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Dead Memories. Angela Marsons Pre-Review

Its not often I’m lost for words, but I’ve run out of superlatives to describe this series. Ten books ago Angela Marsons introduced us to a series of characters based in the Black Country.

The main character is DI Kim Stone. A DI in the Major Investigation Team in Halesowen Police Station in the West Midlands.

Halesowen is a small town on the outskirts of the urban sprawl that makes up the Metropolitan Borough of the West Midlands. Its right on the border of what most people would call the area of greater Birmingham, and the sprawling countryside of Worcester.

It’s actually in the borough of Dudley, one of the seven boroughs that make up the West Midlands, but more importantly it’s part of the Black Country.

That is what makes it such a special place to set crime stories.

Dudley has some of the most affluent parts of the West Midlands, close to the country, and some of the poorest parts where it borders Sandwell. It has rich gated communities, run down industrial areas, and some of the poorest social housing estates in the UK. Its population commute into Birmingham City Centre to sit in smart offices and high end retail shops, or work in the manufacturing, scrap meatl, or haulage business.

The black Country has a hard working history, and this ethic is seen daily in its population; but just like everywhere else there are the freeloaders who never intend to do a day’s work as long as the state will give them benefits.

Then there are the people who pray on both ends of the community. Drug sellers target the rich with designer drugs and well cut class A drugs, and at the same time pray on the vulnerable with less well, and dangerously cut, class A drugs and marijuana.

Addicts are addicts and once hooked will look to fund their next hit. The desperate will turn to crime.

Prostitution has been forced indoors over the last decade with sex being sold in private flats or thinly veiled massage parlours. This has led to illegal immigrants being forced into the sex trade alongside some desperate local people.

Illegal immigrants are also being used as slaves in retail and manufacturing.

Street kids are turning to violence.

Post code gangs are frequently a problem, fighting for territory to sell their wares, both human and chemical.

But most of its population are just your average family members trying to get along with their neighbours.

So, as you can see, Angela Marsons has chosen a great area to set her crimes. Just about anything that could make up a serious crime happens in the area, and so can be portrayed realistically in her books.

The characters she writes about are just as real as her crimes.

Kim Stone is epic. A kid-from-care made good.

In the first few books her character is established as one of the best cops in British Crime Fiction, her back story is slowly revealed showing how her life has evolved and how she has become the successful detective she has.

Her team also have good back stories. The ever reliant Bryant, her Detective Sergeant is every bit as fundamental to these stories as Lewis is to Morse, or Watson is to Holmes. He acts as her stabiliser and suffers the frustration of seeing Stone struggling through some investigations, but more significantly her personal life.

DC Stacy Wood, the quiet detective that is really good at information trawling and working on a computer, but not so good on face to face encounters. Watching her develop through the series, as she finds her confidence, and becomes a tour-de-force of a cop, is something that would not ever be achieved this well in a single book, or short series.

DC Kev Dawson, young, handsome, cock-sure, but an integral part of the team. His character changes as much as Woods, but in a totally different way.

Then there’s the fringe characters that keep recurring, Keats the pathologist with his love hate relationship with Stone. The Forensic Teams, and Senior Police Officers

Then there’s reporters. One in particular, that has a strange relationship with Stone, to say they use each other when they want something is an understatement. But they both know they need each other and their fraught working relationship is entertaining throughout the series.

Of course, there’s the criminals. A vast array of them over the ten books, all realistically written, all with back stories to help the reader engage with them. Some of them recurring through several stories; and for every criminal there’s a victim who is equally well portrayed, often eliciting as much empathy as sympathy from the reader.

That brings us back to this book. DEAD MEMORIES finds Stone and the team looking at some of their past investigations as a murderer appears to be using Stone’s history to set their crimes. Is it a message to her, or is it the prelude to an attack on her. Is somebody trying to ruin her reputation, her life, or kill her.

I love this series, and as I said at the beginning of this blog I’ve run out of superlatives to describe the books in this series.

Safe to say Silent Scream, book one in the series, was one of the best books I’ve ever read, and each book has just got better and better.

My review of DEADLY MEMORIES will be on-line in February as part of the Blog Tour, but if you haven’t found Angela Marsons yet get yourself on Amazon, or down to the bookshop, and treat yourself to what I think is the best crime series out there.

The Quiet Hours. Michael Scanlon

Introducing a new Police Investigator, Detective Sergeant Finnegan Beck.

Newly demoted and moved from the busiest Police Station in Dublin, Beck finds himself in the small town of Cross Greg.

He is not quite what you would expect, although he’s had a bad time professionally, he still cares, even if he pretends not to.

So, when he turns up at his first crime scene, in his new town, to find a murdered woman lying out in the open with the SIO, Inspector O’Reilly, paying scant attention to procedures it rattles his cage a bit.

That is the first encounter with the old dinosaur of a detective that is O’Reilly, and things don’t get much better as the story unfolds.

He finds an ally in young Garda Claire Sanders who acts as his partner in the investigation and also covers for him when he has an occasional fall off the wagon. He’s not an alcoholic, he’s just not very good at saying no and has a low tolerance for booze.

The murdered girl is an opening into a sordid story of an underage relationship. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The small town has a criminal underworld. After all people in towns and villages have the same needs, and urges, as those in the city.

The thing is, just like every small town, everybody knows everybody else’s business.

As Beck starts to untangle the web of lies around the investigation he thinks he starts to identify a motive for the crime and is getting closer to the person who killed the girl.

His new colleagues don’t agree with him, and treat him as the Big City Idiot, but slowly they begin to see the merit in his thoughts.

It takes another death before people start to take him seriously but is it too late to stop another killing.

As the story continues we find out why Beck has been demoted and moved away from Dublin. We see him start to build a reputation in Cross Greg, but will he ever be fully accepted.

This is a great story that’s billed as being book one in the Finnegan Beck series.

Will I be reading book 2. Yes definitely.

Pages: 327

Publishers: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 8^thFebruary 2019

Her Pretty Bones Carla Kovach

Her Pretty Bones Carla Kovach

If Carlsberg made Cops.

DI Gina Harte is back. She is probably the most troubled female Police Inspector on the shelves right now, and at the same time she is probably one of the best fictional cops on the shelves at the moment.

When a young girl falls from the back of a van it quickly becomes apparent that she has been held against her will, she is undernourished and drug dependent, but who is she.

Harte’s teams first task is to identify the girl, then find out what has happened to her.

But this won’t be the last young girl found. Nor will it be the last one the team have difficulty identifying.

At the same time a mother is looking for her runaway daughter, could either of the two unidentified girls be her daughter, or could their story hold the key to finding her.

This book looks into the homeless runaways we see sleeping rough on our streets.

Not all of them come from unloving homes and many of them have families who are frantically looking for them, scared of every knock on the door in case its bad news.

Hartes team run their investigation without knowing about the desperate mom, are both looking into the same thing.

People on the streets tell their story to the mother, where they won’t talk to the Police. As a reader frustration builds when the two sides aren’t communicating. When the mother is left to walk the streets talking to people in the hope that she will uncover some clue to her daughters whereabouts.

The things she hears are hardly comforting, drugs, prostitution, shop lifting, abuse, assaults are day to day experiences for some of the rough sleepers.

This book made me stop and think more than many others have over the years.

Carla Kovach has written a wonderful story. Gina Harte is one of my favourite characters, but for me the star of this book is that Mom who is looking for her daughter.

I cannot begin to imagine what a parent would go through when a child goes missing. And yes I know what goes on, on the streets, but somehow it was all brought home in this book. The horrors of sleeping rough, making allegiances with people that can only bring danger, but in a weird way offer security.

This is a subject that I have read about in other books, but this is by far the best.

Pages: Kindle 2265KB

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 17^thJanuary 2019

The Last Lullaby. Carol Wyer

The second book to feature DI Natalie Wood, a middle-aged woman trying desperately to be a good wife, and mother, at the same time as leading a Major Investigation Team.

When the body of a woman is found brutally murdered in her bedroom suspicion is immediately placed on the husband.

The more the team look into him the more lies and untruths are uncovered but are they anything to do with the murder.

The victim was an entitled woman that thrived on playing people off against each other. The husband is an ex-con who has set up a gym in an underprivileged estate.

The investigation is set spinning in circles by the stories told by locals, and by the mixed messages they are receiving about the victim.

With the investigation going down one cul-de-sac after anther the team are getting nowhere. Then another woman is found dead in very similar circumstances and it becomes clear that it’s the same killer.

The investigation is still going nowhere quick until………you’ll have to read the book to find out.

This is a great story. The frustrations of the police are laid bare as they are sent on one false lead after another by people trying to protect their own back, or simply deciding they don’t want to help the Police.

The main character, Natalie, and her team are flat out. Carol Wyer writes about the affect their career has on their relationships better than any other writer at the moment.

She looks at the almost selfish attitude they have towards keeping the investigation going, usually at the cost of their nearest and dearest.

And the transient characters are equally as good

The first murder victim Charlotte is a woman that wants everything everybody else has, then once she’s got it, she gets bored and gets rid of it. The book could easily have been called Marmite Girl, because people in the book either love her or hate her.

Her Husband is a thug that makes it easy for the reader to want him to be guilty. The people he hangs out with are all rouges that think themselves above the law.

It’s not often that a Police Procedural is based around one murder, and although this one isn’t either, it very nearly is. And its brilliant. It allows the characters to be explored fully and develop. I have a feeling that some of them may make appearances in future books.

A great read and I can’t wait for book 3

Pages: 333

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing date: 7^thDecember 2018.

The Liars Wife. Samantha Hayes

Samantha Hayes has a way of writing that gets the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, and has me turning the lights on at the first hint of darkness.

Imagine being in a desperately abusive relationship and finally having the courage to escape. That is what happened to Ella, and now she is building a new life.

Having dodged the dreaded works night out she is on her way home when she’s involved in a hit and run that leaves her in an induced coma in hospital.

When she wakes up she’s told how lucky she is to have such a wonderful husband as the man that’s been by her side since just after she arrived in hospital. The only thing is she has no recollection of being married, until she sees him. Her ex has the hospital staff wrapped around his little finger and is going to take Ella home and look after her.

If she tries to escape, or raise the alarm, he has a video of something from her past which he will give to the Police. She’s trapped.

All that in the first few chapters, and what follows is a fast paced psychological thriller of the finest order.

Ella needs to get away, her ex isn’t going to let her and if she does he’s going to ruin her. There’s one ray of hope. Liam, a person she has been working with in her new life, is missing her. But if he pokes around too much is he going to put himself and Ella in danger.

The story of what is happening now, is interspersed with events that lead up to what is captured on the video that Ella is being threatened with. Both make compelling stories on their own but woven together they are chillingly good.

Pages: 372

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 22^ndNovember 2018.

Her Final Confession. Lisa Regan

This is book 4 in the Detective Josie Quinn series, my favourite American crime series of the moment.

Quinn is career Detective working in the Denton Police Department. Denton is a small City with a small Police Force, but enough crime to keep everybody busy.

Quinn picks up the worst of the cases, with good reason, she solves them.

But this case is going to tax her and her team to the limits.

One of the other detectives on her team is missing, and a young man has been found dead at her home, shot in the back.

As much as everybody wants to think Gretchen is innocent, and that there is a good explanation, nobody except Quinn is really convinced she is not responsible for the young man’s death.

When Quinn begins to look into the case she realises just how little she knows about Gretchen, even though she hired her, and she had become one of her closest confidants.

The investigation leads Quinn to New York where she finds out more about Gretchen than she imagined. The woman had lived a nightmare for years and nobody knew.

The investigation takes in historical murders, under-cover cops and outlaw biker gangs.

The threads of this web weave one hell of a story that gradually leads to an outcome that I never saw coming.

Lisa Regan writes great stories. I love the character Josie Quinn. She is tough but vulnerable. Her back story is laid out in the first 3 books in the series and I can’t recommend reading them highly enough.

It’s no secret that I love crime series books that have underlying stories for the characters. This is one of the best, and as usual when I finished it, I wanted to read what Quinn is up to next.

Pages: Ebook 2145KB

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 28^thNovember 2018

The Songbird Richard Parker

DI Tom Fabin returns for the second instalment of this Police Procedural series.

Never Say Goodbye promised a lot from this series, The Songbird doesn’t disappoint, in fact, it raised the bar.

With his nemesis, the mass murder Christopher Wisher, in prison things are looking good for Fabin on the work front.

On a personal level he is separated from his wife and his daughter Tilly has just started University.

Things are running along quite smoothly until his boss sends him to visit Wisher in prison. Wisher hands him his journal and asks him to read it.

When Fabin starts to read the journal, he realises it starts on the day that Wisher was sent to prison.

The cryptic entries in the journal mean nothing at first. Then the murders start, all with the same MO and signature that Wisher employed. These details were never released so who is copying Wisher.

As the murders continue it becomes apparent that they are reflecting the entries in the journal.

The crimes start to add up and Fabin tries to make sense of the journal entries. Whoever is carrying out the crimes is escalating, and the end game is getting closer.

This is a brilliant book. Richard Parker has moved away from the stereotypical cop character. Yes, Fabins family life isn’t great, but there are a lot of broken marriages out there. He has created a cop that cooks as a form of stress relief, he’s not a big drinker, or a womaniser. In fact, he’s pretty normal, not boring, just normal

But that’s where normal ends.

The Songbird follows on from the first in the series, Never Say Goodbye, and I really would recommend you read that one first.

When I reviewed Never Say Goodbye, I said the last hundred words made the hairs on my arm stand up. Well he’s done it again and ended on another cliff hanger that has me impatiently waiting for the next instalment.

Bring it on Richard.

Pages: 264

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 19^thDecember 2018. JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

A link to my review of Never Say Goodbye

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2018/08/19/never-say-goodbye-richard-parker/

The Silent Dead. Graham Smith

Every now and again something stunning comes along, and now is that time.

In The Silent Dead I found a gem of a book.

Not only is the story original, and compelling, but the main character is one of the best fictional Police Detectives I’ve had the pleasure to be introduced to.

I’ll start with the detective. Detective Constable Beth Young is only 23 years old, but she’s already lived a full life. She had been a model, her boyfriend dumped her when she became a cop at the earliest age she could. He wanted a model girlfriend on his arm, not a Police Officer.

Her stunning good looks have been robbed from her by an errant broken bottle in a pub during a night out, and she now carries vicious scars on one side of her face. Does it hold her back? No. In fact she uses the way people react to the scars to help her gauge the type of person they are.

She is a puzzle solver, and has complicated puzzle books on her shelves next to the books on her other interest, serial killers.

She has a strange way of thinking, and uses logic to help her think outside the box. She emphasises with victims, and she understands perpetrators.

Her only problem is she has no filters, her scars redden when she’s angry, and at times there is no filter between her brain and her mouth.

I like this girl a lot.

Beth has just started in Cumbria’s Force Major Investigation Team. A small close knit team she is having trouble integrating into. The first case she works on is grim.

A bride spots a corpse in the grounds of the ruined mansion in which she is having her wedding.

The corpse has been posed and has suffered a horrific death. The investigation leads to the discovery of more bodies posed in the same manner. But the killer is not only escalating they are experimenting, until they have created their perfect murder.

Beth quickly has to find her feet in the investigation and uses her logic to start to piece together information from the different murder scenes. But as the young new detective, will the old hands take her seriously.

This is book has shot right into my top three of this year, and would be pretty close to one of my favourite books of the last 5 or 6 years.

I love the character Beth Young, and hopefully there is a lot of scope for Graham Smith to create a long series with her.

The manner of killing in this book is well written and without being overly graphic, is very gruesome. In fact it will live with me for a while.

A great book, just stunning.

Pages: 362

Publisher: Bookouture

Publishing Date: 30^thNovember 2018.

Fatal Promise Angela Marsons

If I wasn’t already a massive fan of this series I would have been hooked in the first few pages.

DI Kim Stone is back at work, freshly out of the plaster that protected the leg she broke in the previous book. Her leg may be healing but her emotions, and that of her tight knit team, are still in tatters.

When a body is found in a park, not 2 miles from Kim’s Police she is stunned to find that it is that of a man that was so closely linked to her last investigation.

As more bodies pile there seems to be a link to Russell’s Hall Hospital, but what has this hospital and Heathcrest School got in common?

Is it just a coincidence that the team are investigating a crime that is linked to the place where none of them really want to be, back where one of their friends, a colleague died so recently.

The story looks at the secrets kept by groups and families, and how loyalties can forged on the most ridiculous of assumptions or beliefs.

It looks at how feelings can fester and cause hidden harm.

But as good as the plot of the crimes and the investigations of them are, this book is about much more.

This book is a rollercoaster of a ride through the investigation of some startlingly believable crimes, which is being carried out by a team that is struggling with the loss of a close friend.

If you have read the other books in this series, you will know the cast of characters well. You will understand what they are going through, and you will empathise that they each do it in their own particular ways. Just like in real life this team is trying to pull together in a time of grief, whilst almost self-destructing in their self-imposed isolation.

Then there was always going to be the question of how Angela Marsons would replace one of her main characters that has been an integral part of the previous 8 books.

Well she found a very interesting character that had appeared a couple of times in the previous stories and dropped him into the team.

It was never going to be easy for the team to accept him and the awkwardness in the office is captured beautifully.

Will the team ever accept a replacement, is this the right guy.

Will his eccentricity help him, or hinder his integration?

When book 8 was published social media was full of reviews saying they were in tears at the end, I might have had a bit of dust in my eyes myself.

For me the end of this book is even more emotional. A conversation between 2 of the main characters wrung so many bells for me it left me with a handful of dust in my eyes.

Every time a new book in this series becomes available I review it and say that it’s the best one yet.

Well its happened again, this is the best one yet.

If you are new to the series this book could be read as a stand-alone, but I would suggest reading the previous book , The Dying Truth, first.

In fact if you are new to the series I would suggest reading them all in order. I can’t think of a better way of recommending 8 fantastic Crime Thriller books.

Pages: 409

Published by: Bookouture

Available now on Amazon

Tell Nobody, Patricia Gibney, Blog Tour

Tell Nobody- Blog Tour

Today it’s my turn on the blog tour celebrating the publication of Patricia Gibney’s TELL NOBODY. Book 5 in the DI Lottie Parker series.

I’ve been a big fan of this series since the first book was published.

Patricia Gibney spins some serious multi-layered crime thrillers, with a remarkable set of characters living out some very realistic crimes.

Each book has had me hooked from the first pages and this one is no exception.

I recently recommended the series to a friend who was looking for some books to read on holiday. When they got home his wife gave me a hard time because he’d had his head buried in his Kindle for most of the holiday. He like me was hooked.

The fact that he’s a Policeman can only be a testament to just how good the stories are, and just how realistic the crimes and characters are.

Here’s my original blog, written a few weeks ago.

TELL NOBODY Patricia Gibney

Patricia Gibney has a way of hooking me from the very start of each book.

This one starts with an unknown woman running away from something or someone. She is in terrible pain and blacks out.

The story cuts to a boys football match, a final, everybody should be happy, but not everybody has a caring and loving family to support them.

Mikey Driscoll had scored the winning goal in the Cup Final, as he is on his way home he is picked up and given a lift. Two days later his body is found.

What comes next is a story that follows DI Lottie Parker and her team as they investigate Mikey’s murder. Then more bodies start to be found, and the pressure is on to find the killer.

But that is far too simplistic a description of the book.

This book doesn’t just look at the murders. Patricia Gibney looks at family dynamics, and how not everything in the family is how it seems to somebody looking in from the outside.

Latch key kids, bingo moms, single men and women bringing up families, teenage angst, unlikely friendships, all play a big part in the story.

And it’s not just the victims and criminals that are having a hard time.

Lottie, her son, two daughters and grandchild, are all living with her Mom, and its driving her crazy.

Her home had been destroyed in a fire and she is renovating her new house. But even that comes at a cost, to her and somebody close to her.

At work, her boss has it in for her, and would like nothing more than to see her fail.

The chemistry between Lottie and her DS is still bubbling along, but she is terrified to take comfort in his arms.

This series of books is great. The attention to detail that Patricia Gibney gives to the stories make them amongst the most realistic books I’ve read.

As well as the crimes in the books there is the ongoing story of Lottie, her family, and her team, and for me, that’s where she has the edge over most Crime Writers these days.

I love these books, and look forward to each new one that’s published.

This is the 5^thin the DI Lottie Parker series set in the mid-Ireland City of Ragmullin.

Although it can be read as a stand-alone novel to get the best out of it I would recommend reading the series in order. Follow Lottie her family and her team as Patricia develops and grows the characters and their relationships.

Believe me it’s worth it.