Category: Blogger

Onyx Storm Rebecca Yarros

To start with I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for this book.

Last year I read the first two in the series, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, as a challenge to myself to read a different genre, and I really enjoyed them.

This book, the third, has been really hyped over the two or three months prior to its publication, and I was one of the people really looking forward to seeing what happened after the cliff hanger at the end of Iron Flame .

Before I read it I saw some reviews where people were stating that they were struggling to catch up with the plot or make sense of where the story picked up immediately after the end of the last book.

Some even went as far as to say they had reread Iron Flame just to make sense of the start of this book.

The story told through the series is actually quite complex, with people of different families having different allegiances, dragons and other mythical monsters forming bonds with different people, all having their own intricacies.

So with Iron Flame finishing at the end of a vicious battle, which saw a whirlwind of death, injury, and changing sides, it’s easy to see why people were a bit bamboozled, I was over 100 pages in before I was comfortable with being caught up and on the right track.

Onyx Flame continues in the aftermath of a battle. Lines had been crossed and alliances tested, stretched and in some cases broken.

Spoiler alert if you haven’t read the first two books

Xaden is not all that he seems, he has bad blood running through him, poisoning his soul and it should be turning him to the dark side, but he’s fighting it.

Violet won’t accept that she’s losing him and sets out, with her friends from the Fourth Wing, to try and find a cure. This involves trying to locate the mythical seventh breed of dragon.

At the same time the Wyvern are attacking with towns and villages falling.

As Xaden tries to hide his changing bloodline he helps to battle the type of beings that he is turning into.

During the quest, and one of the ensuing battles Violet meets her ultimate enemy, the her of the enemy, and only one of them can be allowed to live, unless Violet crosses over.

Although the main gist of this story is the quest to find a cure, and the seventh breed, it’s also a story of war and politics, and as with the previous book’s loyalties

And of course the relationship between Violet and Xaden.

I put a warning on my blog about the first two books, that although they were classed as young adult, they contained some graphic spice scenes. I was amazed how many people replied thanking me because their young, thirteen and fourteen year old, teenagers had been asking for the books as presents. Well if anything the spice in this book is even more graphic.

So what did I really think of the book.

Would I have read it all the way through if I hadn’t read the first two. No, I read this because I became invested in the whole story.

If this was the first book would I have been as engaged. No, if this was the first book I would have given in after the first fifty or sixty pages.

Will I read the next instalment. Yes. I’m invested in the characters and as this book ends on an even bigger cliff hanger than the last one I feel compelled to read whatever comes next.

That’s the sign of a clever author. Like Ink Black Heart in the Strike books by Robert Galbraith, I might not have loved the book, but the ongoing story has me hooked, but if the next one is in the same vain as this one, it might be my last.

Publisher Piatkus. Pages 544. Audiobook length 23.54 hours. Narrator Jasmin Walker

Hidden. Kendra Elliott

Billed as book 1 in the Bone Secrets series, and what an opener.

Looking online there are 5 books in this series, so far, and I can’t wait to get stuck into the next one.

Forensic Odontologist Lacey Campbell is young and at the beginnings of her career. A lecturer at her local Dental School, and occasional forensic consultant, she is called to a scene where a collection of bones have been discovered.

She quickly realises she knows the victim. The last time she had seen the girl she had been taken by a serial killer, and became his last victim.

The bones are found in a building belonging to a medically retired cop, Jack Harper.

Jack had once dated another victim of the killer, and when his ex cop partner is found tortured to death, links start to fall in place. That cop had been one of the officers to catch the killer.

An uneasy alliance forms as Lacey and Jack start to work on their own theories.

Both come under suspicion by the officers investigating the current killings.

But what is the link?

Can Lacey really trust Jack?

A great story. I don’t know where the series will go next, which characters will return, but there’s enough interesting subplots in this book to open many avenues.

Lacey is young, hot, and hot blooded. Her character is a really enjoyable read.

The relationship with Jack is steamy. They are both passionate about finding this killer, and that passion boils over into a will-they-won’t-they scenario.

Jack is a business owner who owns many properties. He was a cop for a short time, until an arrest went wrong and he got injured. He had returned for a short while but found it wasn’t right for him so joined his father’s business.

Then there’s Lacey’s friend Michael, a no nonsense journalist who she once dated but is now best friends with.

Set in the coastal state Oregon there is loads of potential for crimes to investigate, big cities, isolated towns, seaports, the list could be endless

So let’s see where it goes next.

Pages: 373. Publisher: Montlake Romance (Don’t know why, it’s definitely a crime thriller)

The Unravelling Vi Keeland

A dark psychological thriller with some well disguised twists that keep coming right up to the last page.

Written in the first person from Dr Meredith McCalls point of view.

At the start of the book McCall is a successful psychiatrist, with her own practice in New York. Her marriage, to a NHL Hockey player is perfect, but then he suffers an injury on the ice.

The first few chapters alternate between McCall now, as she struggles to get over her husbands death, and the incident that killed him, and the lead up to the incident as her husband turns to drink and pain killers.

A young woman and her daughter were also killed in the incident and all the evidence points towards it being her husbands fault.

In the present McCall fixates on Gabriel. The husband and father of the woman and girl that were killed by her husband.

She’s just finishing a years ban from practicing and is completing mandatory counselling herself, but although she knows what she is doing is wrong she struggles to tell her therapist the entire truth.

When she starts back, at her practice, Gabriel turns up as a patient. She should turn him away……….

The story follows the way she starts to unravel, lack of sleep, increased drinking, mood swings brought about by distracting herself with dating apps.

Some of her other patients mirror her own thoughts and actions, she can see it’s wrong in them, and can give them advice. So why can’t she help herself.

Her unraveling is going to ruin her, both professionally, and as a person, but can she put a stop to it.

This book is brilliantly written.

It’s psychologically dark.

The twists in the plot are well hidden until they hit.

There is a bit of “spice” but it’s not gratuitous, it adds to the story, and believe it or not, the suspense.

A big recommendation for this one from me.

Pages: 305. Publisher: Piatkus Audiobook length: 8 hours 45 minutes Narrator: Aidan Snow

The Collector Series. Dot Hutchison

There are four books in this series, I picked the first one up over Christmas and finished the last one on the second of January.

Yes, I was hooked.

This is a remarkable series, not just for the stories, which are superb, but for the structure and the way they are written.

The stories centre around an FBI team in the Crimes Against Children division.

Each book contains a gripping story but is told from a different team members point of view, with that character in each book being written in the first person.

In the case of the first book the first person, present tense is mainly used for one of the victims.

This, almost unique, style of writing over the series gives a great insight into the personality, emotions, and relationships in high profile investigation teams.

#1 The Butterfly Garden

Teenage girls kidnapped from the streets and held inside a secured garden. The man who takes them is only known to them as the gardener. He’s a collector, a collector of butterflies, in this case human butterflies.

Once the girl has been kidnapped the are subdued and their back is tattooed with their own unique, colourful set of butterfly wings. The girls is given a new name and released into the garden where they interact with other girls who are also being held.

The butterflies are treated well, except when the Gardener wants sex. In his mind he’s being gentle and saving them from the outside world. But they have a life span and when they reach 21 he kills them, before putting them into a glass frame in resin to display them.

But he’s not the biggest threat to the girls. His son is a monster and uses, and abuses, the girls in the worst way.

Special Agent Victor Hanoverian, and his partner Brandon Eddison, and their team investigate the latest disappearance and start to piece together a case that surprises even these veterans.

The pace of this story is frantic. Following one of the girls experience from just before she’s taken, until ……..well until the end of the book but that would be a spoiler.

#2 The Roses of May

This time Eddison is the main character with the story being written in the first person tense from his point of view.

Young women are being killed and posed with flowers on, or around the body. The type of flowers are different for each girl and seem to have a relate to her in some way.

One of the victims sisters, Priya, is receiving flowers, specifically the same type of flowers the victims were posed with, in some type of predictive countdown to another killing, but is she the target.

Eddison has a relationship with Priya, he had investigated her sisters murder and had kept in touch.

A running theme throughout the series is that the team form friendships with victims, and in some cases the bond is more like family. Often the victims become unofficial councillors, they understand the team like nobody else can, and from very different positions, share the experiences of the crimes they are involved in.

In this story the relationship, between Eddison and Priya, is the main focus of the story and it works really well.

#3 The Summer Children

Team members are introduced through the series, in this book Special Agent Mercedes Ramirez, a background character in the previous books, takes centre stage.

Blood covered children, clutching teddy bears, are being left on her doorstep.

Each time the child is told to talk to Ramirez and that she’ll look after them. They are told by a woman who’s forced the child to watch her kill their parents, telling them that they would be safe now and that she’s saving them.

Ramirez has always given the child victims of the crimes she investigates a teddy bear to help comfort them. The killer is now using this against her.

Her emotions are fraught as she tries to dig into past investigations in an attempt to find a link. The killer is described as looking like an angel, and in a really unusually spin the children are all sure it’s a woman.

#4 The Vanishing Season

One of the newest members of the team, Eliza Stirling takes the first person point of view for the final book in the series.

A young girl goes missing around Halloween time. She was walking home from school in a nice safe neighbourhood and nobody saw a thing.

The girl bears a striking resemblance to Stirling, enough for her to be moved to a desk for the investigation because her looks are to emotional for the family.

Her frustrations are shared by her partner Eddison. It’s the anniversary of his sister’s disappearance, and she was about the same age as the latest victim, and had the same blonde hair and blue eyes, and he is also sidelined because of the triggers the similarities might bring.

The detective in charge of looking for Edison’s daughter is long retired but he never stopped looking for her.

When he, and others start to link numerous disappearances over nearly 30 years, it looks like a serial kidnapper has been taking girls for generations.

The story of the investigation, in this book, is a tool to examine the relationship between Stirling and Eddison, and the extended team of FBI agents and past victims.

It’s one of the best finales to a series I’ve ever read.

Emotions run high, friendship and relationships are strained the bonds are tight but not indestructible.

This is a short but brilliant series. I had not heard of Dot Hutchison before but these books have been available for some time. Why she’s flown below my radar I have no idea. But she is firmly on it now.

Publisher Thomas & Mercer

Classic? What are they, and why ban one because writing styles might offend.

A recent headline in Wales got me thinking. The Welsh Joint Education Committee have banned the “Classic”, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, from its GCSE reading and studying list, stating racism in the writing could be seen to be offensive.

This got me thinking.

What is a a Classic, and why do we class some books as classics, what are they actually supposed to teach us.

At secondary school, in the 1970’s I was made to take CSE English Literature. Some of my brighter friends took it at O Level.

I didn’t read any of the books on the reading list. Mainly because I found them boring and stuffy.

I’ve read many of them since, and some of them I even found entertaining. But what was I supposed to learn from books like Lord of the Flies, White Fang, Rebecca, and others I can’t even remember.

My friends taking O Level suffered even more, Dickens and Shakespeare weighed heavily on their reading list.

Growing up on a huge council estate in Birmingham, these books bore no relevance to anything we were experiencing.

At the time my reading was mainly based on my father’s discarded WWII paperbacks and the occasional spy book. At thirteen these held relevance. The war was over but still recent enough to be fresh in the mind of many of the adults in my life. The Cold War was at its height.

What I didn’t know at that time was just how much reading would mean in m life.

I’m a bookworm with my own review blog. I get sent advanced copies of books so that I can review them prior to publication.

I embrace reading and love to think that I encourage other people to read.

How do I do this. I tell the truth about books I enjoy. I never write a negative review, because I know reading is subjective. Just because I don’t like something, why should I write something that might put somebody off a book they would really enjoy.

To flip that why do education boards select books, Classics, that have no relevance, and in all likelihood will put people off reading in their formative years.

I understand that some people will want to study and research the history of literature and writing styles. That can be done at Higher Education for that minority group.

To ban a book because it has historical, but accurate for the time, phraseology, in my mind, is counterproductive.

We should learn from the past, bad things as well as good.

One of my favourite writers, in American Fiction, is Chester Himes. His Harlem crime series, set in post war New York is full of information that would be hard to find in many none fiction books.

His main characters Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, are fierce, black detectives, working in the slums of Harlem.

Chester Himes was born in the early 1900’s and lived in a similar area to that which he wrote about. His accounts, although fictional are true to life.

Another American author, whose books would be seen to be offensive by some is James Ellroy. The LA Quartet contains era appropriate, and accurate language. Loosely based on real life events, the fictional characters often interact with real people of the time.

Some of the content would be massively controversial today.

In my mind, these are Classics, and if you read these you cannot help but compare the occurrences of, in Himes case the 1950s, and in Ellroy’s case the 1960s, with today’s society.

It’s not just American writers.

Colin Dexter, in his Morse books, plots the changes of Policing in the 1980s. Language and attitudes accurate to the era are vastly different to that of today, they can be seen to be changing throughout the series.

The books are entertaining but also allow the reader to look at how much has changed in the U.K. over the last 40 years or so. In life in general, as much as Policing, things changed vastly during that era.

There will be people who love Agatha Christie, I’m not one of them. Her books would be classed as cosy crimes today. The language and attitudes in her books are another example of accurate for her era, but would be found offensive today.

In my mind we shouldn’t be banning books because of when they were written, we should embrace and learn from them.

Do we learn from the Classics? Writing styles maybe, but societally no.

They are too far in the past. Dickens wrote about the mid to late 1800s. Shakespeare wrote about the 1500s. This is history and bears no real relevance to modern literature, so how are they still on Literature Reading Lists., below higher education.

Everybody will have their own opinions and I hope my little rant doesn’t offend, but I do hope it provokes some discussions.

Books of the Year

It’s that time of year again. Hopefully all the presents are brought and wrapped.

I just thought I’d look back at my favourite reads of the year, and add links to my original blogs

My favourite book this year is by Greg Iles. Southern Man is the culmination of of the Penn Gage series. Which in turn is probably my favourite modern American Crime series. Set in the Deep South it looks at the effects that one man can have on an electoral campaign. When I was reading it I thought “Trump” now, scarily, I’m thinking “Musk”

Is a great story to finish off a brilliant series

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2024/07/06/southern-man-greg-iles/

Talking of series my favourite new find in British Crime Fiction, is the Cassie Raven series by A.K Turner. Raven is a school drop out, goth, who finally settled down and has become a Senior Morgue Technician.

She has a forensic eye, and a deductive mind, and pairs up with Phyllida Flyte a Police Detective who, in personality, is about as far removed from Raven as possible. But they make a formidable team in this series. I found and binge read the series without breaking to read anything else. Yes it hooked me.

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2024/08/03/body-language-life-sentence-case-sensitive-and-dead-fall-by-a-k-turner/

The biggest surprise for me, this year, has been the fact that I was intrigued by the amount of people I saw reading Fantasy books. Every time I jumped on a train, every coffee shop I went in somebody, and on many occasions quite a few people, were reading fantasy books. All age groups, and all genders, seem to be reading these books. So I thought I’d try one.

One of my favourite crime authors, and fellow book blogger Noelle Holten, recommended Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros. This was the second in a series so I downloaded Fourth Wing, the first, and with some trepidation dived in. I was instantly enthralled by what is, at its core,the story of a girl who joins the army and goes through basic training. The difference being people die when they fail. And instead of modern technology the armies rely on magic and dragons.

Oh and it’s spicy. When I downloaded it of Amazon it was listed as youth and young adult fiction. On my initial blog I had several people replying thanking me for being honest about the “spice” as they had considered buying it for their early teenage kids.

It’s definitely an 18 if you are going to use the movie classifications.

Both books are fantastic and I have the third on preorder and can’t wait for publication in January.

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2023/12/11/fourth-wing-and-iron-flame-by-rebecca-yarros/

There are other series I haven’t mentioned. Angela Marsons has added two books to the Kim Stone series, and this is always going to be my favourite UK Police Procedural series. Set in the Black Country, great characters, both recurring and occasional. Utterly brilliant.

The True Crime, and autobiographical book Every Contact Leaves a Trace, by Jo Ward is a gritty read by one of the UKs top CSIs. Jo has been on TV a few times in fly-on-the-wall documentaries about murders in the West Midlands.

What those programs don’t show is what’s going on in the Forensic Scientists mind, how some cases can have an adverse effect on the mind and the body.

I have worked a few times with Jo and to see her put her heart on her sleeve like this is tremendous. It’s a must read for crime fans but should be compulsory for anybody thinking of joining the Police as a CSI.

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2024/05/18/every-contact-leaves-a-trace-jo-ward/

What a year to be a reader. I can’t wait to see what 2025 brings

A Random Kill. Andrew Barrett

Billed as the start of a new series, I can only hope it turns out to be a long one

I like my main characters to have a bit of grit. Detective Sergeant Regan Carter has a whole quarry.

A fiery red head, who has just been transferred to her nightmare job by the husband she’s just divorced, Regan hates dead bodies. She hates the smells, the body fluids, the injuries, the fact that they fart and belch when the trapped gases get released, in fact there is nothing about them she can get along with.

So as a piece of revenge, the worst thing that her nearly ex-husband could do, would be to get her transferred to one of the busiest murder teams in the country.

Just to put the icing on the cake she is replacing a woman that was dearly loved by her team and who died in a freak accident, with everybody presuming that one of the existing DCs on the team would get her post.

Regan Carter, yes she is named after the two main characters in the 1970s TV series The Sweeney, has a mouth that would match Gene Hunt, from another famous series and has an attitude to match, so making friends is not at the top of her list when she arrives at the new team.

Neither is getting involved with a complicated murder based around the drug scene in Leeds.

What follows is one of the best introductions to a new series I’ve read in a very long time.

A seemingly random shooting of a woman, her child taken in his pram, is Carters introduction to her new job.

But is it as random as it seems. Carter is the epitome of a “Dog with a Bone” and in her brash manner manages to annoy both her bosses, her peers, and the local villains.

In the real world she would undoubtedly be sacked, but in the none woke world of crime fiction, she is a breath of fresh air.

A bit like real world policing there are times in this book when a wry grin cannot be avoided. It’s the only way to deal with the horrors the detectives, and the readers, encounter, and in this book there is one very imaginative, and gory, way of killing.

I really hope this series is a long runner, because there is some entertaining mileage in Regan Carter.

Publisher: The Ink Foundry. Pages: 415. Available now

Her Last Walk Home. Patricia Gibney

Every time I read a book in this series I know it’s going to be frighteningly realistic. The crimes, the characters, the lot, all add up to stories that have me hooked, and this one is no exception.

Walking home at night you should be safe, but everyone knows it’s increasingly risky. So when one young woman doesn’t complete the journey and is found dead, on a bit of grass, a murder investigation is got underway.

As a mother, with children about the same age, Detective Lottie Parker is always going to give the investigation her all, she always does.

The team soon identify the girl and find that she had been on an innocent date the night she disappeared.

Or at least on the face of it she had.

When another girl is found dead in similar circumstances the victims begin to look a little less “innocent”

Two things you are Guaranteed with Patricia Gibney books. Firstly they are written from the heart. Every emotion, of every character is carefully crafted and plays out wonderfully on the pages. Secondly the plot is always original, surprising, and most importantly realistic.

I can’t write too much about the plot, the victims, and the person, or persons responsible for the crimes without including huge spoilers.

In a vague way I will say that the young women that are killed are just being young women, and that nobody deserves to be murdered.

But in modern society what is innocent.

It’s a question this book ponders. When does moralistically wrong become illegally wrong.

When does a person cross the line from having fun, to needing the fruits of having fun.

At what point does the empathy of the reader, or the bystander, become negatively judgmental, a luxury a Police Investigator cannot afford to let cloud their investigation.

All of these things Patricia Gibney handles better than most writers.

Lottie Parker has had it rough, her family have put her through the wringer, but no matter what she is still a supportive mother, grandmother, and daughter, faced with all the trials and tribulations of being the “responsible adult” to all of the generations.

The Parker family story is central to these books and although this, and the others, could be read as a standalone, I would highly recommend reading the series to get the full impact.

Print length: 500 pages. Publisher: Bookouture. Audiobook length: 13 hours. Narrator: Michele Moran

Body Language, Life Sentence, Case Sensitive and Dead Fall by A.K Turner

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a new series this much.

One of the best things about reading is finding a new author with an established series, and binge reading it.

That’s exactly what happened to me with this series. I picked up Body Language just over a week ago and have just put down Dead Fall having read all four books.

There are two main characters in these books Cassie Raven and Phyllida Flyte, and they couldn’t be more at opposite ends of the social scale.

Cassie is a runaway school drop out who once lived, and took class A drugs, in squats around Camden Town, whilst embracing the Goth life style. Now she’s still a Goth, but she’s got herself together, and in her mid twenties she’s working as a Senior Morgue Technician, still in Camden Town.

Phyllida is a very prim-and-proper, Police Detective, who is suffering the culture shock of moving from a relatively safe shire constabulary to a high pressure, machismo fuelled , Major Crimes department in Londons Met.

Cassie doesn’t look the part, with her Goth haircut, tattoos and piercings but she’s good at her job.

She thinks the dead sometimes talk to her, but what is actually happening is her intuition is kicking in. She’s seen something on the body that isn’t right, or contradicts the initial findings, or the Police’s hypothesis of how a person has died.

She knows that instinct has highlighted something, and she is like a dog with a bone until she’s worked out what it is.

Meanwhile Phyllida battles the male dominated rough talking London Officers, she is not just there to make their tea, and although often given the menial tasks, her detective work soon gets to be seen for what it is, brilliant.

When Phyllida first encounters Cassie it’s fair to say she doesn’t like her, and it’s also fair to say the feeling is mutual. These two are everything the other doesn’t like in a person.

But inevitably the trust starts to build, they both recognise each others strengths and intuitions on a professional basis, but find each other immensely irritating on a personal level.

The series follows both of their personal lives, and as both of them have great back stories, and become reluctant friends , it makes great reading.

Each book contains one main crime, starting with a sudden or suspicious death. As in real life the investigation can be complex and convoluted, but it always stays well within the realms of possibilities.

Body Language.

When somebody Cassie knows ends up in her morgue she’s not happy with the initial findings. The Police say Accidental Death, a hypothesis the pathologist is, at first happy to support.

But Cassie’s intuition says different and she goes to great lengths to prove the death was anything but an accident.

The one person who listens to her is the “stuck-up, posh” new Police woman.

Life Sentence

Having learned something about her family, that she was blissfully unaware of ( It’s difficult to go deeper without spoiling book 1) Cassie tries to make right a wrong which has affected her family for as long as she can remember. Her unlikely ally, as this will also bring the police into disrepute is Phyllida, can Miss Strait-Laced be convinced to break the rules with the reputation of her colleagues on the line.

Case Sensitive

This time it’s Phyllida’s turn to trust her instincts. When a body turns up floating in a canal she is sure she recognises him. It’s her that doesn’t like the initial Post Mortem, and asks Cassie if her intuition had kicked in.

This time what they uncover will test both of their resolves, physically and moralistically, but will both of them come out unscathed.

Dead Fall

When a promising young singer ends up on Cassie’s slab everybody thinks it’s a tragic suicide.

Cassie knew her before she became famous and had gone to school with her.

Reflecting the life and death of one of Camdens other tragic pop stars this girl had a roller coaster life of drugs and fame, even if it was very short lived.

Cassie spots wounds on the body that she doesn’t think are consistent with her jumping from her high rise flat.

Things have moved on in Phyllida’s world ( again I can’t go into that without spoiling book 3) but when Cassie is proven right, and that this is not a suicide, Phyllida is tasked to look at how the initial police investigation got things so wrong

The series needs reading in order. The running story forms the backbone of the series and Cassie and Phyllida’s needs reading in chronological order.

Having read 4 books in 10 days I now have to join the rest of the world in waiting for book 5. And to say I’m excited to see where the series goes next is an understatement.

Stunning.

My Daughter’s Revenge

Natali Simmonds

Two women, well one woman and a youth.

One mother and her daughter, at opposite ends of sexual activity scale.

The mother, Jules, in her forties, she wants to be sexually active but her husband has shown no interest in sex for a while.

The daughter, Leah, sixteen, desperate to experience sex.

Leah lies to her parents and hooks up with a young man at a music festival.

Jules resorts to an anonymous app which allows her to talk to men nearby.

At first Jules is getting cheap thrills from the site. Having uploaded a boudoir type photo of her from behind she soon starts to attract the attention.

The thrill soon changes to loathing as the majority of the responders to her post are just perverts or downright rude.

But there is one person that doesn’t seem that bad. Could she……should she???

Meanwhile Leah is on her own track to a calamity. She lied about her age when she hooked up with the cannabis smoking festival goer, and that soon comes back to bite her.

With mother and daughter both on a collision course to emotional disasters is there any way to redeem themselves.

This is a twisting plot which at times seems to telegraph what is about to happen.

But just like real life, when bad decisions are made, things become anything but predictable.

I enjoyed the plot.

I enjoyed the characters.

At times I’ve criticised books for being too graphic, or using gratuitous sex or violence, this is definitely not the case in this book.

The scenes are well written, and where the sixteen year old is concerned it’s very empathetic.

This book treads a sensitive line but never oversteps the mark.

A good read.

Pages: 368. Publisher: Bookouture. Publishing date: 14th August 2024