Tag: Crime Series

Faceless and Reaper by Vanda Symon

Two books. Two stories. One extraordinary main character.

Max is a homeless man living on the streets of Auckland, New Zealand.

Let’s be blunt he stinks, he hasn’t had a wash for ages, he hasn’t had a shave or a haircut for even longer. He’s emaciated, covered in sores and has suffered more than one beating as he forages skips and bins for food.

Despite most peoples impression of people like Max they live life by a code. The people who chose to live on the streets look after each other.

Often they have nothing in common except they live rough but they do have friendships and feelings.

Max is an ex cop. He has dropped out of life for a reason. He’s not undercover, he saw his daughter killed, and he was part of a botched investigation that let it happen. Since then he has walked away from life, his job, his wife, his teenage son. Nothing is ever going to drag him back. Until………

Book #1 Faceless

Billy is a young girl, only just 18, she has ended up on the streets and has befriended Max.

Billy is a top graffiti artist ands is well known amongst the youth of Auckland. Her graffiti is art, she doesn’t tag, she creates beautiful paintings on buildings. But art cost money. Spray paint isn’t cheap, and she’s not a shop lifter. To fund her activities she sells her body. She has no pimp so she has no protection, and that leaves her vulnerable.

Bradley is an overworked accountant. Hassled by his bosses to work harder and longer than he already does, a wife who persistently pointing out his work life balance is lacking and that he needs to spend more time with his wife and daughter.

Out of pure frustration he looks for a street prostitute and picks up Billy. Then it all goes wrong. Suddenly panicked, before they have any kind of physical sexual contact he knocks her unconscious and takes her to a void building he owns.

Not knowing how to resolve the problem things deteriorate putting Billy in real danger scared for her life, and physically, but not sexually abused.

Max knows somethings wrong. Billy never stays away from her spot on the streets, close to Max, without telling him where she is going to be.

But how does a very rough, smelly, rough sleeper make people listen to him. Nobody takes the homeless seriously, they are just an inconvenience that the city doesn’t want.

Max reaches out to an old colleague, Meredith, still a serving Detective Sergeant, but will she take him seriously. Billy has only been missing a day. Will she take the concerns of a hobo version of a man she once worked with seriously. And if she takes him seriously will she convince anybody else to listen to him.

What follows is a brilliant story set in a community most stories either ignore or cast as victims. In this case they are part of the investigation with Max acting as a Lone Ranger on the streets.

Will his attempts to find Billy, and build bridges with his past succeed.

Book #2 The Reaper

Max is still on the streets but he’s crashing in a gym most nights.

Somebody is murdering the homeless of Auckland. But Max is having difficulty getting the Police to put the deaths down to anything but natural causes.

Reaching out to Meredith he points out that three deaths in three days, even in a community of rough sleepers the size of the one in the city, is very unusual

Word amongst the homeless is that the Grim Reaper is murdering them. It’s no coincidence that the person who started the rumour of the Reaper, the person who has actually seen him, is one of the people found dead.

Meredith and Max team up and the police eventually treat the deaths as murder.

How do you catch an invisible man who is floating amongst the homeless, picking them off one after another, and why are they doing it. Working out a motive might help to identify the killer, but thats proving difficult.

At the same time a man who Max would rather stay in his past approaches him with a request for help.

He wants to find the person who supplied the drugs to his son that led to him killing himself. He killed himself in front of Max seconds after he slit Max’s daughter throat.

Max needs to dig deep, this is triggering, he’s sort of sorting his life out, will this plunge him back to the depression that saw him at the bottom of the barrel he was in at the beginning of the first book.

These two book are extraordinary, and I read them back to back in a few days.

Max is a fantastic creation by an author I had never heard of before.

Vanda Symon may be my discovery of 2026 and I’m looking forward to diving into her back catalogue.

Faceless: Pages 334. Reaper Pages: 305. Publisher: Orion

Nothing Left Behind. Hannah Brennan

Book two of the DCI Liz Field series.

All emergency services suffer from regular nuisance callers. Most are malicious false alarms, sometimes they are a cry for help, but they are always taken, and responded to. Sometimes that response can be a bit slower than they would expect, the calls being prioritised, and known false callers get put to the bottom of the queue.

But what happens when those callers really need help. The time they are calling wolf because there is actually a wolf there.

Anne was one of those callers. Her regular cry for help was that “he” was going to burn the house down and kill her inside it.

So when one night another call comes in, to her house being on fire, the nearest Police Officer takes his time in responding.

When he does get there he finds the house well alight and goes inside to rescue the old lady most police officers in the area have come to know.

His life is saved when a neighbour pulls his unconscious body out of the house.

And so begins a complex investigation which takes more than a few unexpected, and thoroughly compelling twists.

DCI Liz Field is appointed SIO but her team is reduced to help cover another team who are investigating the murder of a high profile activist who had been shot on her own doorstep.

Fields investigation soon uncovers the real identity of Anne, the victim in the house fire had changed names, and location, following the conviction of her husband who had previously assaulted her.

Could this be the reason for the murder, he had always said he would kill her and her son.

Who is the son, and where is he. The police officers who had grown to know her had no knowledge of her previous life.

This is the basis of a fantastic story.

As with the previous book No Safe Place, the story revolves around Field, and the two or three other key players in the plot.

As the story progresses the slow drip of clues finally builds up and I eventually realised who some of the characters really were. I had a good idea of who might be the murderer, but when it was revealed I was still surprised.

It’s been a long time since I have read books so well plotted. Hannah Brennan hides things in plain sight so that when the reveal is made I couldn’t help thinking to myself “how did I not pick up on that”

It helps that I love DCI Field. She is about as realistic as it comes, and I find empathy with her every time she makes a decision.

What really struck me about this book is how well it is researched. I recently read and reviewed a book in which the main character was a Fire Investigator. I criticised the research for that book as it was factually and procedurally incorrect. And that was with the FIre Investigator as the main character.

In this book the Fire Investigator has a bit part, an important part in the story but still a small part. The realism in the scene setting, and the procedural aspects, in this book are really very good, and there is absolutely no comparison between the two. This one is far better than the other.

For me, as a retired Fire Investigator, that makes a hell of a difference.

I can’t wait for book three to be published in November 2026, in fact I preordered it as soon as I finished this one.

Pages: 446. Publisher: Avon. Audiobook length: 10 hours 13 minutes. Narrator: Rachel Atkins

No Safe Place. Hannah Brennan

Book one in the Detective Chief Inspector Liz Field series, and if this is the standard to come it’s going to be one hell of a series.

What starts out as a single attempted murder quickly escalates.

DCI Field is close to the attack when the call comes in. A man has been stabbed multiple times and left to die in the street.

Her and one of her DS’s are the first on the scene and the description of the chaos they encounter, and the way the next few minutes is described sets the cadence for the story.

The victim is a Mental Health Doctor who published a paper about his observations of 5 teenagers who had undiagnosed OCD. The study took place fifteen years ago and the front page of the paper is found beneath his body when paramedics move him to hospital.

The next day a second victim is savagely stabbed, in a similar manner, but she dies. She was one of the teenagers in the study carried out by the Doctor, and she is found on the steps of another of the cohort included in the study.

The study only contains an identifying letter for each of the teenagers. The police now know the identity of two of them, but they need to identify the other three to either rule them out and protect them, or arrest one of them for murder.

All of the subjects of the study had previously been diagnosed with other mental health issues, but by identifying the underlying issue was severe OCD the Doctor had been able to offer them all help before they were discharged from his care.

Each of them has made a recovery, to differing degrees of success, but some still suffer, and when the investigating team start to identify them it’s only the start of the process. Interviewing people with hidden, or in some cases not so hidden, OCD issues is difficult. But it makes for a great story plot.

The characters are really well written in particular the Police Officer at the head of the story.

DCI Liz Field is the female version of a lot of the fictional Police Officers you find in some established series, but with Brennans writing she is elevated to another level.

As well as dealing with the investigation she is also dealing with two Detective Sergeants on her team.

DS Wilson is a traditional Police Officer. She joined as a uniform Constable and did her time on response, dealing with all the rubbish and violence that that job brings.

DS Riley has a degree in Criminology and joined the force on a Direct-to-Detective scheme. Who Wilson sees as an inexperienced underling.

Wilson an Riley often but heads, most SIOs would do something to stop this but Field almost encourages it, and sees the competition between the pair as a good way of getting the best out of them.

This story moves with pace. For a story with, at most, eight main characters, three of which are Police Officers, it’s amazing how well hidden the perpetrator is hidden.

I did’t have a clue who was carrying out the attacks until the reveal, and thats not a bad thing.

A great start to a new series.

Pages: 414. Publisher: Avon. Audiobook length: 9 hours 34 minutes. Narrator: Rachel Atkins

Crimson Thaw.

Bruce Robert Coffin

I think I may have found my new favourite American Crime Fiction series

This is book one of four so far published in the Detective Brock Justice series, and the good news for those that have it, its on kindleunlimited.

Set in a small rural community in the north of the state of Maine, close to the Canadian border, the story uses the countryside and lakes to produce a different type of suspense to that where the story is set in a city.

The isolation of each location, the small town everybody-knows-everybody community. The outdoor activities, including hunting and the use of all terrain vehicles, all add to the tension.

The investigation even starts with the recovery of a man, from beneath a remote site on a frozen lake, who had been handcuffed to a snowmobile.

The characters are just as good. The main protagonist is Detective Brock Justice. Once a city detective he has returned home under a cloud. Transferred from the city to his backwater home town force following a dubious shooting of a criminal during an arrest.

It wasn’t him that was accused of the bad shoot, but he was there, and it was partially his fault for not waiting for backup. But he committed the ultimate crime by testifying against his partner who did fire the fatal shot.

That reputation precedes him to his new post and he is never going to be the most popular man in the small team.

Because of his experience he is appointed lead detective on the case of the body recovered from the lake, and is partnered up with a brand new detective recently promoted from uniform. Chloe Wright may be a rookie detective but she has a brain on her, and despite Brock’s reputation she is keen to learn from him.

There may sound like there’s a lot of cliche character traits here but believe me the story, and the characters, are so well written that that is soon overlooked.

I’d describe this book as a cross between Michael Connelly’s Bosch books and C.J Box’s Joe Picket books.

A great I can highly recommend

Pages: 378. Publisher: Severn River Publishing

Nash Falls & Hope Rising. David Baldacci

Two books one review

I’m going to start this review by saying how good the story in these two books is, before I go onto what I unfortunately is a bit of negativity.

The story.

At its foundation this story is about a good guy, with the perfect life, a wife, a teenage daughter, and a highly successful career, who is approached by the FBI to help them build a case against his employer.

Unsurprisingly this goes wrong and his world is torn apart.

The rest of the story is about his efforts to get justice.

Nash Falls

Walter Nash is a tall, wimpy highly intelligent man. At the start of the story he attends his dad’s funeral, a Vietnam Veteran who had little time for the son who sought to play Tennis instead of NFL style football.

His distain for his son is so deep he even has another vet’ bad mouth him at the funeral.

The case is built from the very beginning of the book that Nash is a physically weak, but highly intelligent man, who does anything to avoid physical excess or any form of danger.

The company he works for is run by Burton Temple and his son Rhett. Both men are typical modern day lotharios who treat people with contempt. Although they embrace Nash because he brings in more money than anybody else.

So when the FBI approach Nash to help them uncover the illicit side of the Bartons business he is slow to say yes but eventually does.

The Bartons are only mid-level operators. The big fish that the FBI are after is Victoria Steel, and her ultimate boss

Steel is half English half Chinese and is a ruthless drug runner using the Temples to launder money.

Nash’s world falls apart as his cover work is exposed, no spoilers from here on except he has to change his identity and becomes Dillon Hope

Hope Rises

Part two of the story with Nash established as Dillon Hope and working undercover to gain revenge by exposing Victoria Steer and the Rhett Barton.

His new looks, and persona couldn’t be further from his old identity.

The story crosses Asia and America.

Hope/Nash’s ethos and his beliefs are tested to the limit.

The mild man that is, or was Nash, wants the ultimate justice, whilst the new Dillon Hope is beginning to have empathy for some of the criminals.

When the time comes which ego, Nash or Hope, will rise to the surface.

This is a really compelling story but there’s one thing in this book that really had me struggling to set aside.

Nash’s transformation into Hope takes over a year, and there are some physical changes, but for me it’s a bit like Clark Kent taking off his glasses and nobody noticing that he is Superman.

For me its just too much of a stretch to think that nobody notices its him.

The other thing that troubled me is this should not have been two books.

There is no getting away from the fact that Nash Falls just stops. There is no conclusion. No Cliffhanger. It just stops. The last chapter in that book is just the end of another chapter, like any other in the book.

The first chapter in Hope Rises is the next chapter of the previous book.

If you were to read either as a standalone it wouldn’t work.

There is no finish to one and no start to the other.

The end of the story is really good but I couldn’t help thinking that there were two or three chapters in the second book that weren’t needed.

As much as I enjoyed the books, and I am a massive fan of the author, I really couldn’t shake the feeling that he had a good story in mind, and when he wrote it he realised it was too long for one book. So he looked for a continent place to end the first and realised the second wasn’t long enough so threw in a few more chapters.

I did enjoy the books but I felt almost conned at the end of the first one. The lack of an ending made it a bit weak.

Although I said the first book didn’t end on a cliff hanger, and it didn’t, I still wanted to know what happened next, purely to get a conclusion to the story.

All that being said would i recommend the books. Yes and No.

Yes if you are a Baldacci fan.

Yes if you start book one knowing you are going to have to go straight to book two.

But as stand alone’s, or if its your first by David Baldcacci NO.

Nash Falls Pages: 611. Hope Rises Pages: 433

Publisher: MacMillan

Both Books available now.

What The Dying See. M.J Lee

DI Ridpath series, book 12

What I like about this series is the fact that M.J Lee always manages to find a plot that includes something either topical, or something that could quite easily happen.

In this book the murder of a man, found malnourished and who had been dead for several weeks, gets linked to other cases after an almost casual observation at the scene.

Meanwhile Greater Manchesters Coroner is beginning to have suspicions around the involvement of the Department of Work and Pensions in the seemingly accidental deaths of several people.

She is always on guard, shes never going to let another Harold Shipman happen on her watch.

So when it becomes apparent that the DWP are cutting vulnerable people’s benefits, or putting undue restrictions, or impossible request, on them, and that several people’s deaths may have been the result of this, then she makes it her mission to stop these practices.

Could Ridpath’s murder investigations be somehow linked to the Coroners suspicions of the practices of the DWP.

The use of private carers is mentioned in the book. Having seen the vast differences between good carers, and bad ones for myself, it’s a surprise to me that there are not more deaths involving carers investigated by the Police.

Then there is the question of assisted suicide. Moralistically this is divisive, legally its a minefield. So when a man walks into a police station and says he’s killed his father, but later states that it was a part of an assisted suicide, its a clever plot twist that just adds more intrigue to the story.

The plot is not as complicated as I may have made it sound. It’s a cleverly written story. It brings together some very believable scenarios.

That coupled with the ongoing storyline of Ridpath’s private life makes this book a great read.

Publisher: Canelo Crime. Pages: 352. Available now

The Bone Stalker. Victor Methos

Book 3 of the Vegas Shadows series

A deprived  serial killer is trying to get into the head of Detective Lazarus, but why.

There is a hierarchy of people that have reasons.

The white supremacist Phineas (Deadeye) Walsh.

Judge Hope Dawson, who is running for the Senate

Police Assistant Chief Harold Dubbs, a career desk jokey who has no courage and can’t stand up for himself.

All of these people, and many others have reason to take down Lazarus, but they also have reason to bring down each other. It’s a type of vicious circle that is spiralling around the detective.

His friend Piper Danes is inevitably caught up in his manic investigation, and along with helping him investigate, she is also trying to nurse him.

Still suffering from serious injuries sustained in a previous investigation. Lazarus is also going cold turkey from the lack of alcohol.

He wouldn’t class himself as an alcoholic, but he is a typical hard drinking cop, and with trauma damage to his liver, and the medications he is on he has to stop drinking, and its taking an effect.

His judgment is questioned and when the murders start to connect back to him Dubbs bans him from the investigation.

The trilogy of suspects are all connected, and all of them have reason to get to Lazarus.

So when his estranged daughter decides she wants to know her Dad, it just another worry for him, another distraction.

Distractions are something he can’t afford. This killer is different. He doesn’t make mistakes, he leaves subtle clues only Lazarus seems to be able to pick up on. He kills in a ruthless manner.

For fans of the series you might have expected me to mention Piper Danes a bit more. But to be honest, with the exception of a side story about her family, and the fact that she is nursing Lazarus, she doesn’t have much impact on this story.

If you haven’t read the previous two books, The Silent Watcher and The Night Collector, I would highly recommend reading those first.

This book would not read well as a standalone and relates back to both the previous ones.

My reviews are in the links below.

The Silent Watcher

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

The Night Collector

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2025/09/25/the-night-collector-victor-methos/

The Family Secret. Patricia Gibney

This series is a must read for all crime fiction fans, and The Family Secret, book 16, is no exception.

The title gives the plot away, you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. The family showing a happy face to the public can be hugely different in the isolation of their own home.

It’s not the only isolation in the story. Detective Inspector Lottie Parker is newly single following a break up with one of her team, Boyd, and her mother’s dementia is getting worse, and her children and grandchild are always giving her worries.

One of the endearing things about this series is the soap opera that is Lottie’s life, and it plays a major part in this book.

As well as investigating murders and a potential kidnapping, she is being drained physically, and mentally, by things in her private life.

But the main focus is the crime.

A family murdered following a child’s Birthday party.

Twelve year old Freya is dead in her home, the day after her birthday party, and so are her mother and father. It’s a gruesome scene and all of the attending police officers are affected by what they see.

Kneeling at Freya’s side Lottie promises her that she will find the killer.

One key witness is Lily, Freya’s best friend who was supposed to sleep over after the party but changed her mind.

A luck escape, or an insight by somebody.

Before Lily can be interviewed properly she goes missing with her mother saying she had been “stolen” from her own home.

And so it begins. The hunt for a person who has murdered a family, and in all likelihood has kidnapped a child.

What are the secrets hidden behind the closed doors of both girls homes.

Are the parents really as they present themselves, or are there some dark secrets.

Patricia Gibney writes one of the most realistic crime fiction series there is on the shelves right now.

There will be people who have worked crime scenes that will make links to what she has written. In this book she tapped into the one thing that always plagued me.

The normality after the crime.

When she describes the first murder scene, following the birthday party, it was like she was inside my head.

Devastation in one part of the house and total normality in the rest of the premises. The detritus of the party, waiting to be cleaned up. A party dress that should never be part of this type of scene.

I know a few people that hated that normality as much as me, and in a few paragraphs Gibney captures it perfectly.

This story has real pace and is emotionally charged.

As far as fiction goes, it’s as good as it gets, and better than most.

Pages: 503. Publisher: Bookouture. Available now. Audiobook length: 13 hours 24 minutes. Narrator: Michele Moran

Rough Justice & Unlikely Saviour. Biba Pearce

The first two books in the Shrap Nelson series set in current day London.

There are going to be the inevitable comparisons with Lee Childs and Jack Reacher made by people who read these books.

For me, they are much better, but that may be because I’m not a fan of the Reacher series.

The main character, Shrap Nelson, is an ex-military police officer suffering PTSD, and in the first book she is living rough on the streets of London.

In Rough Justice the closest thing she has to a best friend, a fellow vet living on the streets, is being sought by the police who believe he has killed a woman.

Shrap doesn’t believe it, but before she can talk to him he is found dead in the street, a burning corpse.

Again Shrap doesn’t believe he either died by accidentally setting himself on fire, or committing suicide, which appears to be the way the police investigation is going.

One Officer is also doubtful of the veterans involvement in the murder of a young woman, and of his accidental death.

Detective Gareth Trevelyan is a recent transferee into the Criminal Investigation Team and is a bit weary of raising his concerns.

But when he starts to bump into Shrap during his own investigations he sees the benefit of having her as a very unofficial part of the investigation.

Living the homeless lifestyle makes Shrap almost invisible, she can get close to places and remain invisible by just sleeping in a doorway. Who ever takes any notice of anybody sleeping rough.

The murdered girl was a sex worker, only she wasn’t. The Police are happy that she’s just another street walking prostitute, so are happy to close the case quickly.

The girl worked as an erotic dancer at a club run by and Eastern European but that was all she did.

The investigation opens up a real can of worms. The Eastern European is running drugs and most of the girls working at his club are on the game.

He has small time local hoodies running the drugs for him and they present as big a danger as the boss himself.

The story in this book is really fast paced and makes an excellent read. Shrap and Trevelyan make a great partnership.

The plot is very realistic and brings the dangers of living on the street to every chapter, what it also brings to the fore is the community amongst the homeless and how they look out for their own.

Book 2, Unlikely Saviour, follows on quickly from the first book but now finds Shrap living in a hostel.

The son of one of the hostel workers is a graffiti artist and when he and a friend witness a body being dumped in the Thames they make a run for it. Unfortunately his friend doesn’t make it home.

The police are again reluctant to take the disappearance seriously.

But when a body turns up, just where the youth said he’d seen a body being dumped it starts a race to find the missing teenager.

The dumped body turns out to be another ex military veteran who runs his own investigations agency.

He has three current cases on the go and any of them may have thrown up somebody who wanted him dead.

But which one is most likely to have killed at least one person, and whats happened to the missing teenager.

Shrap uses her investigative skill and the skills she has learnt living on the street to help Trevelyan carry out the investigations.

Other police officers are beginning to appreciate Shraps skills and the value she can bring to an investigation, including Trevelyan’s boss, and she is given a bit more access and a lot more leeway.

This is another cracking story, and this time its got a surprisingly different ending I didn’t see coming.

The clues were there all the way through the book but they were cleverly disguised.

Two brilliant books in what I hope is going to be a long series.

Pages: Rough Justice, 360. Unlikely Saviour, 310. Publisher Mortlake Press. Audiobook length, Rough Justice, 9 hours Narrator Caroline Fantozzi. Unlikely Saviour not available.

Both books available on Kindleunlimited in the U.K.

The Gold Coast Quartet books 1-3. Iain Ryan

The Strip, The Dream, The Casino

A review of the first three books because the fourth is yet to be published.

I recently reviewed a book series set in the Ganglands of London over several decades, and Amazon being Amazon decided to show me books that I might like having read them.

Well Amazon hit the spot with this series, it is an addictive read from the first chapter of the first book, The Strip, into the second The Dream and right up to the last chapter of the third The Casino.

The series is set on the Gold Coast of Australia in the 1980s its a real old school crime noir.

Back then The Gold Coast was an up and coming place which bore more than a passing resemblance to Londons Soho of the 60s and 70s.

Run by corrupt politicians and small time gangsters who are gaining notoriety and strength.

The Police are corrupt beyond belief and a racket they nearly all take part in, known colloquially as “The Joke” , is making them very comfortable.

What makes it worse still is that most of the police are not only on the take, but they are lazy and unambitious when it comes to solving crime. Why would they want to lock people up who are lining their pockets.

The Queen of crime in the area is Colleen Vinson. A Madam extraordinaire and an extortionist. She has used her brothels to take pictures and films of all of her more powerful clients and she basically has everyone of any importance in her pocket. From street cops to judges, from local business men to the highest politicians, she has something on all of them.

Anybody who steps out of line with Colleen can expect to be the victim of, at best, some very physical violence, at worse they just disappear.

But there are some people trying to make their way legitimately. Trying desperately to clean up the area from within the Police, and elsewhere.

The Strip

The scene setting book that contains a cracking story and introduces most of the main players in the series, but don’t get to engaged with any of them, because nobody is safe and not all of them will make it to book two.

Initially there are six murders, which the local police are desperate to lump into one case blaming a serial killer.

Detective Lana Cohen has been leant to the task force looking for the killer. Her boss in Brisbane also wants her to keep an eye on the local cops because the rumours of their inefficiency and corrupt practices have reached the leaders of the state.

She’s convinced that there is more than one killer, why would one killer strangle their first victims then completely switch methods and start shooting the later victims.

She’s teamed up with Henry Loch an Officer whose career is already in tatters and has no real interest in solving the case.

She does find a cop who is willing to help and wants to get the Gold Coast clean. Detective Bruno Karras is as close to a clean Officer as she can find, but can she trust him, and what is the secret he is harbouring.

The story climaxes in the last few chapters and as with all of these books it can be read as a standalone but it sets the scene for book two.

The Dream

The Gold Coast has its very own version of Disney World, or it will have if its owner ever finishes the build. And that is the problem there are a lot of powerful people that want the project finished, and some that don’t There is a lot of money invested in and around the project. Clean and dirty money.

Mark Nichols is a fixer who works for politicians and he’s sent to make sure that Fantasy Land is opened on the latest deadline. What he finds is a dysfunctional family business being worked by corrupt officials.

Far from solving the issues Nichols becomes part of the problem, getting entwined in the drugs and prostitution surrounding the project and inevitably becoming one of Colleen Vinson’s victims.

Bruno Karras is still on the force and he is on the hunt for a missing family, but he’s not the only one. Private Investigator Amy Owens is also carrying out an investigation that brings her close to Karras. They might want the same outcome but it’s for completely different reasons.

How does the missing family tie in with Fantasy Land. Well on the Gold Coast everything seems to revolve around drugs and prostitution. Surprisingly that means that Colleen Vinson is involved.

Karras and Owen both need to be on their guard.

The Casino

This story is like the splintered glass of a broken window, every crack leads to a single point. There is not one word in this book that is wasted in the weaving of a brilliant story.

The last few chapters bring it all together in a perfectly understandable conclusion.

A severed hand found on a beach brings Detective Lana Cohen back to the fore of the ongoing story.

She’s back on the Gold Coast in a dead end job, punishment for her involvement in solving the crimes in the first book.

She is still trying desperately to compile enough information on the corruption in the police force to bring the Joke down and clean up the force, but she has to do that in her own time, between mundane police tasks.

She starts to work with Vince Walter’s, and Internal Investigations Officer once known as Miami Vince because of his wild life style he claimed was all part of bringing under cover. But he’s an addict and his addictions are not as under control as he tries to make out.

Ewan Hayes is a private investigator who is hired to find a missing person. This person is also part of Cohen and Walter’s investigation.

Everything leads to, and revolves around the newly completed super Casino Complex, the first on the Gold Coast and Colleen Vinsons Dream, but is it hers, no spoilers allowed and it would spoil the previous book.

What I can say is Colleen’s not happy and she is looking for some missing people herself.

As I said earlier this is a complex story and at times, as enthralling as it is, I wondered how it would all tie in but it does, and out of a brilliant three book series, so far, this is the best of the three.

I can’t wait for book four to be published to see how this is all going to end.

I was interested that in the acknowledgements at the end of the book Iain Ryan thanks authors he has read who have influenced him. One name stands out for me as being really relevant. James Ellroy. The writing style is not the same but the complexity of the stories, the way one book naturally acts as a stepping stone into the next, the way no character is safe, the way that a chapter in book one somehow has relevance in another chapter in later books, all make this series an equal to Ellroy’s trilogies and quartets.

For those with Kindleunlimited the first two books are available free in the U.K.

Pages: The Strip 438, The Dream 448, The Casino 444 Publisher: Lamb House