When inexplicable and terrifying things begin happening to his family, Waites resorts to his shady haxx0r past to figure out what's going on, and his research leads him to Tucker. We then meet Waites, a nerdy (but of course handsome) computer programmer who's also estranged from his wife and two children (the same age as Tucker's were). This is what everyone else thinks too, and Tucker's sent to prison for life.īut this part of the story is told from Tucker's point of view, and it turns out he's right about his innocence - his family were attacked by members of a conspiracy involving both black and white men. If I'd been reading about this in the paper, I'd have very little doubt that Tucker was lying and that he committed the murders himself. The next thing anyone in the outside world knows, the wife and daughter are brutally murdered, the son is missing and later found dead, and Tucker is blaming the whole thing on some mysterious black men. He's visiting her and their two children on Thanksgiving, trying to get a second chance at being part of the family. We're introduced, first, to Tucker, a white man with a history of violence and alcohol abuse, who is separated from his wife. I even ended up liking Waites and Tucker, the two main characters, although not as much as I was probably supposed to.
Given all of this, I was astonished by how much I got sucked into the story.
The main female characters later get a lot more personality and/or responsibility for the plot, but it's true that while we meet the two main male characters by finding out what they're good at in addition to what they look like, all the female characters (including the little girls - urgh) are introduced in terms of how extremely physically attractive they are. What else do you need?" and for the first third of the book I kept thinking that the answer to this question was Respect for Women. There's a blurb on the back cover that says the book is "nicely plotted, wonderfully paced, and has characters the reader cares about. (I think the African doesn't have a more specific national identity because it would be too slanderous to associate him with an actual group of people.) There are plenty of racial and ethnic slurs. The major black villain mostly goes by "The African." There is a minor villain thought of by all of the viewpoint characters as "The Indian." The African and the Indian have pretty interesting backstories, but none that really explain why they don't have, you know, names. Also by some larger details - Computer programming never worked like that (right?)! Men and women don't work like that!Īlso jolting: there are many offensive things in this book! There are several villains. Egg cartons don't work like that! Eight-year-olds don't work like that! The moon doesn't work like that! etc. I kept being jolted out of the story by little details I couldn't believe. But I knew I couldn't, because if I did, I'd never find out what happened next! And then I got into it and couldn't put it down. For the first 50 pages or so I was constantly about to put it down for good.
#Black blood brothers book how to#
It's hard to decide how to rate this book. I will continue to look for more Steven Barnes books. Sometimes the situation got so intense I had to go out and walk the dog, just take a break! That really doesn't happen very often these days in my reading. They make two very unlikely allies and they're up against an evil that goes back to slavery days.įour stars, perhaps 4.5, as I really liked the characters and the story. Derek is trying to protect his family from the same predator. Tucker is a man out for revenge against the person or persons who had his family slaughtered.
The black guy, Derek, is the nerd, a computer hacker who was known as Captain Africa. Heck, he'd give the Terminator a run for his money. The white guy, Tucker, was a highly-trained Green Beret, a real tough guy who could take on Jack Reacher, T'Challa, and Conan the Cimmerian all together. The Blood Brothers of the title are a white guy and a black guy who team-up to fight an evil predator with seemingly unlimited powers. It's set in the early 90s when computers were more primitive and people had to look for public phones to make a call. It definitely is a "page-turner," a thriller but also an effective horror novel, which reminded me of Dean Koontz. Finally, I've gotten another book by Barnes-"Blood Brothers" published in 1996. I read a book titled "The Kundalini Equation" by Steven Barnes years ago and found it to be a most interesting read.
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