Review of Bloody Point by Linda White

Guest book review written by Sarah Salter:

Bloody Point by Linda J. White (River Oak, 2005)

Cassie McKenna’s husband, Mike, is dead. She leaves her career in the FBI behind her and returns home to the Chesapeake Bay area to be near her father and to take comfort in restoring old boats. Cassie seems to be taking to the quiet, peaceful, simple life when her old partner, Jake Tucker, shows up pleading for her help. When Jake disappears and then reappears with horrific injuries, Cassie knows that as painful as it is to return to a life of hunting down hard answers to dangerous questions, she has to do everything she can to save her partner’s life and maybe her own as well.

Cassie McKenna can definitely be described as a realistic character: stubborn, pig-headed, at times selfish, but also fiercely loving and loyal. There were times that I wanted to shake her! She had lost her husband and in the pain of that, she ran away, isolated herself, and wallowed in her misery. Although that’s exactly what many people do in real life, I find that I want my storybook heroes to behave better than that. However, Cassie redeemed herself in my eyes through her care for her partner. When he goes missing and then ends up injured, she realizes that life isn’t all about Cassie. She puts her owns issues and feelings aside to help Jake and to find her life again.

I like the way that Linda White wrote the character of Jake Tucker. She could have made him a knight-on-a-white-horse kind of man, but instead, she wrote a genuine, human, fallible, unsaved man. His journey is nothing short of miraculous, but at the same time it is unpredictable and wholly satisfying. He turns out to be exactly the type of hero that Cassie needs, but not what she (or we readers) expect.

I also appreciate the way White used the setting in Bloody Point to strengthen and deepen her story. She captured the beauty of Chesapeake Bay and then showed the dark side, too. The most obvious way she did this was by using the name “Bloody Point.” But she also did it in subtle ways by making the water a character all of its own.

This book was an enjoyable and suspenseful page-turner from the very beginning. The mysteries, twists, and questions made this a difficult book to put down. I highly recommend this book for fans of suspense and mysteries.