Review: Anna Dressed in Blood

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Synopsis (From Goodreads): Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story... 

 Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead. 

 So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay. 

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, but now stained red and dripping blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home. 

 And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

I first had Anna Dressed in Blood on my to-read list ever since I first heard about it. I'm an absolute sucker for a good ghost story, and Kendare Blake certainly produced one with Anna. Cas is a ghost hunter. His father was before him and now he follows in his footsteps, preparing for the time he can face the ghost who took his father's life. Anna is not supposed to be anything different, just another ghost he's meant to kill, but there is something different about Anna, for some reason Anna decides to spare his life. As Cas tries to understand the motivations of Anna and why she doesn't behave like any normal ghost, he becomes fascinated with her, he has to figure out whether he can kill her in the end.

Kendare Blake has written an original ghost story with a splash of romance chucked in between the two most unlikeliest of couples. It's always good to find a story from a well-written male perspective, and Cas was a strong hero with his own insecurities and vulnerabilities, but also one who knows his own duties and he's a character that I fell in love with from the first page till the end. Anna, for the ghost and supposed villain at the start of the piece, it was easy to sympathise with and I loved that the reader was made to feel sorry for her rather than hate her.

The plot was fast-paced and will keep the reader guessing with many twists and graphically described scares, everything that a good ghost story needs. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who loves to be scared or loves a good horror story, and I definitely can't wait to see where Anna's story heads to next.

Source: kindle
2013 TBR Pile Reading Challenge: #3 of 21