Book Blog – Page 5 – nigeladamsbookworm

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

The Crash Robert Peston

A great story well written.

Gill Peck is the BBC Financial corespondent that everybody sees on the news talking about stock markets, banking trends, and interest rates.

What he isn’t is a criminalist, or crime reporter.

When he is given a tip off that one of Britain’s leading banks is about to go broke, he breaks the news, and gets the blame for braking the bank.

A long time friend, and lover, working for the Bank of England commits suicide when the news breaks.

What Peck hadn’t accounted for was the things happening in the background.

Why was this bank targeted, and by who, because it soon becomes obvious that this is not the only one in trouble. This just happened to be the one somebody wanted to drastically devalue.

Peck is soon embroiled in an investigation into what happened to the bank, and more importantly to him, why his lover died.

This is a book that I’ll admit I nearly put down on several occasions.

It can be a bit rambling in places, and I got the impression the author was just using it as a vehicle to let the reader know about some of the privileged places he’d visited in the course of his work.

But the more I read the more engrossed I got in the story.

Peck himself is not the most engaging, or likeable character, but neither is he gross, or boring.

It’s the story that hooked me. There are things in this book I knew nothing about, or had a very basic knowledge of. The usual trip to Google led me down the usual rabbit holes, and like with all good books I learned things.

The more I learned the more feasible the story became.

The more feasible it became the more thrilling it got.

In fact, by the time I did finish it, I’d place it amongst the best modern, political thrillers I’ve read.

Publisher: Zaffre. Pages: 395. Audiobook length: 12 hours 19 minutes. Narrator: Matt Addis

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

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

Southern Man. Greg Iles

The one word I would use for this book is “Epic”

Epic in size, at just short of 1000 pages.

An epic story that draws to an end and epic series.

And ultimately the story takes place over a short time in which some epic events take place.

That is when another word comes to mind “Prophecy”

This story is based now. But could be based just before any American Presidential nomination and election cycle, and it’s very realistic.

It looks at how one man’s manipulation of events, to help him make a third party run for President, could lead the Deep South to civil war.

Set in a small city in around the Mississippi, Louisiana area it looks at the deep seated beliefs of some people. The fact that a significant minority of the white population still look down on the Black people. People who are descended from slaves, people who still feel the effects of being considered a lower demographic.

Bobby White wants to have a run at being President, and he has enough supporters to get on the docket.

But what he really needs is to become Nationally known, and to do that he needs to be seen as some type of hero.

And what better way to do that than to stop another race war, or become the piece maker over another Rodney King type incident.

But to become that piece maker, to become that hero, there needs to be some type of situation for him to pacify.

So when a group of cops over react to a situation at a music festival, and shot before they think, leading to dozens of black revellers being killed, Bobby seizes his opportunity.

Set about 15 years after the Natchez Burning the story finds Penn Cage in ill health, but nobody knows just how ill he is.

However he was visiting the festival and witnessed the shooting and one mans attempts at keeping the piece.

As the situation starts to snowball, with some tit-for-tat attacks, Cage starts to suspect not everything is as it seems.

Some large houses are set alight, houses built on slavery and the cotton industry, ideal targets for retaliation against the white community.

But isn’t it a bit too obvious.

Old money is also in play. The Poker Club is a group families with old money, and a couple with new money earned from “legal” modern enterprises. They see an opportunity to gain even more power.

As is typical in America there are multiple law enforcement agencies, State and City, that sit on either side of the racial divide, that have conflicting interests in maintaining, or not, the piece.

This is a story of power, the lust for it, and the how far some people will go to get it.

It’s about how quickly a situation can spiral out of control.

And it’s about people trying to swim against a tide to put things right.

Most of all it’s about the deep seated beliefs and feelings that some people still labour under in the Deep South of the United States.

I’ve mentioned this book takes place 15 years after Natchez Burning. It is, in fact, the final book in a series of seven which have Penn Cage, and his family, as the main characters.

Do you need to read the other books first?

Yes, and in the right order. I’ve listed them below.

This is Iles at his best. I’ve described his writing as Grisham without filters, well this is Grisham without filters and on steroids.

The best thing about this though, is the fact that it could be a prophetic. This story is scarcely close to reality.

It is no stretch of the imagination to conceive that something like this could happen.

Without a doubt Iles is my favourite American author.

This book, and this series is not for the faint hearted. It’s not for people who are easily offended. It’s definitely not for people who are liable to be offended by WOKE triggering subjects.

It is gritty and hard hitting.

However nothing is gratuitous. It’s is all in perspective. It is very very compulsive.

Here’s the list of the rest of the series.

The Quiet Game
The Turning Angel
The Devils Punchbowl
The Death Factory ( novella)
Natchez Burning
The Bone Tree
Mississippi Blood
Southern Man

Pages: 977. Publisher: Hemlock Press Audiobook: 45 hours 43 minutes. Narrated by Scott Brick

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.

Father’s Day. Richard Madeley

As good as this book is, and it is really good, I fell I have to start this review with a warning, there are triggers in this story that may affect people who have been affected by eating disorders, self harming, and bullying.

That is part of the reason this book is so good. It’s a story of modern day society that needs telling.

For the young girl, Lucy, suffering from PTSD having witness her mother die in horrific and tragic circumstances, life is a lie.

Lucy was living the perfect life in a small village in Cornwall. On a visit to a harbour that life changes when she and her dad witness a horrific accident that leaves her mother dead.

In an attempt to get away from constant reminders they move to the quiet Cotswold town of Willersey.

Becoming more reclusive, spending lots of time in her room, wearing baggy clothing, long sleeves in the height of the summer, all indications that her father eventually picks up on to identify what she is going through.

But there’s an outside influence that her Dad, Nick, has no idea about, until it’s too late.

When a man is murderer and left displayed in the Cirencester Amphitheater, a close to retiring Detective Chief Superintendent is in charge of the investigation.

It doesn’t take much to connect the dots. The storyline is pretty much established in the first few chapters. There is no who done it, more how he did it.

And more importantly what will the outcome be.

I haven’t read any other books by Richard Madeley, I don’t know why, he just hasn’t come onto my radar as far as authors go.

It was my wife who saw Richard talking about his book on the television, and it was her who recommended it to me.

If she hadn’t I’d have never picked it up. I’m so glad she saw that TV show. My next stop is downloading his back catalogue.

Pages: 373. Publisher. Simon & Schuster. Audiobook: 8 hours 25 minutes. Narrators Jamie Parker and Juliette Burton

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