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A dead woman. A missing baby. A desperate race against time.

It’s a cold October dawn when Detective Lola gets the call. The body of a young woman has been found in the reeds at Darnley Glen park on the outskirts of Glasgow. There’s a vicious wound to her head.

She’s not been dead long. A shaken taxi driver insists he saw the victim just hours earlier, running through the darkness, clutching a newborn.
But there’s no sign of the baby.

Then, a 999 call. A local businessman reports his ten-week-old son was kidnapped at gunpoint by a woman matching the victim’s description.
But why did he wait so long to call the police? Lola’s instincts tell her he’s hiding something behind the walls of his plush suburban home.

Time is running out to find the missing child — but the truth is darker, and more twisted, than Lola could ever imagine.

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Daniel Sellers is the author of the Kindle-bestselling Lola Harris Mysteries and is an obsessive fan of Agatha Christie. His crime thrillers are pacy and dark, with as much interest in whydunnit as who. He grew up in Yorkshire, and has lived and worked in Liverpool, Glasgow, Ireland
and Finland. Sellers now lives in Argyll in Scotland.

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My thoughts: Another cracking case for Lola and her team. A dead woman, a missing baby, and something deeply wrong going on. Why is the missing baby’s father being so difficult? Why does his story ring so hollow?

As Lola starts investigating, it seems something very wrong is going on a local university, with potential connections to her case.

This might be one of darkest, nastiest cases Lola has dealt with, and it has links to a senior officer in the force too, with implications for her job. But she’s determined to figure out what’s going on and why.

Another excellent, intelligent and gripping installment in this series.

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

Ever dream of killing your boss?

Alan Benning knows how you feel.

The problem: his billionaire boss actually winds up murdered. And the whole world thinks he did it.

When globetrotting tech billionaire Barron Fisk is found dead on the floor of his swanky Silicon Valley office, all evidence points to Alan.

Alan must venture into the glitzy, treacherous world of tech billionaires to clear his name by sorting through a long list of suspects with motive aplenty. If he can’t find the real culprit, Alan’s going down.

The clock is ticking.

Who killed Barron Fisk? The truth will shock— and change— the entire world.

Fans of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series, Carl Hiaasen’s tales of high-stakes hijinx, or Ruth Ware’s page-turning mysteries will love Death of a Billionaire.

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Tucker May was raised in southern Missouri. He attended Northwestern University where he was trained in acting and playwriting. He now lives in Pasadena, California with his wife Barbara and their cat Principal Spittle. He is an avid reader and longtime fan of the Los Angeles Rams
and Geelong Cats. Death of a Billionaire is his debut novel.

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My thoughts: Alan Benning is probably the least likely murderer in the world. A quiet unassuming man, happiest dealing with numbers (he is an accountant) and when his boss is found dead in his office, the police don’t seem that interested in looking further.

His fingerprints are in the office, his shoe print outside and there’s CCTV of him going up to the floor. But Alan knows he didn’t do it. Luckily so does Sharla, formerly PA to Barron Fisk, and she wants to find the real killer. The unlikely duo team up to solve the case and keep Alan out of prison.

Funny and entertaining, voiced by a rather condescending narrator (all will be revealed), this is very 21st century, tech mogul murder.

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

The last thing Penny Carmichael expected when she joined the local bellringing group was for her debut to be thwarted by the discovery of a body just yards from the belfry door.

As her husband and his loyal team painstakingly sift through the evidence and delve deep into the dead man’s past, it’s clear that solving Peter Mackenzie’s murder may prove a challenge, even for someone with DCI Carmichael’s renowned detective prowess.

What was a man who’d lived for decades in North London doing in Moulton Bank? Was his chequered past a factor?
And what about the other members of Penny’s bellringing group. Did any of them have a reason to do Peter harm?

As the case unfolds, DCI Carmicheal and his trusty team seek answers to a complex puzzle which leads them along various paths and, at times, way outside the comfort zone of their rural Lancashire
surroundings.

This fast-paced, cleverly crafted whodunit is the eleventh murder mystery in the gripping Carmichael series from the pen of Ian McFadyen.

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Ian McFadyen was born in Liverpool and enjoyed a successful career in marketing before becoming a writer. Ian’s titles are available in Italian and Czech and, although the author isn’t totally convinced
it’s true, he’s been favourably compared with Wilkie Collins and Colin Dexter. He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife but spends a great deal of his time writing in his bolthole retreat on the Norfolk / Suffolk border. The Corpse Bell is the eleventh in his series featuring DCI Carmichael.

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My thoughts: The victim might have been murdered in Moulton Bank but he lived near me in North London, so that made me smile.

This is a cleverly plotted, slightly convoluted to keep the detectives on their toes, story, where incidents in the past come to matter a great deal. The deceased, Peter MacKenzie, wasn’t a very nice man, a convicted embezzler, he ran a heir finding business and returned to Moulton Bank, where he’d grown up, for reasons unknown.

Found outside the church bell tower by two bellringers, the police are puzzled, why was he there? Was he meeting someone, and if so, who? His wife thought he was in Yorkshire, at a conference, but clearly that wasn’t the case.

And when one of the bellringers who had found him is also murdered, the plot thickens. What was this man’s connection to it all?

As DCI Carmichael and his team look into the lives of both victims, they uncover some unpleasant things, and slowly piece together the puzzle of who killed them.

I love a carefully constructed, slow burn case, where the tiniest details help bring things together, where the police are looking for the mistakes the killer has made, the things they’ve overlooked, much as in this case.

Really enjoyable (can I really say that about murder? I think I can!) and peopled with interesting characters. That’s another series I now need to read all the backlist books for!  

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

MEET DETECTIVE NICKI HARDCASTLE IN THIS GRIPPING SUFFOLK-BASED CRIME SERIES.

One broken body. Seven missing teeth. A killer who’s only just begun.

Detective Nicki Hardcastle is midway through painting her living room — she’s supposed to be off-duty — when the call comes in. ‘You might want to see this one, boss.’

Minutes later, she’s standing at the foot of a four-storey townhouse in the heart of Bury St Edmunds. A man lies impaled on a black iron spike, his body blood-soaked and broken.

It appears Jacob Towers took his own life. But the details don’t add up.
Why was the dead man carrying seven of his own teeth in his pockets?

Then a chilling voicemail surfaces: ‘It’s time to pay for what you did.’

Two days later, there’s another death. Just as sudden. Just as brutal. And once again — seven teeth.

Someone is dealing out justice, one gruesome death at a time. And they’ve only just begun . .

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Michelle Kidd is a crime fiction author best known for the DI Jack MacIntosh and DI Nicki Hardcastle series. Michelle qualified as a legal executive in the early 1990s, spending ten years practising civil and criminal litigation.
But the dream to write was never far from her mind and in 2008 she began writing the first book in what would later become the DI Jack MacIntosh series.
Michelle now works full time for the NHS and lives in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.
She enjoys reading, wine and cats — not necessarily in that order.

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My thoughts: I’m not a fan of teeth, I hate going to the dentist, I go but it really sets my anxiety levels to sky high. There was a task in the last series of Taskmaster involving teeth that made me feel sick. And there’s a very disturbing scene in this book that I really didn’t like.

Having said that, it’s a very clever case, the team are often completely stumped because there’s nothing the victims have in common, beyond the seven teeth.

Whoever is behind these deaths, that at first glance appear to be suicides or accidents, is clever, manipulative and possibly a sadist.

Their motive is so well hidden, and without a key piece of evidence, they might never get the answers. It’s very well done, with plenty of shocking moments and twists. Michelle Kidd really knows how to hook you and keep you hooked.

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