I picked up Bathed in Blood many years ago, after finding out that Joseph Nassise had worked on the Rogue Angel series. I didn't realize it was book 53 in the series though! Nor did I realize he had written more than just the one book in the series. But that's okay, Bathed in Blood catches you up on the basics as you need them fairly well.
Annja Creed is an archaeologist and TV host of Chasing History's Monsters. While in a small Slovakian town filming about Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess, Annja rescues a girl dying of blood loss that she finds on the side of the road. That quickly thrusts her into a conspiracy when she discovers that many women have gone missing around the small town in the last few years. But the police seem to have been covering it up, and the locals are all tight-lipped. It's up to Annja to get to the bottom of things!
Overall, I enjoyed reading Bathed in Blood. It's a fairly fast-paced read that is largely entertaining. And as I already mentioned, it does a good job of filling you in on the things you need to know from previous books, so it was fine that I read this and not any of the other books in the series first. Annja is a great protagonist who was good at getting herself both into and out of trouble as she was investigating the missing women. The plot also keeps you guessing at times - I expected a different character to be one of the bad guys, and was caught off guard by the reveal (although I don't know if it would have been possible to see that one coming as this bad guy wasn't obvious at all before the reveal).
I think my biggest complaint is that the other characters never really got any development. The bad guys felt a bit one dimensional, and most of the characters that Annja knew from previous books only got cameos and so didn't develop either. I also felt that the bad guys did some silly things at times (and admittedly, one of those times actually makes more sense once you realize that the character you're led to believe is a bad guy actually isn't), but that didn't deter from my enjoyment of the book at all.
All in all, this was a fun, fast-paced read. I'd be up for reading more of the Rogue Angel series in the future if they're anything like Bathed in Blood. :)
