One of the first things aspiring novelists are taught is that a book’s protagonist must be likable, but Maggie Gee, author of Blood, must have skipped class that day. Monica Ludd, her book’s 6’1” “Amazon”-like British protagonist is as awful as any human can be: a compulsive liar, a self-obsessed whiner, and a rage-aholic crazy woman prone to attacking anyone she doesn’t like. Her only saving grace is her self-effacing humor. Monica is awful and she knows it, cracking many a sick joke that will leave her readers screaming with laughter. How awful is Monica? When she finds her father, the just-as-awful Albert Ludd, bleeding out from an attack, Monica drops her axe (more about that later), stomps around in the pooling blood while getting blood spatter all over herself, picks the axe back up, and then—with the bloody axe—boards a bus for town, scowling at anyone who gawks at her blood-spattered self. Monica is not subtle. When Monica finally realizes she’s the obvious suspect in her father’s murder, she attempts to hide out, but she fails at that, too. Detective Inspector Parkes-Woods finally catches up with her, whereupon she promptly performs a sex act on him. Did I mention that Monica is not shy? The detective’s shock gives her time to get away, and soon she’s holed up in one of her wealthy family’s beach houses, fondling the bloody axe and wondering what to do next. (I promised to tell you more about that axe, and here it is: she’d bought the thing from a hardware store to kill her father with, only to discover that someone else had done the deed first.) Every now and then, Monica’s craziness is tempered by the POV of a few people less crazy (although not by much), and we begin to realize that awful Albert, a dentist, had been sexually abusing both his patients and his office staff. This is not a book for timid readers. The violence is graphic, and so is the sex. And the entire Ludd family turns out to be just as awful as Monica. Cozy it’s not. But Blood is sneakily and refreshingly hilarious—a book about a deranged woman, a deranged family, and a certain kind of wild, deranged justice.