To catch a killer… Maybe you’ve got to be one…
Acacia Pines, USA. Sheriff Cohen’s life is falling apart – his father accidently burned down the retirement home, his wife has moved out, and his son is bullying other kids at school.
When high-school student, Lucas Connor, is abducted, Cohen sees a chance to get his life back on track – to win back his wife and scoop the reward money offered for Lucas’ safe return.
But as the body count rises, it becomes clear that Cohen’s going to have to make the kind of decision from which there’s no coming back … a decision with deadly consequences…
A furiously paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller exposing the dark underbelly of small-town life, His Favourite Graves is also a twisted and twisty story of father and son relationships, and the one last gamble of a desperate man to save everything…
Paul is an award-winning author who often divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where most of his novels are set, and Europe. He’s won the New Zealand Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur book festival’s crime novel of the year award in France, and has been shortlisted for the Edgar and the Barry in the US and the Ned Kelly in Australia. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He’s thrown his Frisbee in more than forty countries, plays tennis badly, golf even worse, and has two cats – which is often two too many. The critically acclaimed The Quiet People was published in 2021 and was followed in 2022 by The Pain Tourist – a number-one bestseller in three countries.
My thoughts: this was so good, all of the characters are morally compromised, not just the obvious ones. There’s a lot of terrible crimes that have gone unsolved so far, and if Lucas Connor hadn’t been kidnapped, a lot of them would still be a mystery.
Sheriff Cohen has a lot of secrets and is prepared to go to some extreme lengths to try to fix some of his problems, missing issues with his son, who’s not a very nice person and who might be about to get his comeuppance.
Lucas might be a victim, but he’s just as complicated and quite disturbed as well. As the true, horrific extent of how and what his dad has done to protect him is incredible, and not in a good way.
Dark, twisted, disturbing and set in a town I never want to visit.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 