Blood Money features a fantasy mercenary-bounty hunter hero named Brunner, who rides around with his face hidden by a steel helm—how hunted individuals do not recognize that this man is on their trail is beyond me, but doesn’t need to be covered in this review.
Brunner has a run-in with a writer who’s down on his luck and in search of new material, and the two agree to let Brunner’s tale be told to a wider audience. Brunner’s tale (or tales, as I should say) comes in the form of small vignettes and one short novella. Each tale is prefaced by the author telling his reader how his success with the last tale forced him to seek out the bounty hunter again, and again.
The tales survey elements of the Warhammer world, one covers the ratmen (Skaven), another chaos-beasts (Forces of Chaos) and even the evil elves that haunt Warhammer. Each tale has decent pacing and offers little in the way of character advancement. Taking each tale singly, this doesn’t build up to having that great of a focal character, even taking all the stories together makes me feel as though the author wasn’t willing to share much of his character with me.
Brunner gets hired to do X, has troubles Y, and overcomes them in Z manner. Even when the author tries to get a plot twist in, it comes off a cliché and almost poorly executed. I enjoyed the book overall, but the tales offered me more of a grand tour of the realm then any connection to the characters in the stories.
Blood Money is not a bad book, but it’s not a great book either. It’s a fun read, but only if your just going for the adventure of it.
