Tag: Recommended Book

Chapter One. Michael Wood

A clever thriller that had me convinced I knew who the killer was, until I didn’t, and then I realised just how dark this story is.

Reclusive author Aiden Cullen hasn’t left his house for years.

The day his first book was published should have been a huge celebration, but it was the day that changed his life for the wrong reason.

Stabbed multiple times and left for dead the previously shy man, who was leading a normal life, turned into a recluse during his rehabilitation. Now he never leaves his home.

Writing from home he has become a successful author writing murder based crime thrillers.

His life is turned upside down when a murder is committed close to the rear of his house. He has to answer the door to the police, he has to let strangers into his house, even if they are Police Officers, and that really freaks him out.

When he becomes aware of other crimes, all of which are frighteningly similar to the murders in his books he has to tell the police.

Then strange things start to happen in his house.

The list of suspects is short and the top of the list is Aidens best friend and occasional lodger, Luke.

Aiden fights the police’s assumption it’s Luke, it can’t be, it’s his best and only friend.

This is a cracking story written by a brilliant story teller.

I’ve struggled with how to describe it, and I don’t think this does it justice but, if Stephen King wrote Cosy Crime, this is what he’d come up with.

The cosy part first, it’s set predominantly in a nice country family home.

The Stephen King bit. The story is a psychological mind twister.

To be honest, as good as the story is from the start, it’s not until the killer is revealed that I realised just how good the whole plot was, and it elevated my enjoyment of the book even further.

What a cracker of a read.

Pages: 380. Publisher: One More Chapter.

All the Colours of the Dark. Chris Whitaker

If ever the word epic was appropriate for a story, it’s for this book

At 580 pages it’s a tomb of a book but not one word is wasted.

Spread over three decades, and full of unpredictable but realistic twist, this is one hell of a story.

Two young misfit kids find themselves attracted to each other because they are almost outcast from the other children their age.

Patch, a one eyed boy who lives his childhood as a pirate, and Saint the geeky late developing girl.

A childhood friendship built on being two outsiders.

When Patch goes missing protecting a young girl from attack the police investigation soon peters out.

He’s alive and being kept in a dark cellar, but he’s not alone. There’s a young girl with him. A girl he can’t see in the dark, a girl that asks him to imagine her features by touching her face. She talks in strange quotes and try’s to educate him with her cryptic stories.

Her name is Grace.

Saint never gives up on Patch and through her amateur, childish investigations finally thinks she’s found him.

In the commotion that follows the Saint and the Police find Patch but there’s no sign of the girl he says was in the cellar with him.

Over the next three decades Patch devotes his life to finding Grace.

Over the same three decades Saint, who joins Law Enforcement tries to keep Patch out of trouble, and independently looks for Grace for her own reasons.

There’s no real spoilers in what I’ve written above. Patch’s abduction and his release happen fairly early in the book, the real story is what follows.

The characters in the book weave in and out of the plot around Patch and Saint.

The relationship between Patch and Saint is never really a “will they, won’t they” get together, it’s more the story of two best friends who love each other unconditionally but more as brother and sister.

It’s all about what each of them will do to prove that Grace existed. Patch because he thinks he loves her, and Saint because she is on the trail of a long dead killer.

This is my first Chris Whitaker book but, coincidentally, whilst I was reading it he was recommending to me by a fellow book worm.

She was talking about a book I’d read, a gothic fantasy novel, and I had said the second in that series was the same story as the first. We both love crime fiction and she said to me, aren’t all crime stories basically the same.

Many of them are, but this one definitely isn’t like any I’ve read before.

She’d found it and pointed me in Chris Whitakers direction.

Now I’m looking at his back catalogue.

Pages 580. Publisher Orion. Audiobook length 14 hours 37 minutes Narrator Edoardo Ballerini

Damascus Station. David McCloskey

This is one of the easiest reviews I’ve written. Buy the book.

My formative years of reading were taken up reading great espionage books by the likes of Robert Ludlum, Alistair McLean, Nelson Demille and the likes, and rarely have books that come close to their work.

This one does. Billed as the first of four this book it is set around the end of the Assad regime in Syria, and not only looks at American CIA activities but also the in fighting between different factions in Assad’s security and militia, and the rebels seeking to free the country from the Assad regime.

CIA agent Sam specialises in developing assets in foreign countries. So when a woman working at the heart of the Assad regime is thought to be a viable target to turn into an American agent it’s him they send.

Miriam works as an assistant to a high level officer in Assad’s security forces.

Miriam herself is tasked with silencing a rebel who is spreading the anti Assad message throughout Europe.

Unknown to her boss she is also having doubts about the regime, even though her father and uncle are high ranking officers in the Army she sees the tyranny and misjustices that comes with it. Her own cousin is caught at anti government rallies and is beaten badly before her uncle arranges her release.

The story of Sam making contact and attempting to lure Miriam is the main story, but the infighting and politics of the different factions in Syria make this complex and fascinating.

Family members on different sides of the political, and moralistic fences. Fanatics who thrive on violence, and people with more empathy and sympathy, clash within the same factions.

There are those who want war, and those who are not against it, but not at any cost, working for the same people.

How can Sam and Miriam navigate their way through this. Do they both want the same thing, and who is playing who, and to what end.

Not everybody comes out of this book in one piece. The happy-ever-after is not guaranteed. Just like real life the scenarios in this book are messy, and inevitably mistakes are made on both sides as all interested parties look to gain advantage.

This is a great read. At times I sat holding my breath, at others I found myself reading at a frantic speed to find out what happened next.

Brilliantly written, very realistic, great characters and a cracking story.

Pages: 433. Publisher: Swift Press Audiobook length: 12 hours 48. Narrator: Andrew B Wehrlen

Hunted Abir Mukherjee

If you’ve missed the type of book that Robert Ludlum wrote back in the 70s and 80s, or some of the early Tom Clancy novels, then this book set firmly in the modern day is definitely for you.

Hunted is set against the backdrop of an imminent American Presidential Election, very thinly disguised and based on Trump v Harris, and hints that one of them, or at the least their supporters, are trying to sway the election by setting up terrorist attacks on US soil.

Young vulnerable Asian women are being groomed to join a US Terror Cell, but they are not being told the truth about the severity of there actions, or the cause they are fighting for.

Somebody wants to make it look as though there is a Muslim Terror Cell working in America.

After an explosion in a Mall FBI Agent Shreya Mistry manages to see CCTV footage of the alleged attacker, but she looks like she’s running away, not planting a bomb.

Mistry has difficulty getting her bosses to agree with her and finds herself increasingly distanced from the investigation.

Meanwhile and American mother goes to the U.K. to find the family of another Asian girl who is believed to be part of the cell. The mother’s white and is convinced her son is also part of the cell, but knows he can’t be acting out of principles the American Government Agencies, and the press, are attributing to the cell.

She convinces the father to go to the States with her to find their children before the FBI does, because she’s afraid they won’t be listened to fairly, if at all.

The title the hunted come onto play here. The mismatched couple are hunting their children. The FBI are hunting the cell, and also the mother and father team who they now think are also terrorists.

So, who is the puppeteer grooming and guiding the would be activists into terrorism.

And what s their ultimate goal.

I loved this book. It took me right back to the books that hooked me as a young adult. This sits nicely alongside Ludlum, Clancy, and DeMille as a brilliantly tense terrorism novel.

Hopefully there will be a follow up. It doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but there is scope for another book.

Pages: 468. Publisher: Vintage Audiobook length: 13 hours 21. Narrator: Mikhail Sen

The Unravelling Vi Keeland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book is brilliantly written.

It’s psychologically dark.

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

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

A big recommendation for this one from me.

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

The Collector Series. Dot Hutchison

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

Yes, I was hooked.

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

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

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

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

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

#1 The Butterfly Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2 The Roses of May

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3 The Summer Children

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

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

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

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

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

#4 The Vanishing Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publisher Thomas & Mercer

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.

Her Deadly Game. Robert Dugoni

It’s inevitable that every American, legal, courtroom, thriller , I read gets measured against John Grisham. Few get an equal billing but this book is right up there with any of his.

Keera Duggan is an attorney in Seattle. Formerly she worked for the state prosecutor’s office, which she left after a short but ill advised affair with her boss.

Now she’s back working in the family law firm trying to salvage its reputation. Her father, Patsy, was once a fearsome defence attorney, but over the years he has became more dependent on booze and is ruining his own fearsome reputation as well as his firms.

When Vince LaRussa, a rich investment fund manager returns home to find his disabled wife shot dead in their kitchen, the Police do what Police do and instantly suspect the husband.

He is aware of Patsy’s reputation off old, and hires his firm. He doesn’t get Patsy who is recovering from his latest bender, he gets Keera, who is yet to defend at a murder trial.

The case is a strange one. It’s a locked room mystery that LaRussa seems to have an airtight alibi for. But Keera’s ex-boss and lover, wants to get it to trial quick, he wants to use the case to humiliate her.

What follows is an excellent courtroom drama.

As is usual in American courts Keera’s defence is that somebody else, unknown, killed LaRussa’s wife.

There are at least two suspects but why would either of them want Anne LaRussa dead.

There are twists in this story that leaves the final verdict in question all the way up till the end, and even then there is a vicious sting in the tail.

I like books which are fast paced, with a bit of grit, and that are totally realistic. This story ticks all of those boxes.

There is no spurious writing. Every page holds meaning to the story.

Although Keera’s relationship with her father is an important part of the story it doesn’t get over relied on in the plot, a mistake I’m finding more and more writers make these days.

This is book one in a three book series.

I have a big to-be-read pile, and it speaks volumes that they have all gone on hold whilst I download and read the other two in this series first.

Pages: 396. Publisher: Thomas & Mercer. Audiobook length 11 hours Saskia Maarleveld

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