Category: books

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

Mercy Killing. Lisa Cutts

A good story but it comes with a warning.

The story centres around victims of child abuse, and although there is no gratuitous scenes, it is alluded to strongly, and may act as triggers to anybody who has been affected by these crimes

DI Harry Powell is newly promoted, in an unhappy marriage, and is the father to two teenage sons.

He has a wondering eye, when it comes to attractive women, but is to afraid of his wife’s r eaction to anything other than looking.

In short, he’s a wonderful character for a series.

In his first major investigation as DI he, and his team, investigate the murder of a man who has been convicted of child abuse.

The man is found in his flat, hands secured with cable ties, and strangled with another.

From the start of the book the reader is led down the line of knowing who the killers are, but as the book moves on it becomes less obvious and there appears to be a handful of people who are in the frame.

As the last few chapters draw the story to a conclusion these suspects spiral around until the murderer is finally identified.

Throughout the book Lisa Cutts does a brilliant job of looking at the long term psychological damage suffered by people who are abused as children.

What she also does really well is examine the effect it has on Police Officers. The difficulty in investigating the murder of a monster who has abused children. The fact that most people, cops included, would probably think he got what he had coming to him. But they still have to identify and arrest the people responsible, ensuring fairness in justice.

Part of the book also looks at the tragic consequences of making accusations of abuse, another trigger warning.

As much as I’ve made this sound like a tough read it’s actually not. It’s a good Police Procedural, but it’s also thought provoking.

Pages: 365. Publisher: Bloodhound . Series number 1/3 so far Audiobook. 11 hours 2 minutes. Narrator Iain Batchelor.

36 Hours. Angela Marsons

Wow. In fact several wows

Wow 1 How is this book 21 of the series. I know time flies but it only seems like yesterday I was enthralled by Silent Scream.

Wow 2 The fact that the series just goes from strength to strength

Wow 3. What a brilliant story.

Kim Stone and her team are back, but at first not officially.

When Stones not so favourite journalist turns up on her doorstep with a half baked story Kim should not be giving it any credence, but there is something about the message that Frost brings her that impacts and makes her take it seriously enough to text her team, on their day off.

So what exactly is it that grips Stone. Frost has been given a deadline. If she doesn’t follow the clues she’s going to be sent, and solve the puzzle within 36 hours, somebody is going to die.

Not everybody, including Stone’s boss take it seriously and the team are given the opportunity to bail out, or help Kim with the investigation on a voluntary basis.

To make matters more complex Stone includes Frost in the team and gives her a seat in the office.

Even those that decide to stay find this a step to far and the tension in the office is palpable.

The first clue leads them to a box, amongst the contents is an audio file in which a person can be heard screaming.

As each clue is discovered the contents get more horrifying.

I’m running out of superlatives to describe Angela Marsons books. Amongst all of the things she’s always good at, characters, plot, settings, this one added a rhythm to story that only the really best authors seem to get right.

Any author can add pace but this story pulses. The anxiety of a new clue and the rush to find it, the lull and anticipation when the team, back in the office, are waiting to hear what Kim and Bryant have found whilst out in the field.

As a Black Country lad I always look forward to seeing where the plot will be set, in this case they race across many locations that are absolutely perfect for hiding clues.

Pace, suspense and a terrific story meant that I read this book in as close to one sitting as it is possible whilst carrying on with a normal life.

Can it be read as a standalone, yes.

Should you read the rest of the series in order, I would, but then again I’m lucky enough to have been in from the start.

Pages. 362. Publisher. Bookouture. Audiobook length. 8 hours 3 minutes. Narrator Jan Cramer

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

Zero Risk. Simon Hayes

This is the book I’ve been waiting for, for years.

Back in the 1970’s, as a young sailor, I discovered Robert Ludlum via the Matarese Circle. I loved his books and found others like him, Nelson Demille being another favourite reads in the down times on board deep sea tankers.

Moving into the 1980’s I devoured each of Tom Clancy’s books, well the early ones anyway.

I loved espionage thrillers.

But there has been a very thin offering of new authors worthy of these, until now.

Zero Risk by Simon Hayes has filled the void.

The book isn’t about espionage in the more traditional sense, it’s about a person who tries to bring down one of Britains biggest banks, and in so doing the Prime Minister.

It has a touch of the Dan Brown, with the antagonist sending cryptic emails with art references in them, but although they add to the story, if you don’t get them, they are quickly explained.

The plot, as written on the Amazon page.

23 December 2024… Rob Tanner should have been enjoying a rare day off from his life-consuming work as Chief Operating Officer at one of the country’s largest banks. But a panicked phone call from a senior colleague forces him to put his Christmas plans on ice: more than a thousand of the bank’s accounts have seen their balances increased by a factor of ten. Exactly ten.

Tanner enlists the help of brilliant American cyber security expert Ashley Markham, but the attacks only worsen: bank balances rise remorselessly and spread to all the nation’s banks. The only clues to the hacker’s intentions are cryptic daily emails, centred on Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval representation of the seven deadly sins—and packed with colourful artistic and cultural references—taunting Tanner and the newly incumbent Prime Minister, James Allen.

With financial markets—and the very world as he knows it—on the brink of collapse, Tanner races against the clock to decode not just the bizarre emails but their deeper meaning, and the implications for who he can really trust. All the while, his former boss “The Toad” is seeking revenge… and answers of his own.

That only really covers the first couple of hundred pages of a book that stretches to nearly eight hundred pages.

There were times in the book I thought I had things cracked, but then something would happen that would throw me entirely in a different direction.

There were times when I thought, “this has to be almost the end, how come there are so many more pages to read”, but a twist would open up another chapter.

Simon Hayes uses the fact that this is a standalone novel to its best advantage.

Nothing, and nobody is sacred. Anything can happen to anybody.

Having said that there are is no shark infested custard. There are no improbable situations. Everything is scarily plausible, and realistic.

An absolutely stunning read.

Pages: 780. Published: The Rubriqs Press Limited. Audiobook length: 25 hours 8 minutes. Narrator Stephanie Racine

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

Áróra Investigation Series

Lilja Sigurdardóttir

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the first three books in this series, back-back.

Set in Iceland with a main protagonist who is half British, half Icelandic, the story in each book is brilliant, as is the running story which continues in the background of the second two, having being the main story in the first.

Áróra is a financial private investigator who specialises in identifying where people hide money, whether it’s for a messy divorce, or a corporate crime. Her favourite outcome to each case is to take her commission in cash and roll around in it, on her bed.

Cold as Hell

When her sister goes missing in Iceland her mother insists she goes to find her. Explaining to her mother that she is not that type of investigator hold no grounds with her mom, so she catches a FI light to meet a “relative” who is a Police Officer who has volunteered to help.

The Officer, Daniel, is only a distant relative, and that is by a marriage that has long ended in divorce, but they click, and start the hunt for her sister.

They start with the boyfriend. is an abusive bully who has beaten Ísafold on multiple occasions, but she keeps returning. Suspected of not only taking, but also dealing drugs Björn is the obvious suspect, but proving it is going to be difficult.

They are not the only one that has concerns about Björn and his treatment of Ísafold. And he is out for revenge, but does this help or hinder Áróra and Daniel’s investigation

It’s no spoiler to say that Ísafold is never found, and it’s Áróra’s hunt for her that continues through the other two books.

Red as Blood

Áróra is still on the island looking for her sister when an accountant she works for contacts her to tell her he needs help with a client in Iceland.

Entrepreneur Flosi has returned home to find his wife had been kidnapped. Told not to inform the police, but to arrange for a 2 million euro ransom to be paid in cash he has contacted his accountant in England.

The accountant wants Áróra to act as liaison and to fly to the U.K. to courier the cash.

Inevitably the police do get involved and it’s Daniel’s team lead the investigation.

Áróra however finds links to Russian mafia in Flosi’s businesses, he’s not the innocent entrepreneur, and the kidnapping isn’t all that it seems.

White as Snow

The story centres on people smuggling. When a container is found abandoned in Iceland with four dead bodies inside an investigation is launched.

There is one survivor, a Nigerian woman that had been living in France. At first she doesn’t know how she ended up in the container but the book contains her backstory in some of the chapters. As this unfolds so does the investigation in Icleland.

Again the Russian Mafia seems to be at the heart of everything.

Daniel has stepped back from leading the investigation, finding it harrowing, having found the survivor, but continues in a support role.

Áróra starts to follow the money, putting herself in more danger than she appreciates.

I read these books because I read a review of the 4th book which is due out later this year. I’m glad I did but now I find myself having to wait months for the next episode in what I’ve found to be an enthralling series.

Publisher: Orenda Books. Print lengths: 309, 315 and 319 pages.

Guilty Mothers. Angela Marsons

The series that just keeps on giving. I have led a far from sheltered life, but Angela Marsons has found a topic to base this story on that I was blissfully unaware of, and it’s stunning.

Kim Stone and her team are called to the scene of a murder. One of the worst types of crime, a young woman has apparently murdered her mother.

With the daughter locked up the team start to dig into their family relationships.

The only thing of note is that the daughter was a Child Beauty Pageant contestant and that mom might have been a bit pushy.

When another mother of a Beauty Pageant Contestant turns up dead it can’t be a coincidence, and as Stone thought she had the killer already locked up it comes as a bit of a surprise.

And so the journey into the world of Beauty Pageant begins.

The world inhabited by the contestants, and their families, comes as a big surprise to the down-to-earth Stone. The comparison of her early life can’t be ignored.

This is book twenty in the series, that’s one hell of a milestone.

You would think that this far into a series the author would be struggling to keep the reader hooked. This book proves just how wrong that would be.

The story is compelling, who knew that Pageants were a thing in the UK.

The fact that they do, and that there are bitchy, bullying, mothers living their life vicariously through their, sometimes unwilling, and often unhappy children, makes a fantastic backdrop to a murder story.

Stone and her team are always engaging and their back stories always have me hooked.

I love these books. The series is still my favourite. Book 20. Let’s hope for books 25, 30 and who knows how many more.

Pages: 362. Publisher: Bookouture. Audiobook: 8 hours 21 minutes. Narrator: Jan Cramer