Tag: Thriller

Dark Water Girls. Maegan Beaumont

Georgia Falls has been off the Island for years, running away after she found out the man she thought loved her had got another girl pregnant.

Now she’s back, having served for years in Military Police, and she’s confused by what she’s found.

She’s inherited a mansion and lots of money, confusing because she was a baby abandoned into care.

She’s found that the man she thought she loved has recently come out of prison having served time for attempting to kill his father.

But the most confusing thing is that when she is sent a text asking for help, and she finds a dead woman who has been sexually assaulted.

What follows is a great story.

George is a great character who is left frustrated by the lies people on the island are telling her.

The island suffers from the American caste system. There are those who have, and they really do have, money, mansions, boats, connections.

And there are those that don’t, and they really don’t.

The strangely large amount of adopted girls, especially by one rich family should have rung bells years ago, but who in the family, if anybody, is the problem.

A vicious biker gang run Island Pub where the black and white, of the haves and have nots, blurs into the grey of drugs abuse and prostitution.

George is convinced that one of her fellow adopted girls has been killed at the bikers pub whilst another sits alongside the Gang leader snaring insults at her.

The Sherif, Alex, the man she wakes up with most mornings, is telling her the death was the result of a drug overdose, and warning her off her own investigation.

When she realises she’s under surveillance, by other police officers she becomes really concerned.

Who is to be trusted on the island.

Those she always thought she could trust seem to be misleading her at best, trying to kill her at worst.

The one person she doesn’t want to trust seems to be the only person looking out for her.

This is a fast paced story that had me building hypotheses after hypotheses in my own mind.

It’s written in the first person from two peoples view point.

Georgia. The main character, the island returnee, the confused person trying to piece together what is actually happening on the island.

Lincoln, the rich kid who George ran away from all those years ago, the man who had been in prison, the man she really shouldn’t trust, the only one who seems to be looking out for her.

A great read and hopefully the start of a new series.

Publisher: Bookouture. Pages: 402 (Guide only) Available now.

Frozen Souls. Rita Herron

When a serial killer has to start leaving bodies out in the open to make room for their latest victim things are seriously wrong.

The snow storm should have hidden the body, possibly for months but every crime books favourite unnamed character, the dog walker stumbles not only across the body, but also has a close encounter with the killer.

Detective Ellie Reeves is the first to the scene and is about to start a game of cat and mouse with the killer that will revoke memories of her own childhood.

The star of this book for me is the setting. Rita Herron uses the remote township of Crooked Creek for the small town scenario really well. Everybody knows everybody, except who is the killer.

They also know where to find Ellie, and how to show their frustrations when the case isn’t going well.

So when another girl goes missing the pressure starts to mount. Will that cause her to make a mistake, or let a slip of concentration leave her exposed.

One things for sure when everybody knows the towns detective, her history, and where to find her, that means so does the killer.

And, if you are a killer who thinks a Detective might be on to you, what would you do.

Is the killer in their own community, or is it one of the strangers who have set up remote communities around the mountains at the start of the Appalachian Trail

The characters Herron uses in all of her books are believable and engaging, when they are on the right side of the law, and utterly chilling when they are not.

But, as I’ve already said, it’s the setting that brings chills, and not just because of the snow storms. This book has that psychological thriller slant that had me on the edge of my seat.

A stunning read.

Pages: 449. Publisher: Bookouture Available now

The Lost Boys. Rachel Amphlett

The murder of a youth, at a fair leads, to a disturbing investigation

Why is a young teenager miles from where he should be?

Why has he been stabbed and left dead in an alley?

What are the pills found close to his body?

This story covers some of the more scary issues in today’s society. Homeless or desperate young men running County Boundary drugs, Gangs Cuckooing vulnerable people, scared young people making bad decisions.

Detective Sergeant Mark Turpin is part of the investigation team. Both himself and Detective Constable Jan were close-by at the time of the killing, and arrived on the scene quickly. Both are affected in different ways. Jan struggles with the psychological issues raised by the death of a youngster, but for Mark things get a lot more personal.

The story of the crimes, and the investigation, are brilliant, but for me, the thing that elevates this book is the look at how vulnerable Police Officers are. Not every cop becomes hardened by experience. Jan in particular is affected psychologically by the first murder in this book.

The other thing that made me smile was the research that went into the book. Yes I have a personal interest in that, but when I know an author has asked for advice, on what is a relatively small part of the story, and has used that advice so well to make just a few paragraphs realistic, I know that all of the rest of the book is also researched and realistic.

This is a great book in a great series, but it can be read as a standalone story.

Available now

Amok. Sebastian Fitzek

This book took me straight back to some of the best books I read as a young man. The way it is written, and the story that unfolds reminded me of great books like Rivers of Babylon and Cathedral by Nelson Demille, brilliant stories that hooked me into the crime thriller genre

In this book a desperate man takes over a radio station in Berlin during the breakfast show.

Jan is a Psychologist who is convinced his Girlfriend is alive, a year after a Policeman knocked at his door to tell him she’d been killed in a car crash.

To get everybody’s attention he takes hostages and plays an evil game where he changes the radio shows competition. Now people aren’t answering the phone to win a lot of money. They have to use the right phrase to save a hostage. If they don’t…………

Ira is a barely functioning alcoholic who is about to take her own life. That is until she is drawn into the hostage situation as the Police Chief negotiator.

What follows is an intriguing story with that many twists and turns at times I wasn’t sure who were the good guys and who weren’t, but that’s what made it such a good story.

Ira is brought in to take over the negotiations from another Officer, at Jan’s request, but why her. Ira is also a trained psychological but who is analysing who. The dialogue between the two is mesmerising.

There are some brilliant characters in this book, amongst them is the Masseuse, a gang boss with his own unique way of killing. Spine tingling reading.

The complexity of the story kept me gripped to the end. At no time in the book did I get who was going to be on which side of the law. But when the last page was turned it all made sense, and at no time did I get the feeling the story was unrealistic or deliberately misleading.

Sebastian Fitzek is a new author to me, but one I will be looking for in the future.

Pages: 464. Publisher: Head of Zeus. Published 11th November 2021

The Girl at My Door. Rebecca Griffiths

Before I say anything else I’m going to say I loved this book.

Why say that, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to do the book justice.

It’s a slow burner to start with, almost to the point of a “cozy-crime” story, but it’s far from that.

It’s gripping and chilling.

Set in London just after the war, amongst the clubs of Soho the book is filled with great characters, and not all of them are fictional.

Queen is Osbourne is a Jazz singer with a dream. Unfortunately her dream is shattered and she ends up on the door step of a man she has been told will help her.

What she doesn’t know is that she is walking into the hands of a serial killer, John Reginald Christie.

I was surprised I had never heard of this real life killer. A Google search soon put that right, and sent me down a rabbit hole of research for hours.

Christie has been watching Queenie for a long time, today we’d call it stalking, and now she’s at his door.

What follows is a brilliant story that weaves fact with fiction in such a way as it’s almost like reading a true-account story as it happens.

There are some great characters in the book, the settings are atmospheric in a way that suits the story and adds that pinch off suspense.

I really did enjoy this.

If you like books by people like Simon Michael and Ray Celestin you will love this. Fact woven with fiction is a brilliant sub-genre within the crime fiction section of the book shelves.

And now there is a new writer in their ranks Rebecca Griffiths has written an absolute cracker

Pages: 379. Publisher: Bookouture. Available now. Audio and ebook

Little Bones. Patricia Gibney

For anybody that hasn’t found series of books, by Patricia Gibney, featuring DI Lottie Parker, you are missing out on one of the best Police Thriller series on the shelves.

For those of you that have, you are in for a treat with this one, I think it’s the best so far.

Lottie is called to a gruesome murder the victim has an old fashioned razor blade in her hand.

A woman receives a hand written note with three Rusty Razor Blades inside, she knows she’ll be dead within days, if not before the end of the day. Especially when she sees news of a murder on the news.

Somebody is coming for her. She knows why. She’s scared and so she should be.

Somebody is watching the Police. He wants to help, he has information, but he also suffers blackouts and doesn’t know if he’s the killer.

And all of that in the first few chapters.

Lottie and her team have their work cut out with this investigation.

You can rely on Patricia Gibney to keep it real, and this is no exception. Her books are like the written version of the real life, fly-on-the-wall, crime documentaries that follow live investigations. But her books are access all areas.

She takes you inside the head of the detectives, the criminals, the witnesses and the victims. She shows you the affect of a crime on everybody it touches, and throughout the series she has shown us the affect the work has on DI Lottie Parker and her family.

This book arrived in my inbox on a Friday morning, it went straight to the top of my to-be-read list, and was finished by Sunday, it gripped me from the first chapter. Brilliant.

Pages: 407. Publisher: Bookouture. Available now.

Dead Mercy. Noelle Holten

Right at the back of this book is an insight into why this story, and the series, is so good.

A modest Eleven lines under the title About the Author.

In those lines it relates Noelle Holten’s qualifications and experience.

A Senior Probation Officer for 18 years covering Domestic Violence and Abuse cases.

3 BA (Hons) degrees, Philosophy, Sociology (Crime and Deviance) and Community Justice, and to top it of a Masters in Criminology.

So Noelle is one of those rare breeds, a person that has experience to back her qualifications, and that really stands out and puts her way ahead of many authors.

The story sees DC Maggie Jamieson and the Staffordshire Police Major Organised Crime welcoming back Dr Kate Maloney to the team, and her Psychologist insights are going to be priceless.

When Maggie is called to the first murder scene she finds the victim has been bound, assaulted, and set alight.

Why would anybody do that to a person, is the fire part of the killers method of killing or is it an attempt to destroy evidence.

When a second body turns up under similar circumstances the phrase serial killer gets banded about but Maggie is quick to point out that you need three deaths before you can use that category. She spoke too soon.

As the body count mounts the team work their way through the investigation, building working hypothesis as they go. As in a real investigation suspects come to the fore, and hypothesis are built around the reasons for the killing; and as in a real investigation it takes time to get it right.

Although the reader gains an insight into the killers motives, through the occasional chapter written from their point of view, the Police are frustratingly chipping away at the edges without quite nailing it, until they inevitably put the pieces together, but how many people are going to die first.

They say never judge a book by its cover, and I would usually agree, but this book has a stunning cover and the story is every bit as good.

I mentioned Noelle’s qualifications and experience. She’s walked the walk, she has all of the t-shirts, and now she’s writing books about the things she knows.

If you want your crime fiction realistic, if you want the crimes, criminals, victims, and Police Officers to be truly reflective of the real thing, this book, and this series are what you are looking for.

Pages: 400. Publisher: One More Chapter, Harper Collins

Angel Maker. Morgan Greene

So. Is this the start of a new series or not.

Who cares it’s absolutely brilliant, and is one of my must reads of 2021.

I read this book in 2 days, and would have read it in one sitting if I had the time.

Why do I ask if it’s the start of a new series, because there are several places where it fleetingly mentions big cases the main character, DI Jamie Johansson, has worked on in the Met.

The question is answered by the author at the end of the book. He thanks the reader for reading the book and explains that there have been previous books about Jamie’s cases in London, but that he has always wanted to write Scandium Noir, and that this is the real start of The Jamie Johansson series

It works, it really works, and for me, yes it is the start of a new series and I’ve just downloaded the next, Rising Tide, on to my Kindle. Will I read the previous books? Yes but I’m in no rush. I’ll read them as a prequel at some time.

The story

Jamie Johansson is a British Police Officer who moved to the U.K. with her mother following a messy Divorce from her Swedish Detective father.

Her father committed suicide not long after capturing and incarcerating the Angel Maker, a man who had raped and killed teenage girls before posing them as a praying Angel with tree boughs carved and pushed through the bodies.

The Angel Maker has just died in prison and now a new body has been found, a fresh kill, carried out and posed in exactly the same way as the other seven.

Swedish Police Detective Andres Wiik has requested Jamie’s attendance as he believes that she may know something about the original cases that was lost when her father died. She had been the little girl often seen around the police station with her dad. The apple of his eye he took on hunting and fishing trips. She may have been told something about those original investigations, and she is a cop with a huge reputation for solving cases.

When she arrives she’s taken to the scene, surprisingly still well preserved because of the cold weather.

From there she’s taken to a house, and this might be why she’s really there. It’s her fathers old house, the one she thought her mother had sold, but it’s actually hers and hasn’t been touched since her fathers death. It’s a time capsule that takes her back to the good, and not so good, days with her father.

His old note books hold a wealth of information but not much about the Angel Maker case.

The story of the investigation into the current crime obviously throws doubt on the original conviction based on her dads investigations, but that is the least of her worries.

This is a cracker of a story, one of, if not the best, I’ve read this year

There are twist and turns in the plot which had me thinking I had the crime solved, then I hadn’t. I knew who the murderer was, I didn’t. How the book was going to end, I really didn’t.

The end of this book is a real hook, and I swallowed it.

I didn’t see the last chapter coming, and it made what was already a great read, into the opening of what I think is going to be a great series.

I don’t do star markings, but if I did, this would be one more than the top mark six out of five. No hesitation.

Pages: 444. Publisher: Mercury Books. Available now

Cross My Heart. D.K Hood

I read on another review that this book had a very dark beginning. That was an understatement.

This is the 12th book in the Kane and Alton series and if you are a fan you will know that DK Hood can come up with some chilling storylines, but in this one she’s surpassed herself.

With her sidekick, partner, and protector Dave Kane away at a conference Sheriff Jena Alton is home alone, in her house, in the woods.

What she doesn’t yet know is that there is a man in the mountains, capturing women and teasing them, by allowing them to escape and then hunting them down like game animals. Until he gets fed up of them, then he………..I’ll leave that to your imagination but I’d bet you won’t come up with what.

As Jenna lies alone in bed with just Dave’s dog, and her cat for company a vicious storm hits, and during it somebody launches an attack on her house.

After the storm the a grisly discovery is made attached to her house, with a message.

The message, and the method of attack, lead the team to think of one man. The problem is he is prison, for life, and Jenna put him there.

What follows is a story that is a heady mix of CJ Box and Greg Iles. Box for the way the story leads to the mountain trails and into the woods, Iles for the unfiltered psychological edge. Stunning

Some of the scenes in the book are so well portrayed I found myself sweating for no other reason than the tension that was in the story.

It ticks all the psychological fears that are inherent in most people, storms, fires, being out in the woodlands on mountains in the dark, being stalked by somebody you just can’t get away from. Hood has written what many people see in their nightmares.

But it’s all well within the realms of believable realism and at no point did I think “no, that’s not going to happen”

A great book in a great series.

Does it need reading in the correct sequence, it would be better, but it could be read as a standalone.

Publisher: Bookouture. Pages: 290

A Place To Bury Strangers. Mark Dawson

In my last review of one of Mark Dawson’s books I said Atticus Priest was a mix of Sherlock Holmes and Cormoran Strike, I should have said “ the perfect mix”

Priest is just the on the right side of arrogance, just on the right side of ignorant, just on the right side of insecure about his feelings.

But he is very much on the right side of genius when it comes to observations, deductions, and making connections other people would take ages to get to.

In this book Priest is approached by his ex-colleague, ex-boss, ex-lover DCI Mackenzie (Mack) Jones to help her work out where the rest of the body, that goes with the femur found by a dog, is located.

When he finds a disrupted grave in an abandoned grave yard, in an abandoned village, on a military firing range he has no idea what a large investigation it is going to lead to. Nor does he know just how involved he is going to become, and has been involved with.

It sounds complex, but it’s not. It’s a brilliant story that flows brilliantly but is hard to comment on without giving away spoilers.

The book starts with the end of the trial that resulted from the investigation Atticus carried out in the last book.

His business is booming because of the publicity the case brought.

So it’s surprising when he takes on the case of a missing teenager.

It’s not so surprising that when Mack comes calling he goes to her aid.

Trying to concentrate on both cases Atticus is also caught up in his feelings for Mack, but typically he doesn’t know how to deal with them.

Can he keep his mind straight enough to not miss something.

The body count at the abandoned church rises, and the bodies are much fresher in the ground than they should be.

I would highly recommend reading this book, but I’d make sure you read the other book in the series first click the link below for my review of that one. ⤵️⤵️

https://nigeladamsbookworm.com/2021/06/10/the-house-in-the-woods-mark-dawson/

Publisher: Unputdownable. Pages: 436