Tag: Thriller

The Detective’s Wife. Mary Stone

I was convinced I had predicted the end of this book in the first few pages.

I was wrong, until I wasn’t.

How does that make sense? Well I had a hypothesis in my head within the first few chapters, but the more I read, the more I was convinced my first assumption was wrong.

It wasn’t, but how the book gets from start to finish is an amazing read, an amazing story that unfolds through two peoples eyes.

My sympathies and empathies must have changed half a dozen times as I read this book, and not just with the two main characters.

The story is told in the first person but through two peoples eyes.

The first half(ish) of the book is told through the eyes of Jo, a Psychologist working in an institute that looks after troubled women, most of which are dangerous, and spend much of their life highly sedated.

Jo has recently married Conor, a Police Detective whose first wife disappeared 18 months ago.

It’s a Honey Trap, Jo is convinced her husband knows exactly what happened to his first wife, and she wants to use the marriage to find out what.

The problem is Honey Traps are not supposed to result in loving relationships. This one does, and its causing major problems.

About halfway through the book the story switches and is looked at through the eyes of Amanda, a patient at the hospital where Jo works.

Her story is as compelling as Jo’s and is brilliantly written.

The conclusion of the story is epic, but not as epic as the route to it.

As I said at the start of this blog, I had the scenario worked out from the start, as will most people who read the book. But it’s not about the beginning and the end. It’s about the other 80% of the book. The story of how everything comes about.

It’s about what goes on behind closed doors.

It’s about issues within families that not even family members are completely tuned into.

It’s about loyalties, and the way that they are formed, and tested.

It’s about manipulation, and distorted truths.

It is a great story.

Publisher: Bookouture. Pages 404. Publishing Date 24th September 2026

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.

Twisted. Steven Cavanagh

I started writing this review before I was halfway through the book.

Why? Because I was sure that the twists that were already in the story were some of the best, and surprising, I’ve read in any book.

Had one of them come at the end it would have been the culmination of a great plot. So I really can’t wait to see where this story goes.

And they just kept coming. I honestly think if somebody had told me how this book progressed, I may not have read it. BUT, and it’s a big but, I would have been wrong. I would have missed out on the best book I’ve read this year.

This story isn’t filled with unnecessary characters, in fact there are only a handful of of people mentioned outside of the main four.

Paul Cooper is a mysterious person. His wife of two years, Maria, is kept on a short but comfortable financial leash. He works away from home a lot and leaves Maria at home in the small coastal town of Port Lonely.

Maria, in turn has got bored of her husband, she has a lover Daryl, a bar tender who owns his own fishing boat. He is her real love and she is planning to leave Paul.

Daryl, the typical, laid back, carefree, man with no commitments. He loves Maria as much as she loves him and is prepared to do anything to get her out of her marriage.

Dole, the small town sheriff. A single man with no family. He takes every crime seriously and has one unsolved suspicious death that haunts him. He will never close the case.

Those are the real characters, but there’s a fifth that hangs over every page of the book.

The mysterious author J.T LeBeau. One of the world’s top crime writers, every book a best seller, every book contains unpredictable twists.

LeBeau has never been seen, nobody alive knows their true identity. They maintain their privacy explicitly, nobody can ever find out who they are.

The book opens with one of the main characters at the memorial for LeBaux, he’s about to kill the person he thinks is the real Lebeau. Just as he’s about to pull a gun a hand is placed on his shoulder and a voice whispers in his ear. “I know who you are J.T LeBeau”

The next line of the book is set 4 month earlier. And from there the book traces the story up to the point where the statement is whispered.

In between is the most compelling story I have read for years.

The plot had me comfortable with who was who, and who was LeBeau, until it didn’t. And when the twists started to come it just raised the story to another level.

Even the last few chapters snuck up and kicked me in the butt.

It’s not often I enthuse about a book much in my day to day life, but I’ve been telling everybody about this one. A definite must read recommendation from me.

Pages: 388. Publisher: Headline. Available now. Audiobook length: 11 hours 43 mins. Narrator Laurence Bouvard

The Octagon. C. J Merritt

There’s a massive gap in the book market for decent espionage thrillers.

This book fills that gap very nicely thank you.

My formative years of reading, when I really became a proper bookworm , was the mid to late 1970s.

Back then this type of book was a staple in all bookshops.

Writers like DeMille, Ludlum, MacLean and the likes were my favourite reads.

With the exception of the early Tom Clancy books this genre has been sadly neglected ever since.

Until now.

Merritt is right up there with those authors, and has looked at today’s international security threats and come up with a brilliant story.

Stella McRae is a former MI6 Agent runner who is now working in the private sector, having set up her own Intelligence Agency.

When a former colleague is killed after giving her a drunken, rambling, cryptic brief into a current threat she feels compelled to look into it.

Tommy Kane is an ex SAS soldier and the only person Stella trusts to help her as she tries to uncover the threat by moving through Europe.

Back home her only employee Hoss, a nerdy social media and gaming geek, is trying to unravel the cryptic clues given by Stella’s friend, and the new ones she and Tommy are uncovering.

None of this story requires the reader to suspend reality, in fact it’s frighteningly realistic.

As Stella and Tommy work their way through Scandinavia and Europe they begin to uncover a plot to destabilise Europe.

Mystery figures lurk in the back ground prying on local extremest groups and hatching a plot for a multi city terrorist attack.

The one thing Stella’s friend told her in plain, straightforward English, before he was murdered, was “don’t trust anybody. They have people everywhere”

So going it alone is the only option for Stella and Tommy.

But is that a wise move.

A ritualistic murder marks the start of the terror campaign, but is only a small event that goes largely unnoticed.

The main event is days away and the consequences will be horrific and far reaching.

Tommy and Stella push themselves to their limits but will they stop it in time.

I got invited to read the ARC of this and I’m so glad I said yes.

There is no cliffhanger ending but there is an opening for a follow up, and just the thought of that has me excited.

Pages: 400. Publisher: Michael Joseph. Realise Date: 28th May 2026

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

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

Deaths Head

Michael Alexander McCarthy

I’m going to start this review with a quote from the book.

“He had been so engrossed in his grandfather’s journal that he read on into the late afternoon without stopping to eat or make himself a drink”

That s exactly what happened to me reading this book. I read, and read and read. This was as close as I’ve gotten to a one sitting read in a long time.

It transformed me back to reading one of my earliest favourite authors, Sven Hassel, and his stories of a band of German Soldiers during WWII.

No glamour, just the horrors of war. The conflict of the regular soldier carrying out orders of delusional, psychopathic, leaders and the gradual numbing of their own moral compasses until they fought as much for their own survival, as they did for the “greater cause”

So who is reading what journal.

David Strachan is a successful business man living in Singapore. He receives notice that his grandfather had passed away in Scotland, and as the next of kin he returns to oversee the clearing of the house and arrange the funeral.

What he finds is that the nice Polish Grandfather he knew was not the person he thought he was.

And Grandad has left a journal relating his early life on the Poland German border, and the fact that as Hitlers war machine was gearing up for war, he had joined the notorious SS.

The journal would have made a great standalone book on its own but wrapped up in the consequences of the effect it will have on Strachan, and what happens after he has finished the journal, this makes for a story which is a cut above.

The story contained in the journal reminded me a lot of the Sven Hassel books but also of the best war book I’ve ever read, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. The parallels with this book are striking, especially the traumatic psychological effects the experiences of the young soldiers have on them.

A must read.

Published by Rogue Maille Publishing. Print length 395 pages

Crow Moon. Suzy Ashley

If Hitchcock had directed a film starting Miss Marple this would have been the plot.

Set in a remote Scottish village, around the time of the crow moon, the plot is set in the current day but has at its base ancient folklore.

Martha Strangeways is a reporter who is on extended leave following the death of her young twins in a house fire. She has a teenage son from a previous relationship, and unknown to her he had a dabble in the occult with two friends, one of which is found dead in the woods with a verse from an poem written in his back.

The police carry out a major investigation but Martha, who is carrying out her own unofficial investigation, isn’t sure they are doing enough.

The Police Senior Investigator recognises the benefits of having a renowned journalist, who lives locally, on his side, and agrees to share information with her as long as she is not working as a journalist.

She isn’t, she’s investigating because she’s made the connection that the police don’t want to take seriously, and she’s worried for other teenagers, including her son.

When a girl, another of the three teenagers who dabbled in the occult goes missing Martha starts to make spurious links, and disagrees with the police when they think they know who is to blame.

The setting for this book, and the premise of the story, are dark and could have been written by James Herbert. As I’ve already said the main character of Martha could have come from the pen of Agatha Christie.

That simple formula has produced a cracking story.

As far a debut books go this is one of, if not the best, I’ve read.

Publisher: Orenda Books. Pages: 402.

Audio Book length. 10 hours 18 mins. Narrator Sarah Barron

Age of Vice. Deepti Kapoor

A story of greed, corruption and abuse.

Based in India this book follows a group of people.

A boy from an impoverished village that is sold into servitude.

A rich spoilt brat, the son of gangster whose raping villagers of their land and children.

A journalist who wants to get to the bottom of everything that is happening in the villages, only to find herself in a world of alcohol and drugs that sends her life spiralling out of control

There lives are thrown together, over years, the good becoming bad and the bad becoming worse.

At the core of the story is greed, corruption and the Caste System.

One thing that this cooking pot of characters, greed, and corruption is sure to bring is an explosive end.

What it delivers is a slow building pressure cooker of a story that had me hooked from the very beginning.

My allegiances changed as I moved through the book. My liking for some characters changed to hate, my hate for others ……just got worse, but it added to the magnetism of the story.

Brilliant.

If you are a person that only reads one book a year, and are looking for that poolside read.

This is it.

Pages: 589. Publisher: Fleet. Available now

The Lies You Wrote. Brianna Labuskes

Of all the crime fiction books I’ve read, and that stretches into many hundreds, this is the first one I’ve read that has a Forensic Linguistic expert as it’s main character.

It’s an original approach and it really works. I can’t remember how many times I disappeared down a Google Rabbit Hole researching some of the terms and phrases used in this book, and it’s fascinating.

FBI linguistics specialist Raisa Susanto is called in to assist in a case which appears to be a copy cat murder.

A famous murder suicide some years before has been the point of speculation for the usual crime conspiracy theorists for years.

A young man murdered his mother and father before killing himself and leaving his three younger sisters without a family.

He left a suicide note and the local police decided it was a slam-dunk, open-and-shut case.

For years people have theorised that the investigation was too short. There were rumours in the small community that Alex Parker was a youth with issues, accusations of assaults by him on young girls were brushed over because his Mom and Dad were almost town “royalty”.

But there were rumours about them as well, was it a really a perfect marriage?

The suicide note has long been an item of speculation. Susanto uses it herself in lectures, hypothesising on its credibility and authenticity.

When a couple are found murdered, posed in the same way that the Parkers had been found, the FBI launch an investigation with Susanto, and Forensic Psychologist Callum Kilkenny making up part of the team.

The usual scepticism is thrown Susanto’s way. How can she be of any help.

But she can. Word patterns, phrases, unusual use of terms, inconsistencies in tenses, are just a small way she looks at the words written by different people involved in the investigation

And, because of her familiarity with the original crime, through her studies and lectures, she is uniquely placed to start spotting links.

So is this really a copycat, or is it more sinister.

As much as Alex Parker was a hateful figure, and easy to identify as the killer of his parents, did he really commit suicide or was he another victim.

This is a cracker of a story. I loved its originality.

Years ago I was involved in a murder investigation where Forensic Linguistics played a huge part in getting a man convicted of murdering his wife.

I’ve since seen that linguistic expert lecture to college and university students, and hold them captivated by the way he and his team have aided in criminal investigations.

So I’m not surprised that somebody has used a linguistic expert as their main character.

Thinking about it I’m more surprised by the fact that this is the first, that I’ve read, where it’s happened.

Billed as book one in the Raisa Susanto series I can only hope it’s the first of many, because if this book is anything to go by, it’s going to be a fantastic series. 🔲

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer. Publishing date: 28th November 2023 available on preorder