Category: blog tour

The scrap of paper looked as if it had been torn from a diary. The words written in faint pencil. The letters rounded, almost childlike: Please look after her. Her life and mine depend on you not trying to find me.
When Detective Alana Mack arrives at Clonabee police station, in a small Irish seaside town on the outskirts of Dublin, she doesn’t expect to find a distressed two-year-old girl sobbing on the floor.
Abandoned in a local supermarket, the child tells them her name is Casey. All Alana and her team have to go on is a crumpled note begging for someone to look after her little girl. This mother
doesn’t want to be found.
Still recovering from a terrible accident that has left Alana navigating a new life as a wheelchair user, Alana finds herself suddenly responsible for Casey while trying to track down the missing mother
and solve another missing person’s case… a retired newsagent who has seemingly vanished from his home.
Forced to ask her ex-husband and child psychiatrist Colm for help, through Forensic Art Therapy, Alana discovers that whatever darkness lies behind the black windows in Casey’s crayon drawing, the little girl was terrified of the house she lived in.
Then a bag of human remains is found in a bin, and a chilling link is made – the DNA matches Casey’s.
Alana and her team must find the body and make the connection with the missing newsagent fast if she is to prevent another life from being taken. But with someone in her department leaking confidential details of the investigation to the media, can Alana set aside her emotional involvement in this case and find Casey’s mother and the killer before it’s too late?
Heart-pounding and totally addictive, The Puppet Maker is the first in the Detective Alana Mack series that will have fans of Ann Cleeves, Angela Marsons and LJ Ross racing through the pages late into the night.

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Born in Dublin, Jenny O’Brien moved to Wales and then Guernsey, where she tries to find time to write in between working as a nurse and ferrying around 3 teenagers.
In her spare time she can be found frowning at her wonky cakes and even wonkier breads. You’ll be pleased to note she won’t be entering Bake-Off. She’s also an all-year-round sea swimmer. Jenny is represented by Nicola Barr of The Bent Agency and published by Storm Publishing and HQ Digital (Harper Collins).
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My thoughts: the crimes the villain of this thrilling new crime series’ first book commits are really gruesome and made my skin crawl. No wonder Casey’s mother begs to be left alone and not looked for. But the police can’t do that, she might be at risk and then there’s the bag of body parts found in a bin, thank goodness the homeless man that found it showed his friend, a former doctor, and didn’t just cook it up for his dinner!

I liked Alana, she’s smart, with great detective instincts, having her be a wheelchair user is an interesting twist, while it limits her physically, as the world is very inaccessible, it doesn’t stop her leading her team and solving crimes. Or getting flirted with by a newspaper magnate, who happens to also be the father of her newest team member. And so it shouldn’t. It will be interesting to see her evolve with the series.

A really interesting read and with plenty of great characters (Alana’s boss is awful) and lots of possibilities for the series. Big thumbs up.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

To all appearances Joanna Emerson is a fully qualified, gold-medalled graduate of the world’s finest college of Nursery Nurses. No sooner is she engaged as a nanny to Benedict, newly born heir to a vast cosmetic fortune however, than she becomes caught up in a complex kidnap plot.

But the enigmatic portrait painter, yachtsman and former spy, Johnson Johnson is never far away – and he knows the dangerous game she’s playing.

Before long, bullets are flying, and most of them in Joanna’s direction.

Dorothy Dunnett (1923-2001) gained an international reputation as a writer of historical fiction. She later turned to crime writing with the acclaimed Dolly books, aka the Johnson Johnson series. She was a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, and a board member of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. In 1992 she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. A leading light in the Scottish arts world and a renaissance woman, Dunnett was also a professional portrait painter and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions.

My thoughts: another brilliant outing from Johnson Johnson and his marvellous yacht Dolly, this time we’re off to the Croatian coast, although it’s still Yugoslavia at this point in time.

Joanna is one of those practically perfect in every way nannies, graduate of something similar to Norland (they’re the ones in the smart brown uniforms hired by celebrities, the very wealthy and royalty), with every possible event prepared for and never a hair out of place. She can sail a yacht through a storm, while also looking after a baby, two unconscious men, some seasick kidnappers and making soup.

She’s also a crack code writer, working for the British government in the form of her father. And someone has a very important, very secret document that was encoded by her and now they want her to decode it. Kidnapping Joanna and her three month old change, who has horrible parents, might just be the way to force her hand. She’d never let the baby come to harm. Good thing Johnson is around though, she needs a spot of assistance escaping and capturing the kidnappers.

With bullets whizzing about, millionaires having affairs and behaving badly, is it any wonder she’s starting to question her vocation – maybe being a nanny is not for her.

Another hilarious and action packed book, the second to last sadly, in this tremendous and highly entertaining series.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

Four girls close their eyes. Only one wakes up.

Leah and her three best friends get changed into their pyjamas, eat pizza and argue about what film to watch. They laugh together until the early hours. But the next morning, Leah blinks open her eyes and sees three empty sleeping bags. The other girls are gone.

Twenty years later. In her small hometown, still-haunted Leah has never been able to shake off the rumours and whispers. How could she have slept through it all? She must know what happened.

Now, a documentary is being made about the night Leah’s best friends disappeared. Is the truth about to come out?

Then an anonymous email arrives in Leah’s inbox. ‘Stop them’.

Somebody out there knows what happened the night of the sleepover. Is Leah in terrible danger? And will she ever find her missing friends – or are some secrets meant to be kept forever?

An absolutely addictive psychological thriller with twists and turns that will make you gasp. Anyone who loves Lisa Jewell, Shari Lapena or The Perfect Marriage won’t be able to put this down.

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Kerry Wilkinson is from the English county of Somerset but has spent far too long living in the north. It’s there that he’s picked up possibly made-up regional words like ‘barm’ and ‘ginnel’. He pretends to know what they mean.

He’s also been busy since turning thirty: his Jessica Daniel crime series has sold more than a million copies in the UK; he has written a fantasy-adventure trilogy for young adults; a second crime series featuring private investigator Andrew Hunter and the standalone thriller, Down Among The Dead Men.

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My thoughts: I used to have sleepovers when I was a teenager, luckily I never woke up to find all my friends missing, although I did once see my sister crouched on the floor eating the leftover popcorn we’d discarded and she definitely wasn’t invited!

But that’s what happened to Leah, at a sleepover at her friend Vicky’s house, she wakes up and her 3 friends are just gone. Not in another room, not playing a prank, just gone. And 25 years later, she still doesn’t know what happened. But someone out there does.

The brother of one of the other girls is making a documentary about the case. The police still have no answers, and he wants to find out whether anyone remembers something, a lead the cops didn’t follow perhaps.

Leah’s getting strange emails from “a friend” telling her to shut the film down or else. But she doesn’t know why they’re threatening her, she doesn’t know what happened. Or does she?

Kerry Wilkinson specialises in plots with twists and turns that you just can’t see coming and this one is no different. Just as you think he’s handed over the answers, it goes off in a different direction entirely and made my head spin. I have no idea where the sequel will go, this was so shocking.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.