Tag: Reading

CTG Reviews: Murder on Thames by Neil Richards and Matthew Costello

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Murder on Thames cover image

Murder on Thames cover image

Murder on Thames is the first instalment of the new Cherringham Murder Mystery series, an eBook series that will see a new novella-length mystery solved every month. Published by Bastei Entertainment (an imprint of Germany’s Bastei Lübbe) the series by Neil Richards (based in the UK) and Matthew Costello (based in the US) will be published both in English and German.

What the blurb says: “Cherringham is a quiet and peaceful town in the Cotswolds. Time moves slowly here, and nothing out of the ordinary ever happens, until one morning a woman’s body is discovered in the river. Sarah Edwards has just returned to Cherringham with her two children following the breakdown of her marriage. Sarah had been friends with Sammi Jackson – the woman in the river – before they both moved to London and she’s certain there is more to her death than meets the eye. But juggling the school run and her job as a web designer doesn’t leave much time to solve murder mysteries.

After the death of his wife, former NYPD homicide detective Jack Brennan has retired to Cherringham hoping for a quiet life. He soon realises “peace and quiet” isn’t really him and, despite his misgivings, he’s persuaded by Sarah to help her look into Sammi’s death. It quickly becomes clear that the case isn’t as simple as the police hope. From her violent ex-boyfriend to her alcoholic father, it seems everyone has something to hide. Sarah and Jack will need to use all their wits to get to the bottom of this case.”

If you’re a fan of Midsomer Murders and other ‘cosy’ (or ‘cozy’) crime drama and novels then this eBook series is well worth checking out. It ticks all the right boxes: quaint English village – check, traditional pub – check. Traditional game of cricket – check. Nasty goings on, and murderous intentions, lurking beneath the picturesque and seemingly tranquil setting – check, check, check.

Narrowboat-dwelling, retired ex-NYPD detective, Jack Brennan, and recently returned to the village, divorced single-mum, Sarah Edwards, make a great double act. Although I did think that Sarah seemed to get over her friend’s death rather too quickly, the spark between the two main characters, and the pace at which they launch themselves into their ‘off the books’ investigation, carried me along with the story and kept me turning the pages.

A fun read. And, at this time of year, perfect for curling up by the fire with while the rain pours down outside!

Murder on Thames is out now, and the second episode in the series, Mystery at the Manor, will be published on 16th January 2014.

[Many thanks to Bastei Entertainment for my review copy of Murder on Thames]

CTG Interviews: SJ Bolton author of Like This, For Ever

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SJ Bolton (c) Mark Basse

SJ Bolton (c) Mark Basse

Today I’m delighted to be joined on the CTG blog by crime writer SJ Bolton, author of the Lacey Flint series, whose fabulous novel LIKE THIS, FOR EVER is now out in paperback. 

So, first question, like all of your novels, Like This, For Ever tells a dark, gritty and powerful story. What is it that prompted you to write a crime series?

I believe the most successful authors are those writing books that they would love to read themselves. I’ve never been a great fan of traditional crime fiction, veering instead towards stories of the supernatural. I love the dark, creepy atmosphere, the sense that normal rules don’t apply and that anything can happen (and usually does.) At the same time, such stories can be frustrating and I often have a sense of the writer feeling he needn’t bother tying up the loose ends because – hey – it’s the supernatural, and the ghost did it! Such a story might be enjoyable in the telling but will ultimately fail to satisfy. What I try to do is marry the two. A sort of crime/horror mash up, if you like, where the story is as dark and scary as those of the supernatural but in which the narrative is logical, explained and complete.

 

When you get the idea for a novel what usually sparks it for you – plot or character?

Quite often it’s location. I’ve long loved and feared the River Thames in equal measure, and find the lesser known stretches around Greenwich, Deptford and Rotherhithe completely fascinating, so it’s no surprise that they feature so much in Now You See Me, Like This, For Ever, and my current work in progress. After that, it’s plot. I’m very much a story-driven writer, and put a lot of time into planning the twists and turns of my narrative. Characters, I find, can usually look after themselves.

 

Tell us a little about your writing process, do you plot the story out in advance or dive right in and see where it takes you?

Were I to try the latter, it would take me straight to the gin bottle! My books have very complex plots. (Not by design, I hasten to add, I try every year to write a simple book but the blind alleys and red herrings just sneak their way in there.)  Knowing how complex they’re likely to turn out, I need at least the outline of a plan. Generally speaking, the more I can plan in advance, the easier the writing process. Sadly, my brain just isn’t big enough to hold an entire plot, so I have to plan as much as I can and hope to fill in the gaps as I go along.

 

What tips and tricks have you learnt that you’d like to pass on to any aspiring crime writers?

Get to the end of the first draft as quickly as you can. Don’t listen to that small, snide voice telling you that it’s rubbish, that the idea will never work, that you need to bin it and start something else. Finish the draft. There is no problem that can’t be fixed. There is no piece of writing that can’t be improved. And the task always looks so much more manageable when you are working with a complete, if imperfect, manuscript. The biggest hurdle facing aspiring writers isn’t getting a publisher, it’s getting finished.

 

And after Like This, For Ever what’s next for Lacey Flint. Do you have another novel in progress, and if so when will we be able to read it?

Lacey Flint No 4 has just gone into production. I’m not allowed to announce the title yet, but in it we see that Lacey, having been through the mill in previous books, has turned away from her promising detective career and gone back into uniform. She’s joined the marine unit of the Metropolitan Police and bought a houseboat moored at Deptford Creek. One day, out swimming, she meets a mermaid.  It will be published in May 2014.

 

Sounds fantastic. A huge thank you to SJ Bolton for dropping by and answering our questions.

LIKE THIS, FOR EVER cover image

LIKE THIS, FOR EVER cover image

I reviewed LIKE THIS, FOR EVER back in April when the hardback come out and highly recommend it. Here’s what I said …

What the blurb says: “Bright red. Like petals. Or rubies. Little red droplets. Barney knows the killer will strike again soon. The victim will be another boy, just like him. He will drain the body of blood, and leave it on a Thames beach. There will be no clues for detectives Dana Tulloch and Mark Joesbury to find. There will be no warning about who will be next. There will be no good reason for Lacey Flint to become involved … And no chance that she can stay away.”

It’s hard to write a review of this novel without included spoilers and I don’t want to spoil the story for you. So all I’m saying is that Barney, an eleven-year-old boy with a gift for spotting patterns, is looking for the connections to help him solve the child murders while he’s home alone while his Dad works late. He’s also Lacey Flint’s neighbour.

The story is shown primarily from three perspectives – Barney’s, Lacey’s and Dana’s. This lets you, as the reader, in on a lot more of the facts than any one of the main characters have – a sure-fire recipe for heart-banging moments!

The story is artfully plotted, with many possibilities for who is behind the killings. This, and the multiple twists and turns, create an unputdownable puzzle that kept me reading well into the night.

But it wasn’t just the puzzle that kept me reading. SJ Bolton creates such deeply drawn characters, like the smart, often strong and yet also emotionally fragile heroine, Lacey Flint, that I felt compelled to read on just to stay with them on their journey within the story.

As well as motivation to murder, the story touches on a number of themes including modern-day vampire culture, online stalking and how social media influences, aids and inhibits investigations.

Utterly gripping, tense and suspenseful: this is a real page-turner of a crime novel.

 

Guest Post: Spooks and Things by Bernard Besson

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Author Bernard Besson

Author Bernard Besson

The Greenland Breach cover image

The Greenland Breach cover image

Today’s guest poster, Bernard Besson, has had a long career in French intelligence and law enforcement. He is a former chief of staff of the French FBI, was involved in dismantling Soviet spy rings in France and Western Europe at the fall of the Soviet Union, and is one of the country’s top specialists in economic intelligence. He is also a prize-winning thriller writer—eight of his novels have been published in French. His latest, The Greenland Breach, is a spy novel set on a backdrop of global warming and was just published by Le French Book. Here he talks to use about what this book means to him and how he writes.

Why did you start writing thrillers?

I got inspired to write my first thriller when I was at the DST, which is French counter-espionage, or the equivalent of the FBI. I was very lucky to be working during the fall of communism and the Soviet Union and learned how networks of Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and Romanian spies worked with their allies in France.

Where did the idea for The Greenland Breach come from?

The Greenland Breach is my first eco-thriller. It was the debate among scientists in France that led me to write this novel. They do not all agree on the causes of global warming.

The most prosperous nations are those that are able to understand and anticipate economic changes and well as natural changes. In The Greenland Breach we have both. It was very tempting to tell a story that recounted this reality. Fiction makes it possible to tell more truth than an academic work filled with numbers and statistics.

And I like to write about things that question or concern me. This book is about climate change and its political and economic consequences.  Greenland and the North Pole hold immense mining, maritime and agricultural opportunities. These will belong to those who will know how to discover them, as long as they have a strategy. The battle for the Arctic has already begun. It opposes Canada, Europe, the United States and Russia. The intelligence services of those countries are mobilized. And European and American businesses that have complicated relationships with the intelligence services—which can be both entertaining and dramatic.

What does this book mean for you?

For me, this book was an opportunity to pay homage to the men and women who work in intelligence, with whom I worked for a long time. It is not enough to collect information by satellite and intercept emails and telephone communications around the planet. You need to know what to do with it. It is not the information that counts, but asking the right questions. Intelligence, courage and an ability to adapt to the unforeseen are qualities that are just as important as the technology you use. I also show in The Greenland Breach that spying is only interesting if the political and economic leaders know what they want, and want it for a long time.

James Bond and Jason Bourne always seem to have firearms at hand. What’s the real story?

Ninety-five per cent of an intelligence officer’s assignments consist of gathering information and verifying it. Computers and software, along with general knowledge and conversational skills are more useful in this area than guns. Fortunately, I have never in my career used a weapon or killed anyone. I am happy about that. My characters don’t do it much either, or at least not with the usual kind of weapons. In The Greenland Breach, John Spencer Larivière handles the bad guy with a screwdriver, and Victoire Augagneur downs an adversary with a broken windowpane.

How would you characterize espionage today?

Today, keeping things top secret is less important than being quick to think and to gather information. One of the key battlegrounds is business, and both countries and multinational corporations are fighting for key strategic knowledge they hope to be the first to use. In my novel The Greenland Breach, my heroes are little-known actors in this economic war for the future. Those with the best information will win the battle. The blood splattered on Greenland’s ice cap belongs to shadow fighters, mercenaries fighting battles we don’t learn about on the evening news.

The Greenland Breach is published on 30th October 2013.

To find out more hop on over to http://www.thegreenlandbreach.com

CTG Reviews: Wicked Game by Adam Chase

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Wicked Game cover image

Wicked Game cover image

What the blurb says: “Joshua Thane, aka Hex, is a freelance assassin. His next target is Dr Mary Wilding, a British microbiologist suspected of trading secrets. Breaking into her house, he discovers someone has beaten him to it – she’s already dead. The portable hard drive he’s ordered to steal is also missing.

About to flee the scene, Hex comes face-to-face with Wilding’s teenage son. According to normal rules of engagement, Hex should kill the boy to protect his own identity and professional reputation, but turbulent memories from his past trigger a crisis of conscience.

Bewildered by his actions, Hex allows the boy to live and flees; yet his nightmare has barely begun. With his own life under threat for apparently botching the job, he embarks on an international quest to find the real killer and redeem his soul. Using his old contacts, including crime boss Billy Squeeze, he unravels a criminal conspiracy to develop and detonate an ethnically specific biological weapon. Rogue state, terrorist, or organised crime, whoever has the information, holds the power to deal to the highest bidder. And the British security services want it back …”

An experienced and respected assassin, Hex finds himself facing a very different problem and playing a very different role to his usual ‘MO’. Taking up the mantle of investigator, Hex uses his underworld contacts to find information, and forms an uneasy alliance with MI5’s dynamic agent Inger McCallen.

The story twists and turns as Hex uncovers the terrifying capabilities of Dr Wilding’s research, and begins to unravel the web of dangerous people that surround it as it becomes the most sought after weapon on the market.

While Hex’s profession as a freelance assassin doesn’t immediately endear him to the reader, he certainly makes for an interesting and complex character. He’s straight talking, action orientated, and full of determination. As the story progresses, and Hex puts himself on the line in order to recover the lethal bioweapon, I found him increasingly empathetic.

This fast moving spy thriller cranks up the pace to rocket speed in the final third of the book. The first novel in the new ‘Hex’ series, Wicked Game is sure to be enjoyed by fans and newbies to the genre alike. Definitely one to watch.

Recommended.

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Review: CROSS and BURN by Val McDermid

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What the blurb says: “Tony and Carol are facing the biggest challenge of their professional lives: how to live without each other. No one has seen Carol in three months, and the police brass no longer need Tony’s services. Even worse, both hold Tony responsible for the bloody havoc their last case wreaked on Carol’s life and family, and Carol has sworn she’ll never speak to Tony again. But just because Tony and Carol’s relationship is finished doesn’t mean that the killing is: a body has been discovered in an abandoned flat inhabited by squatters. Paula McIntyre, the number two detective investigating, is struggling to adapt to her new job and new boss who is emphatically not Carol. As connections to other missing or dead women emerge, a horrifying pattern becomes clear: someone is killing women, all of whom bear a striking resemblance to Carol Jordan. And when the evidence begins to point in a disturbing and unexpected direction, thinking the unthinkable seems the only possible answer.”

At the start of this book police detective Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Tony Hill are not in a good place. Carol is broken. She’s turned her back on her career and her friends and thrown herself into a restoration project. Blamed by Carol for her brother’s death, Tony is guilt-ridden and lost. He’s buried himself in his work and his living alone. The rest of the MIT have moved on, but things just aren’t the same in their new roles. But when Paula McIntyre, ex MIT and now newly appointed bagman to DCI Fielding, gets a call that puts her on a case to challenge both her skills and her loyalties she knows that she’ll need the help of her old colleagues to make sure justice is done.

As you’d expect from Val McDermid the story is beautifully crafted, and although the book is focused around a murder case,  it is the relationships between the characters that make it such compelling reading. The characters feel utterly real: smart, flawed, passionate, withdrawn, searching, misguided, determined. The relationships that bound them together at MIT and made the team so strong have drifted, but to solve the case Paula has to reconnect them. It’s not easy, but as she juggles the pressures of working a tough case under a new boss, the changed dynamic in her personal life of a teenage boy to look after with her partner, Elinor, and gradually draws in input from her MIT colleagues it seems that they’re getting closer to the killer. Then the forensic evidence points in a direction none of them would ever have expected.

With her new DCI unable to see past the forensics, Paula draws on the skills of her ex MIT colleagues – Carol, Tony, Stacey to name a few – to investigate an alternative line of enquiry. She’s treading a dangerous path, one false move and her career will be over. But some things are more important – justice, both for the victims and for the wrongfully accused. But as another woman goes missing, can Paula find the real killer and save his latest victim before it’s too late?

Luckily Paula isn’t alone. As Carol’s strong sense of justice, and her determination to see it brought, gradually bring her back into the environment she’d left behind. But the question remains: will Carol and Tony’s relationship ever recover?

Utterly compelling and unputdownable.

Highly recommended.

[With thanks to Grove Atlantic for my copy of CROSS and BURN]

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Review: Chilled to the Bone by Quentin Bates

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book cover

book cover

What the blurb says: “When a shipowner is found dead, tied to a bed in one of Reykjavik’s smartest hotels, sergeant Gunnhildur “Gunna” Gisladottir of the city police force sees no evidence of foul play, but still suspects things are not as cut and dried as they seem. As she investigates the shipowner’s untimely death, she stumbles across a discreet bondage society whose members are being systematically exploited and blackmailed.

But how does all this connect to a local gangster recently returned to Iceland after many years abroad, and the unfortunate loss of a government laptop containing sensitive data about various members of the ruling party? What begins as a straightforward case for Gunnhildur soon explodes into a dangerous investigation, uncovering secrets that ruthless men are ready to go to violent extremes to keep.”

It’s easy to like Gunna, she’s strong and determined, yet compassionate and giving: a hardworking detective and a dedicated mother juggling the complexities of modern life. As Gunna starts to unravel the threads that bind a set of seemingly unconnected crimes together, she uncovers a secret community that she’d never realised existed. When a witness goes missing, the question is can Gunna find the truth, and the culprits, before the sinister man impersonating a police office does?

Told through several viewpoints, in addition to Gunna’s, over the course of the story we learn how initially unconnected events have brought the main point-of-view characters – Baddo, Hekla and Joel Ingi – to their current situation, and how, even though they may not realise it, they are bound together by the secrets they keep and the choices they have made.

The tension builds steadily throughout the story. Each character is conflicted, some are criminal, but through showing their many facets, and relationships both work and personal, Bates has a way of making each of them empathetic.  I found myself caring about each of them, compelling me to keep turning the pages, hungry to find out what would happen.

I’ve never been to Iceland, but I loved the evocative imagery of this novel, and the chilling sense of cold, that made the setting really come alive for me. At first the Icelandic names took a little bit of getting used to, but they add wonderfully to the authentic feel of the story, and I was soon used to them (although I’m not sure that my pronunciation would be correct!).

This is a beautifully crafted, intricately plotted, atmospheric thriller.

Highly recommended.

 

[With thanks to C&R Crime for my copy of Chilled to the Bone]

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Review: Out of Sight Out of Mind by Evonne Wareham

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book cover

book cover

What the blurb says: “Madison Albi is a scientist with a very special talent – for reading minds. When she stumbles across a homeless man with whom she feels an inexplicable connection, she can’t resist the dangerous impulse to use her skills to help him.

J is a non-person – a vagrant who can’t even remember his own name. He’s got no hope, until he meets Madison. Is she the one woman who can restore his past?

Madison agrees to help J recover his memory, but as she delves deeper into his mind, it soon becomes clear that some secrets are better off staying hidden. “

Out of Sight Out of Mind might not be my usual type of read, but I found it really enjoyable.

It doesn’t fit neatly into a sub-genre bracket but, if you wanted to categorise it, I think it would be as romantic suspense with a dash of science fiction.

Told through the point-of-views of Madison, J and the shadowy people at ‘The Organization’, the reader is able to piece together information, alert to the increasing danger that Madison and J are unaware of until much later in the story. This adds an extra level of danger, up-ing the stakes, and keeping the reader on their edge of their seat, hoping that Madison will find out who, or what’s, behind J’s memory loss before it’s too late.

The main suspense in the story comes from the question: who is J? A mysterious (and rather sexy) character, he has no memory of his past, but he can remember how to navigate through London. When Madison tries to help him by reading his mind she encounters a wall that she’s unable to see through. As a research scientist at the top of her game, she throws all she’s got into the challenge of finding out just who J is.

As the relationship between Madison and J develops the reader gets to discover more about Madison’s past, and details about J’s life as he begins to remember things. There’s a lot of sexual tension between the two characters. The ‘will they, won’t they?’ question hangs over them for a large portion of the book as they both resist the attraction they feel for each other. This kept me hooked into the story, but I did, at times, want to scream at Madison to just kiss him and get on with it!

As Madison tries increasingly risky and unproven memory experiments, she manages to get past the wall and discover J’s sinister past. And that’s when the danger really escalates. After a gradual build in tension during the first two-thirds of the book, the final third races along to the action-packed finale.

My verdict: even if science fiction isn’t usually your thing, don’t let it put you off – this is a classy romantic suspense novel that’s definitely worth a read.

[My review copy of this novel was provided by Choc Lit publishers]

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