A Matter of Blood (Forgotten Gods Trilogy)
At first, Pinborough’s novel appears to be a traditional police procedural, with Detective Inspector Cass Jones hunting a particularly fiendish serial killer while also trying to nail the perpetrator of a failed assassination attempt that took the lives of two boys—and dealing with the murder of his brother’s wife and son, crimes for which he may be a suspect. But soon we realize there’s more going on here. The book is set in a gloomy near future: London has been devastated by the collapsing economy, and the police have been forced to forge a sort of off-the-books alliance with the city’s criminal element. As we move further into the story, we begin to see tantalizing hints of something supernatural lurking behind the scenes, something that casts everything Cass is working on—not to mention Cass himself—in a frighteningly new light. The first of a series called The Forgotten Gods (previously published in the UK under the series title The Dog-Faced Gods), this cross between mystery, urban fantasy, and horror should play equally well to audiences of all three genres. --David Pitt