Mitchell, George and Annie are a trio of twenty something’s, sharing a house in Bristol, trying to live lives of social normality, which is harder than it sounds when you are respectively a vampire, werewolf and a ghost...

Being Human: Bad Blood, is written by James Goss, who previously penned the Torchwood novel, Risk Assessment. The novel is one of the new spin-off books from the successful supernatural/comedy BBC3 series, created by Toby Whitehouse and staring Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey, and Lenora Crichlow. For fans of the show the book is set during the second series.

Denise is one of Annie’s oldest friends, full of life, adventurous by nature, who turns up at the house looking for Annie. Oddly, as Annie has reverted back to being invisible, Denise appears to be the only fully human individual who can actually see her. Although Annie desperately wants to tell her friend about being murdered by her ex-boyfriend, she can’t. Denise takes this evasions and Annie’s desire to stay in the home as signs of depression and enlists Mitchell and George's help to organise a bingo night at the local hall. In her mind this is just the sort of thing that Annie needs to bring her out of her fugue state.

This is not the only strange occurrence. Mitchell seems to be getting unusually drunk, something which normally doesn’t happen to him, and the vampires of Bristol seem to be out on the streets and acting decidedly odd.

Goss has a nice easy writing style and the overall story is well constructed. The book is peppered with lots of humorous moments. He captures the characters of Mitchell and Annie well, but I felt that his take on George’s obsessional neurosis tended to be played for laughs and made his character more two-dimensional than that portrayed in the show.

There are some interesting new characters including McGough, a doctor with an agenda all his own, and the previous head of the hospitals HR department, Janice Prescott, who falls back on her corporate training, trying to adjust to becoming a vampire.

At 253 pages the book is a good travel companion and should please fans of the show.

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Charles Packer