Review: Joe Coffin, Season One

Joe Coffin, Season One by Ken Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of JOE COFFIN SEASON ONE by Ken Preston

A nonstop, heart-in-mouth, no-holds-barred, supernatural thriller, JOE COFFIN SEASON ONE is also rife with complex character evolution, deep thought processes, emotional highs and lows--and oh yes, gore, violence, sensuality, profanity, and vampires. You read that right! JOE COFFIN SEASON ONE is a vampire thriller, but I don't think you'll find anything like it in any other vampire story, no matter how well done.
Joe Coffin, our eponymous protagonist, is a "man-mountain," an individual in size much like The Incredible Hulk, a man who came into his stature in adolescence, the product of an abusive childhood (and he is certainly not the only one of those in this story), a pariah in school, a man who brooks no nonsense, but is easily led astray (only by women). He is the right-hand man of the eighty-year-old patriarch of Birmingham, England's Slaughterhouse Mob, a paternalistic leader who demands loyalty of his crew and of their wives/girlfriends. Joe, of course, is also a killer, but he is a killer with thought as well as an assassin killing to order.
While in prison for an assault, Joe's wife Steffanie and toddler son Michael are brutally killed. On release, Tom Mills, another member of the Mob, directs Joe to the alleged killers, whom Joe then kills. However, Tom has his own complex web of deceit going on, and as Joe proceeds to detangle it, with the aid of determined journalist Emma Wylde, more is uncovered than anyone could expect: not Joe, Emma, or Emma's live-in DCI Nick Asher. For the killer of Joe's family, and several others, is undead: a vampire, soon to be titled by newspapers "The Birmingham Vampire." It's very difficult to put a vampire down for the final count, as our hero repeatedly discovers.

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