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Chapter One. Michael Wood

A clever thriller that had me convinced I knew who the killer was, until I didn’t, and then I realised just how dark this story is.

Reclusive author Aiden Cullen hasn’t left his house for years.

The day his first book was published should have been a huge celebration, but it was the day that changed his life for the wrong reason.

Stabbed multiple times and left for dead the previously shy man, who was leading a normal life, turned into a recluse during his rehabilitation. Now he never leaves his home.

Writing from home he has become a successful author writing murder based crime thrillers.

His life is turned upside down when a murder is committed close to the rear of his house. He has to answer the door to the police, he has to let strangers into his house, even if they are Police Officers, and that really freaks him out.

When he becomes aware of other crimes, all of which are frighteningly similar to the murders in his books he has to tell the police.

Then strange things start to happen in his house.

The list of suspects is short and the top of the list is Aidens best friend and occasional lodger, Luke.

Aiden fights the police’s assumption it’s Luke, it can’t be, it’s his best and only friend.

This is a cracking story written by a brilliant story teller.

I’ve struggled with how to describe it, and I don’t think this does it justice but, if Stephen King wrote Cosy Crime, this is what he’d come up with.

The cosy part first, it’s set predominantly in a nice country family home.

The Stephen King bit. The story is a psychological mind twister.

To be honest, as good as the story is from the start, it’s not until the killer is revealed that I realised just how good the whole plot was, and it elevated my enjoyment of the book even further.

What a cracker of a read.

Pages: 380. Publisher: One More Chapter.

The Night Collector. Victor Methos

One of my best reads this year. Brilliantly written Crime Thriller with believable characters and a storyline that had me hooked from the start

One of my finds of last year was The Silent Watcher by Victor Methos. Now book two in what is now called the Vegas Shadows Series has just landed on Amazon and it’s a cracker.

The Night Collector brings back together the two main protagonists of the first book.

Detective Lazarus Holloway and Piper Danes, a former attorney now acting as a guardian ad litem, a legal representative that looks after the interests of minors during investigations and court cases.

Unlike a lot of stories there is no will they, won’t they relationship between the pair, just hard grafting investigations.

In this book the pair are investigating the kidnap of two 15 year olds who were getting married when they were snatched in spectacular style.

The kicker is that the girl, Keri, is the daughter Lazarus wasn’t aware that he had.

The kidnappers are nasty characters that have been brilliantly written, and the tension that Methos creates in the scenes where they, and the young couple, are together is tangible.

Piper is representing Keri, whilst the investigation into the kidnapping, and hunt for her and her boyfriend, are going on.

But there’s more to play out in this than just this investigation.

Why was Keri and her boyfriend targeted.

Was it purely by chance. No ransom is sent, nobody knows what’s happened to them.

The favourite theory is that they have been taken to be trafficked into the sex or slavery trade, but they don’t fit the usual profile for that.

Now that Lazarus knows she’s his daughter, and that a terrible fate is awaiting her he ups his game.

As with the previous book the criminal investigation is over just over halfway through the book, the story then switching to the court room.

And that’s when things start to take a real twist.

And the twist keep coming right up to the last page.

I said that The Silent Watcher was one of my favourite reads last year.

Well. The Night Collector is definitely one of my favourites this year

I’ve included a link to my review of Silent Watcher below just in case you want to look at that book first

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2024/12/01/the-silent-watcher-victor-methos/

Pages: 363. Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Lies and Bones. R.J Law. TikTok made me read it. Was it worth the hype

As a man in my early 60s I’m not the target for TikTok and it’s “ influencers” but I’m also inquisitive and like to keep up with the new technology and apps.

My TikTok search is all about books and authors and the algorithm is always chucking up top ten lists.

One book that caught my eye, because it was on loads of these lists was Lies and Bones by R.J Law. The way it was presented was as if it was a new release, it’s actually been published for two years.

It is a relatively short book at 208 pages and was available on Amazon Unlimited, so it wasn’t going to cost me anything.

Downloaded onto my kindle it was a quick read.

Nothing outstanding, not an original plot

It’s not a bad book but I couldn’t see why it had its place in all of theses top ten recommendations.

The story centres on a young female detective who is struggling to live up to the mythical status her father had in the same department.

When a series of murders fall to her, as lead investigator, several older noses are put out of joint.

Following a familiar format she makes headway, then gets taken off the case and replaced by one of the older detectives, because she is not making enough headway.

The older hand makes an arrest, but is it the right person.

The younger detective carries on her own investigation on the side, and against her bosses wishes.

You can guess the ending.

Is this really a story worthy of so many recommendations.

I’ve tried to have an open opinion. It rates an average 4 stars on Amazon, with the reviews I can see being split almost equally between 3 stars and five.

Many of the influencers on TikTok appear to be in their early 20s and claim to be reading as many as 20 books a month. Maybe they are, but I’m an avid bookworm and have been since my youth, the most I’ve ever read in a month would be about 6 or 7 and that would be when my holiday was included.

So can we believe this latest place to get book recommendations.

There are probably many good, and truthful reviews on there, but the algorithm only seems to chuck up young women with lots of followers.

I wonder what came first. The followers or the books, and just how n many of these people have actually read the books they recommend.

Will I continue on TikTok, yes because I’ve actively found a couple of what appear to be genuine reviewers who seem to give honest reviews about books, many of which I’ve never heard of but ended up enjoying.

But sifting the real from the hype is difficult.

The Hallmarked Man Robert Galbraith

I’ve been with this series from the start and with the exception of one of the books I’ve loved them all.

This is book 8 and quite possibly the best so far.

The hallmarked man in the headline is the body of a man found in a silver vault. His hands, ears and…….well other body parts are either missing or have been deformed.

Each of the missing or deformed parts could have been used to identify him but have been conveniently removed. Coincidentally several men could be the victim, all of which would have been identified by one of the missing, mutilated parts.

The police are convinced they’ve identified who the man is but his, but haven’t said they are 100% sure it is who they say.

The “alleged” victim has left behind a girlfriend and a baby. She wants to be sure it is him, because she can’t bear the thought that he’d just upped and left her and the baby.

It’s the girlfriend who employs Strike and Robin’s agency to prove that it was him in the vault.

The more the detectives investigate the more they become convinced that the body is not the woman’s boyfriend.

The victim had been killed during a silver heist. The police haven’t had any success in finding the perpetrators or whether the victim was part of the gang or just somebody who got in the way.

By digging deeper Strike and Robin start to uncover a very complex plot which makes up the main crime in this book.

The plot is excellent.

The other hook in this book is the ongoing will-they-won’t-they between Strike and Robin.

I would usually say this was tedious and irritating, usually. But I’m that engaged with these characters that I think it was actually this part of the book that kept me reading late into the night.

When I wrote about Ink Black Heart, the book I really didn’t like, I called the blog, Ink Black Heart. An Honest Review By A Fan, because I really didn’t want to sound like one of those haters who jump on the band wagon.

In the spirit of balance I should really say, as an honest review from a fan, this book is really good

It follows Galbraith’s usual formula. The agency is busy and the other investigations are a nice distraction from the main plot.

The main investigation is basically tagged onto an ongoing, or recently closed Police investigation, that realistically gives Strike and Robin the legal ability to take on the investigation.

Galbraith is very clever at pitching the story believably on the fringe of a proper criminal investigation

And of course there’s the ongoing Strike and Robin relationship. He, with his past has finally admitted he’s in love with his business partner Robin, but she’s in a steady, and growing relationship with with a senior Police Detective.

But, although she looks happy on the outside, in reality it’s not all happy families and roses.

As readers we begin to hear her doubt in her own mind. We begin to hear the inward battle she’s having with herself about the way she actually feels about Strike.

This book will have fans of the series on the edge of their seat for more reasons than one.

And the ending, well …………….

Pages 912 pages. Publisher Sphere. Audiobook length 31 hours 7 minutes. Narrator Robert Glenister

All the Colours of the Dark. Chris Whitaker

If ever the word epic was appropriate for a story, it’s for this book

At 580 pages it’s a tomb of a book but not one word is wasted.

Spread over three decades, and full of unpredictable but realistic twist, this is one hell of a story.

Two young misfit kids find themselves attracted to each other because they are almost outcast from the other children their age.

Patch, a one eyed boy who lives his childhood as a pirate, and Saint the geeky late developing girl.

A childhood friendship built on being two outsiders.

When Patch goes missing protecting a young girl from attack the police investigation soon peters out.

He’s alive and being kept in a dark cellar, but he’s not alone. There’s a young girl with him. A girl he can’t see in the dark, a girl that asks him to imagine her features by touching her face. She talks in strange quotes and try’s to educate him with her cryptic stories.

Her name is Grace.

Saint never gives up on Patch and through her amateur, childish investigations finally thinks she’s found him.

In the commotion that follows the Saint and the Police find Patch but there’s no sign of the girl he says was in the cellar with him.

Over the next three decades Patch devotes his life to finding Grace.

Over the same three decades Saint, who joins Law Enforcement tries to keep Patch out of trouble, and independently looks for Grace for her own reasons.

There’s no real spoilers in what I’ve written above. Patch’s abduction and his release happen fairly early in the book, the real story is what follows.

The characters in the book weave in and out of the plot around Patch and Saint.

The relationship between Patch and Saint is never really a “will they, won’t they” get together, it’s more the story of two best friends who love each other unconditionally but more as brother and sister.

It’s all about what each of them will do to prove that Grace existed. Patch because he thinks he loves her, and Saint because she is on the trail of a long dead killer.

This is my first Chris Whitaker book but, coincidentally, whilst I was reading it he was recommending to me by a fellow book worm.

She was talking about a book I’d read, a gothic fantasy novel, and I had said the second in that series was the same story as the first. We both love crime fiction and she said to me, aren’t all crime stories basically the same.

Many of them are, but this one definitely isn’t like any I’ve read before.

She’d found it and pointed me in Chris Whitakers direction.

Now I’m looking at his back catalogue.

Pages 580. Publisher Orion. Audiobook length 14 hours 37 minutes Narrator Edoardo Ballerini

Little Children Angela Marsons

In one of my very first book blogs I said I didn’t like authors that published a book every 6 months or so. Well this series by Angela Marsons is the proof that I was very wrong to say that.

This series is the one I look forward to reading as soon as the book is available to me.

22 books in and this one is so original that I had no idea that this type of crime existed, but now that I’ve read about it I’m sure that was down to my own naivety.

In this book Stone and her team are seconded to another force, overtly to help with the search for a missing boy, covertly to hunt out bad practices, and a bad apple, in the major investigation team.

The investigation into the missing boy has been run badly and Stone and her team start to identify major issues within the other force.

The clash of personalities isn’t just based on the policing methods and it’s a fascinating read to see how the influence of one or two people can affect a whole team.

That alone as a story would have been brilliant, but throw in the actual crime they are there to investigate and you have one of the best crime books I’ve read for a long time.

Boys going missing around the country. Some of them are a bit rough around the edges and not unknown to the Police, but just because they’ve got a history, and have “run away from home” before, shouldn’t mean they should be treated flippantly.

When Stones team uncover a link it almost unthinkable about what these boys are going through.

The hard part for the team is proving it, and then finding out not only who is responsible, but where they are keeping the boys.

When it becomes evident that at least one of the boys has died, in a horrible manner, the investigation becomes even more highly charged.

And with the investigation getting off to a bad start in the other force Stone is playing catch up from the start.

There are not many books that sit this far into a crime series that I would recommend as a standalone story, but this one is a must read and can be read as a one off.

If anybody hasn’t read any of the others in the series, but picks this one up I’m sure they’ll go back to the beginning and start from book one. I’m almost jealous of the fact I can’t start over and read them all for the first time again.

Pages 371. Publisher Bookouture Audiobook length 8 hours 16 minutes. Narrator Jan Cramer

Good People. Patmeena Sabit

I think a better title for this book would have been Perspectives

Ultimately that is what this book is all about.

The story unfolds in a series of statements from numerous people who have known the Sharaf Family, or have been part of the investigation into a crime that centres around the family.

There is no narrative to string the statements together, the whole book is a story told through observations, thoughts, and hypotheses of the general community, an investigative journalist, and various professionals such as teachers, and attorneys. All looking back, with hindsight, into events leading up to…….I can’t really say without including a book spoiling, spoiler.

The “occurrence” doesn’t happen until about halfway through the book. But even then not everything is as it first appears.

So what can I tell you without spoiling the book.

The story centres around an Afghan family who escaped the violence of their country by moving to America

The father arrives in America with nothing but ambition and eventually works his way up to becoming a very successful business owner.

His family, two elder children, a son and a daughter, and two younger children are not just the apple of his eye, but also his status symbol of what he wants to achieve.

He tries everything to get them into the best schools and colleges, no matter what their ability.

In the Afghan community he is seen to be a normal parent with high ambitions for his children, outside of that community he is seen to be a pushy parent.

The eldest daughter Zorah is the fulcrum for the different opinions. To her friends she is the girl trying her hardest to live a normal life as an American teenage girl.

To the Afghan community she is a wild child that her father should reign in.

As the story continues people on both sides of that argument seem to change their perspectives on Zorah.

She is the catalyst for the events at the centre of the story.

Her “rebellion” against the aspirations her father has for her.

Her bucking of the traditions of the Afghan community.

Her families reactions

The opinion of her friends.

The opinion of the Afghan community, many of whom have never met her.

Opinions turn to reactions, as the chronological accounts reach the event the book centres around.

Throughout the book I was waiting for a narrator, somebody to stitch all of the personal accounts together. But the lack of the narrative is what held me, and kept me reading.

As far as books go this is as close as I’ve ever read to a voyeuristic experience.

I felt like I was in a room full of people gossiping.

It’s the fact that it’s written in hindsight, with everybody giving their thoughts having known what has happened, and all the time I was the only one in the room who didn’t know.

I have never read a book written in this manner before.

At first I found it frustrating, and dare I say amateurish.

But I was hooked from very early on.

I think Patmeena Sabit hit on a great, and to me original, way to hook the reader.

FOMO, fear of missing out, it’s that thing we all have lurking in our psyche. The fact I was the only one in the room listening to the gossip but having no idea hat people were on about.

In my working life I have dealt with similar situations. Parents living their life vicariously through their children.

Immigrants working hard for every hour they can to give their families the best life. Only to see their children become westernised, and ditch the beliefs and work ethos of their parents.

It’s a matter of opinion whether this is right or wrong.

Like I wrote at the beginning of this review it’s a matter of perspectives.

I think different people will get different things out of this book, depending on their perspective.

What I will say is that it’s a really good, thought provoking book.

Pages: 464. Publisher: Virago. Publishing Date: 12 February 2026

A Court Of Thrones And Roses. Sarah J Maas

I’m not the demographic for this book, but this genre is becoming my “dirty secret”

And of the few books I’ve read in this genre, this one is by far the best.

A great story, with characters it’s easy to engage with.

At times it’s Steven King dark, reminiscent of scenes from It.

At times it’s spicy, but not too graphic.

But over all it’s the story that grabbed me.

I can’t put my finger on what kept me gripped, but I really did read this in as few a sittings as my everyday life would allow.

And the first thing I did when I finished it, was click the link to download the next.

An island divided into eight kingdoms, the southern most of which is occupied by mortal humans. The upper kingdoms named after the four seasons, dawn, day and night are ruled by immortal High Faes.

The wall separating the humans from the Faes runs between their land and the Spring Court. The wall is supposed to keep the humans out of Spring, and magical beings away from the humans

So when Freyer, a young woman, kills a wolf whilst out hunting the last thing she thinks is that she has killed an immortal.

Unfortunately for her she must repay its life by sacrificing her own.

The choice, die a horrific and painful death, or live the rest of her life in the autumn court.

Choosing to live she is taken to a mansion that is lived in by Tamlin, and to her surprise it’s not as bad as she thought……..at first.

She is soon caught up in a war that rages between most of the immortals.

Amaranath is a cold killer. She has control over all of the Faes and their ruling families and seeks the love of Tamlin.

Her hold over him is about to become complete after she allowed him decades to break her curse, a curse that has removed most of his magic, along with that of many of the immortals.

All he had to do was fall in love with a mortal who had killed an immortal, and have her say she loved him.

Freyer missed her opportunity and when it’s too late has to find a way to rectify the matter, but it will be a fight to the death.

I mentioned Stephen Kings It at the start of the review. At times this book is just as dark, and for very similar reasons.

It’s easy to compare fantasy books with the works of J K Rowling, but in this case the comparison is valid. Except Maas book is much more adult.

The psychological intensity is breathtaking.

The murder and mayhem scenes are both graphic and intense.

The spice, and yes there is some, is needed in the context of the story, and although not as graphic as some books I’ve read in this genre, it is full on.

I can’t wait to read the next book.

Pages 429. Publisher Bloomsbury. Series length Book 1 of 5 Audiobook length 16 hours 7 minutes. Narrator Jennifer Ikeda

The Girl In Cell A. Vaseem Khan

To start this review I have to say that I really enjoyed this book, up until the last two or three chapters.

So to start with the plot is brilliant.

Orianna, the girl in cell A, has been in prison for 18 years. She was convicted of killing a member of the family that founded Eden Falls. A family that still lords it over the town.

The man she killed was, like the rest of the family, a law onto himself.

She maintains her innocence and claims to have no memory of the attack.

Annie Leddit is a Forensic Psychologist who is part of the prison team that is looking at the potential release of Orianna. But to be released she has to show remorse, and to show remorse she must first admit guilt.

It is Annie’s job to unlock the memories and let Orianna have to opportunity to show remorse.

The book is written from two first hand points of view, in two different times.

The present is written from Orianna’s point of view as she returns to Eden Falls four years after her release. She has gone back to confront the family of her victim, to find the truth and clear her name.

The past is written from Annie’s point of view as she conducts her interviews with Orianna, and tries to pick the locks which hold her memories repressed.

Both are brilliantly written. The story flies along and its one of those books where you have to read the next chapter, I found it really hard to put it down.

Until the last three chapters.

The book for me should have ended before those chapters.

There is an unexpected twist, its good, and it’s in context but…….

It left me with the feeling that the author had two endings in mind, and decided to add the alternative right at the end.

Did it spoil the book for me?

No, I just didn’t get see the point.

Would I recommend it?

YES.

Pages: 592. Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks

Hidden Daughters. Patricia Gibney

I used to worry about long series losing there impact or running out of ideas. The Lottie Parker series by Patricia Gibney is one I really don’t have to worry about

Every new addition to the series jut seems to get better, and the bar was high from the start.

I read this book as a recent story about the discovery of a lot of human remains, those of young children, was found in an old school in Ireland, run by the church for unmarried women and their babies

This not only brought a credibility to an already brilliant book, but somehow underlined everything about the story.

When two, seemingly unrelated murders take place, both involving young women with sad stories that include attending the Sisters of Forgiveness Convent Lottie Parker can’t help but get involved but the emotional attachment to this casenearly unhinges her.

Emotionally she has always struggled to keep her family, and partner, separated from her work. Although that’s hard when you’re in a relationship with another Officer.

But the one has always been a refuse from the other.

This case seems like its make or break for her career and her relationships

Lottie will do anything to get justice, and in this case get news of the women’s demise to any family that they might have.

All the time the threat of another murder hangs over her and her team.

This is a timely and very suspenseful story, told by one of the best crime fiction writers on the shelves at the moment

It’s also one of those books I would only pick up if you’ve got nothing else to do for a couple of days because once you start it you are not going to want to put it down.

Pages: 464. Publisher: Bookouture. Audiobook length: 13.25. Narrator Michele Moran