The biggest difference between the first issue and the second was the omission of the series grounding character Roy Divine Jr. While we only saw him briefly in the first issue, he narrated the scenario and gave us an idea of how the random scenes all pieced together in this mystery plot. In this issue, we only get four blurbs before the series goes off on its own to explore Rachel, her AA sponsor Johnny, and Rachel's brother Billy's current whereabouts. This would normally be okay, but with the exception of Johnny's activities during a call with Rachel, this issue didn't give us much to enjoy or anticipate. I'm sure Rachel's glance at her husband's dirty money, and Billy's real estate deal will come into play in later issues, but without the entertaining and focus-driven narration, it was hard to tell what was important and what wasn't. In essence, what the book broke down to was random scenes of criminal activity, debauchery, and night club guards beating up some horrible pop-culture spewing frat boys, with no common threads to pull these lackluster bits together.
I was really looking forward to this issue, and was hoping that this would be yet another consistently solid Image Comics book for me to look forward to every month, but after this issue I'm no longer sure. If future issues lean more towards the storytelling method of issue #1, I'm completely on board. If future issues continue in the vein of Blue Estate #2 however, I don't think I'll purchase more than three issues of this series. It's your play, Blue Estate...