten to raise the price of silver so high that it will have catastrophic results for not only the local economy, but that of the whole country. A riot breaks out when a popular bakery raises the price of bread, and both Beka and her former training partner Tunstall are injured. Because of Tunstall’s injuries, the Lord Provost chooses her, Achoo, and Goodwin (Tunstall’s partner) to head over to the neighboring port city of Port Caynn to track down the colemongers.
The main problem with this is that we’re almost halfway through the book by the time Goodwin and Beka get to Port Caynn, and once they’re there we’re in for even more set-up before Beka can really get down to it and start her investigation. I also felt the colemongering plot was inherently less interesting than the two cases from the first book. It’s not that it was bad or anything, it just didn’t hold my attention very much. And because of all those pacing issues, I wasn’t zooming through it like a mad person, and thus more able to notice things that bothered me. Beka’s journalling seemed an even more flimsy way to tell this story, especially when her entries would go on for thousands and thousands of words. She mentions she’s writing in a sort of shorthand (Dog cypher), but even so, it’s too much. There’s no way Beka could have conceivably written all of this, especially while on a Hunt, and especially considering the reason Pierce has her doing it read as pretty flimsy to me. She should have just nixed the journal format completely, or changed the way she had Beka write it all out. (She seriously writes out conversations word for word like a regular 1st person narrator.)
Not that it was all bad (not that any of it was bad, actually, just less fun and interesting). I still really liked Beka, loved Achoo, and liked seeing Beka exploring a new city. A couple of the twists were also really interesting (and horribly sad). But overall, I just wasn’t as interested in watching Beka chase down money forgers as I was watching her learn how to be a Dog and chasing down child-kidnappers.
[3.5 stars]
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