Former poetry professor Jodi Luna hasn’t quite adjusted to life as a game warden. Her boss thinks she’s better with animals than humans, and the man she’s seeing wants a real relationship. Still reeling from her husband’s death, Jodi has to admit that she keeps people at a distance.
After her new friend, wealthy actress Claudia Evans, gathers with family members in the New Mexico wilderness, Jodi gets some unsettling news—that Claudia’s brother-in-law is missing. Eager to help, Jodi ventures into the wild to investigate, only to be thwarted by a blizzard that leaves the entire group stranded at a fishing lodge.
Jodi is no stranger to extreme weather, but when these reluctant adventurers start turning up mauled around the snowed-in lodge, Jodi suspects the worst: This was no bear. This was murder.
And inside the snowy confines of this rustic hideaway, everyone is fair game…

‘Blood Mountain‘ is the second book in the Jodi Luna series about a poetry professor who, after being widowed in her forties, returns with her daughter to her native New Mexico and becomes a Game Warden.

‘Blood Mountain‘ is a good thriller that has the misfortune of standing in the shadow of the excellent first book. ‘Hollow Beasts‘. I had fun with ‘Blood Mountain‘ and I’ll definitely be continuing with this series but it didn’t grip my imagination in the way that ‘Hollow Beasts‘ did.

In ‘Blood Mountain‘, Jodi has been sent by her boss to lead a weekend elk hunt for a family of billionaires who have bought up land in the mountains to create a 1,000 square-mile ranch on which they have built a behemoth of a ‘Fishing Lodge’ that they occasionally vacation in.

The Elk hunt faces some problems. The first is that the Lodge can only be accessed by a road that passes through the land of the only local who refused to sell the land her family has owned for centuries to the billionaires. She is a tough, eccentric octagenarian who speaks only in Bible verses, lives in a shack with her goats and a black bear that she raised from a cub, and has a habit of firing homemade arrows at people who pass through her land. The second is that a major snowstorm is likely to shut down the hunt and to cut the Lodge off from the rest of the world. The third and most important is that the billionaire brothers are aggressive, entitled, sociopathic narcissists who can’t stand each other.

A lot of the fun in this book comes from the ‘male billionaire freakshow’ aspects of the story. At one time, I might have thought that their behaviour was too monstrous to be real Nowadays, all I have to do is think of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr for everything to seem well-grounded in reality.

There is more to the story than billionaires behaving badly. Someone is trying to kill them.

The book opens with Dona öourdes Lavato taking her pet bear for a walk and finding the corpse of man with an arrow in his back. Then the action rolls back a day and we see Jodi being told to get herself out to the ranch.

The ‘Who is the killer and what motivates them?’ part of the book works well. Even though killing either of the brothers off might easily be seen as a service to humanity, there are lots of other people at risk who are easier to like. Inevitably, Jodi ends up being the only law officer for miles around. She has to find a way of keeping everyone safe and trying to find out who the killer is. This plot kept me guessing and also served to put Jodi under significant stress.

The part of the plot that required the biggest suspension of disbelief on my part was that Jodi brought her teenage daughter, Mila, to the elk hunt. True, it was on a weekend and there shouldn’t have been anything dangerous going on and her daughter is kinda sorta the girlfriend of the son of one of the billionaires but even so, this seemed like a bad idea to me.

Of course, it was a bad idea that made for a much more exciting story. Mila is an engaging character and, from the events of ‘Hollow Beasts‘ we know she can take care of herself.

I liked that Jodi and Mila effectively got a storyline each. It added to the tension, doubled the action and increased my emotional investment in the story.

Unfortunately, the story felt a little uneven to me. There were times when Jodi seemed less competent and less in control of herself than her daughter. Perhaps that’s just realism given that Jodi is much more emotional than her daughter and was under a lot of stress but it still felt as if Jodi wasn’t holding her own.

I liked the strong and slightly unconventional relationships in Jodi Luna’s family They were vividly described, they felt real and they provided a contrast to the constant conflict and aggression exhibited by the bilionaires family.

Even so, there were points towards the end of the story when the Luna family relationships were so portrayed with so much sentimentality that I felt they were becoming candidates for living on Walton’s Mountain. But that’s probably just me.