I have never read anything by this author before, so I thought I would give him a try and I was glad that I did. You have a detective by the name of Jack Nightengale who investigates weird and unusual problems of his clients. The author weaves a little bit of humor into the story. This book is a collection of 6 short stories written by other authors with the same title "Blood Bath" using the detective Jack Nightengale in their stories. This book was mysteriously creepy and I enjoyed reading it.

I liked the story so much that I have downloaded other books by Stephen Leather to my kindle as I am looking forward to reading more books by this author. ( )

This short book (I listened to the audiobook which came in at around an hour and a half) is part of a series of stories featuring Stephen Leather’s creation Jack Nightingale, paranormal detective. I wasn’t aware of that when I bought this one, but certainly didn’t feel that I missed out on anything but not having read/listened to any of the others in the series. Before I talk about this specific story, it’s worth mentioning that the print version of the story also features six other stories of the same name written by other authors. Having read reviews, it appears that the Stephen Leather one was by the far the best of them all, and so I am not particularly bothered by missing out on the others, but some readers may want to have the whole lot.

In this story, Jack and his assistant Jenny take on new clients Mr and Mrs Stokes, who have bought a hotel. However, due to the high number of suicides in the hotel over the preceding years, nobody wants to stay there and the business is losing money. Jack investigates and discovers that the suicides may in fact be murder by a malevolent supernatural force, so it is up to himself and Jenny to find out the truth.

As far as short stories go, this was…okay. Not really a horror, more of a fantasy novel, which admittedly is not necessarily a favourite genre of mine although the occasional fantasy novel will grab me. It was basically just a straight up chronological account of their investigation. I did like Jack and Jenny – both had a good sense of humour and a nice working relationship, and the story itself was serviceable even if it held no major surprises.

There were a few editing mistakes which annoyed me – one character went from being called Timothy to Thomas and back to Timothy again. Also, at the beginning of a conversation with Mr Stokes, the hotel owner says that he has no guests stopping there at that time and a minute later, during the same conversation, Jack asked him if he still had no guests stopping there. Little things like this do tend to niggle me somewhat.

I’m not sure I would be that bothered about listening to any more Jack Nightingale stories, but I also wouldn’t be against the idea of popping one on to pass the time during a long run or car journey. ( )

The first original story was ok, the rest were just repetitions of the same. Some were god while others less so!
I did like the characters a lot though. ( )

Stephen Leather's story was good, but the rest were just bad.

Embarassingly bad in some cases (most notably the second story by Alex Shaw - I almost abandoned the whole collection at that point, and to be honest, am still sorry that i didn't; and the fifth story by Lynnette Waterman which aside from being badly written was utter twaddle.)

The other four stories were mostly readable, but sadly, that's the best you can say for them. I'm very disappointed as the idea - a group of stories written in homage to Leather's Nightingale books by different authors from the same title/theme - could have been a really interesting book. But the quality of the authors chosen just did not measure up. The plots were bad, laughably so in one case, the writing was terrible, and the characterisation... calling him 'Jack', drinking Corona, and driving a MGB do not a character make. Characterisations of Jenny were as bad, if not worse.

Absolutely not worth the time, never mind the money. It cost too much at 'free'. ( )