BLADE: playing dead

by Tim Bowler

It's been a long time since I've read a book with such unrelenting tension and suspense. Not even one sentence of comic relief interrupts the sense of fear and darkness that envelops the life of fourteen-year-old Blade, a street kid in urban Britain. Blade is a person with a past--a violent and painful past. But he managed to escape the life he had been living, and for the past three years, he's been playing dead, hiding from every personal contact and even from himself. Blade is a master at sensing trouble; he has honed his powers of observation to a fine point. But one day he slips, is brutalized by girl gang members, and his life starts unraveling. Ghosts from his bloody past come to track him down. He makes the mistake of starting to care for a girl and a small child. He has lost control, and never has he been in greater danger. Told with Blade's voice to an unseen observer, Bigeyes, in British street slang and Bowler's own language, this story grips the reader from page one and doesn't let go even at the last sentence. The word is that Blade is book one in an eight-book series. That is a good thing, because at the end of book one, Blade has no where to go but up. ~reviewed by Dail Sams