Tag: crime fiction

Julia Bird loves a walk in the countryside. There’s nothing quite like the fresh air and green rolling hills of the Cotswolds to clear your head. Unless you come across a dead body, that is…

When the local Berrywick vet, Dr Eve Davies, is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, the police believe it’s nothing more than a tragic accident, but Julia isn’t so sure. Just a few days earlier when she took her dog, Jake, to the vets, Dr Eve said she believed something awful was about to happen. It turns out she was right…

But who would want the beloved village vet dead? Was it her mother Kay, a down-and-out gambler who stands to inherit her unwedded daughter’s home? Was it her assistant Olga, who was close to getting fired? Or was it her cut-throat tennis partner Will, with whom Dr Eve had an argument shortly before she took a tumble? And who is the stranger skulking around Berrywick peering into people’s windows?

When a second body appears in the exact spot where Dr Eve was found, Julia knows it can’t be a coincidence. Both victims were pushed off the cliff, but why? Should Julia let sleeping dogs lie, or will she be like a dog with a bone to find the murderer?

A totally gripping and charming cosy mystery set in the English countryside. Fans of M.C. Beaton, Faith Martin and Betty Rowlands will love the Julia Bird Mysteries.

Amazon

Katie Gayle is the writing partnership of best-selling South African writers, Kate Sidley and Gail Schimmel. Kate and Gail have, between them, written over ten books of various genres, but with Katie Gayle, they both make their debut in the cozy mystery genre. Both Gail and Kate live in Johannesburg, with husbands, children, dogs and cats. 

Facebook

Tweets by KatieGayleBooks

Sign up to be the first to hear about new releases from Katie Gayle here

You can sign up for all the best Bookouture deals you’ll love

My thoughts: I kinda love Julia, she’s just a really nice person, smart and kind and funny. However she does have the worst luck ever, always finding dead bodies – often of people she knows. This time it’s the village vet, Dr Eve, a woman Julia only saw a few days previously.

Of course Julia starts digging, the supposed accident isn’t one, and Dr Eve was worried about something. Is it to do with her job? Or maybe the Padel club she’s part of?

As Julia investigates, she ruffles someone’s feathers, but can she and lovely Labrador Jake solve the vet’s death and catch the killer.

This series gets better with each book and I love how the other villagers have become more and more involved with Julia’s investigations. I also loved how many adorable dogs this one contained, although Jake is still my favourite.

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

Thirteen students on a party night dream up a plan to save the world. They will create an app to slash food waste and improve diet.

A decade later green activist Astra Wallace hires Danny Lancaster to trace her uni friends.

Despite the help of ex-gangster entrepreneur Big Eddie Archer and reclusive Ukrainian tech wizard Steroid Stepan, Astra’s pals are hard to find.

The trail leads to celebrity chef Bix Battersby, a TV action hero, feisty retired medic Lillian Bayliss, and her lively cavapoo Petal.

It’s a twisting trail made harder by friction between Danny and Astra. But their uneasy partnership reveals people are dying.

One thing Danny’s dead sure of – this FOOD FIGHT is going to get messy.

Goodreads Purchase

I’ve spent my working life as a journalist. You meet a lot of people, see things, learn stuff. For a crimewriter, it’s a plot factory.

I’ve also done a lot of travelwriting. It’s not all cocktails under the palm trees but it is a fantastic job that’s taken me to more than 40 countries, from the white wastes of Arctic Finland to the deserts of Namibia.

People often ask my favourite place. In a world of globalisation, many destinations look the same but Iceland and Namibia are like stepping onto another planet. Go if you can.

I’ve also enjoyed a long love affair with Western Crete, the mountains, coastline, food and people. And I was delighted and surprised to receive the Ed Lacy Gibraltar travel award in 2007.

Another interest is my family tree. I’ve traced the ancestors back to William of Byfield, a farmer in 1600s Northamptonshire, just down the road from Shakespeare.

I love maps. They might seem old fashioned in the age of GPS but they tell stories, make promises. I have a ragbag collection of more than 3,000.

I’m also a fan of interesting cheeses, good beer and wilderness. They’re like Marmite, you’re an empty places person or you’re not.

I have written six crime thrillers and a book of short stories featuring Danny Lancaster, a wounded Afghanistan veteran turned private investigator. They are:

The Wreck Of The Margherita

Death Squad

Rough Diamond

Rock Hard

Gargoyle Pixie Dog

Godlefe’s Cuckoo 

Last Orders

I’ve also written three non-fiction books. GUNNER is based on my father’s World War Two diary. PIGTAIL PILOT is the tragic story of a talented young woman pilot. A CROCUS FROM JERUSALEM is about a 19-year-old country lad’s journey to war in the Middle East in 1917.

If you fancy a chat I’m easy to find.

Facebook Twitter Instagram Website

My thoughts: When I was a student we were always coming up with things to change the world, usually in the pub, and that’s where the ideas stayed. The students in this book actually put the idea into an app that they intended would somehow solve food waste. However someone has taken over the app and twisted it to suit their own needs. And they’ve been killing off the other members of the group in a series of “accidents”.

Hired to look into these deaths, PI Danny Lancaster is struggling a bit, his leads seem to head in the direction of a celebrity chef and his brittle wife. But they both insist they don’t care about the app or the money the last founder standing could gain.

With the help of his friend, retired doctor Lillian and one of the surviving members of the group, Astrid, as well his friendly Ukrainian hacker Stepan and former gangster Eddie, who look into a few things for him, he starts to piece the clues into an answer.

This was really clever, it twisted this way and that, the plot increasingly fiendish as a trio of thug brothers, a rogue police detective and a few other strange characters get involved and chaos ensues. I was hooked, couldn’t put it down as I couldn’t guess what was going to happen next. I was particularly fascinated by Stepan, who in between helping Danny, is hacking into satellites and websites to aid his countrymen against the Russians, he’s clearly damaged and has lots of secrets. But there was something rather endearing about him and his fragility, I wanted to know more. I also wanted to know more about Lillian, who is pretty incredible. Definitely going to read the rest of the series and learn more about Danny and his adventures.

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

A missing baby. A dead councilman. Five suspects.

When psychotherapist Trudy’s baby disappears one afternoon, the individual motives of four members of her post-trauma therapy group are gradually revealed. But when the police begin investigating baby Benny’s disappearance, the seemingly unrelated death of a local councilman brings each member of the group under firm suspicion, along with Trudy herself. Five Fatal Flaws is a psychological whodunnit with a #MeToo thread.

Louise Mangos writes psychological suspense, historical mystery and short fiction, which have won prizes, placed on shortlists and been narrated on BBC radio. Her novels are set mostly or partly in Switzerland where she lives at the foot of the Alps with her Kiwi husband and two sons, enjoying an active life in the mountains. The psychological whodunnit Five Fatal Flaws is her fifth novel.

My thoughts: Trudy dozes off in her back garden, only to wake and discover that someone has taken her son Benny from right beside her. A parent’s nightmare, and the police think the members of her group therapy sessions might be involved. 

I’ve done group therapy and it wasn’t anything like the group here, who bond a little too intensely, and share details that lead other members of the group to do things they really shouldn’t.

As the story rolls back and we learn more about Trudy and the group’s members, their stories, the reasons they’re in therapy, and the way they bond, there’s moments when it could be any of them that took baby Benny from his home.

It is quite dark and Rachel’s story was particularly grim, although none of them were exactly having a lovely life. An interesting, intelligent read.

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

Elena Zoric is murdered, her body concealed beside a stream in North London. Her phone lies nearby, the last number dialled was to the woman who had rescued her from sex trafficking: Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector Grace Archer.

Archer desperately wants to lead the murder investigation but her new boss, Chief Inspector Les Fletcher, makes it very clear its out of her jurisdiction.

Then the thirty-year-old remains of a woman are found in the attic of an abandoned house, the victim dying in similar circumstances to Elena Zoric.

But Archer’s North London colleagues have bigger priorities than the murder of ‘a drugged-up prostitute.’

Archer needs answers. Who killed Elena? Why did she call Archer moments from her death? And what rules must she break to stop a killer in his tracks?

David Fennell was born and raised in Belfast. He left for London at the age of eighteen and jobbed as a chef, waiter and bartender for several years before starting a career in writing for the software industry. David has played rugby for Brighton and studied Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. He is married and lives in Brighton.

Website Twitter

My thoughts: I enjoyed the previous books featuring DI Grace Archer and her team, and this one also brings back true crime podcaster Mallory Jones. A series of brutal murders going back decades, taking place around the country come to light as Grace and her team look into the murder of a young sex worker and the similar death of a young woman whose remains are found in an empty house. 

The murderer has picked up young sex workers and then killed them with a bolt gun to the chest. A brutal and terrifying death. And he seems to be ramping up as another murder in Berwick-upon-Tweed happens only a few short weeks after Elena’s. 

This was gripping and intelligent crime writing, the twists and the pace of the killings, the discovery of past crimes that bear the same MO, the obnoxious social media “personality”, the idiot nepo detective, it’s all so enjoyable and well done.

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

Susan didn’t plan on being an amateur sleuth and, after two successful investigations, she’s looking forward to a quiet Christmas. So, when local businesswoman Meera is in desperate need of help, Susan agrees rather reluctantly.

The task should be easy enough. The infamous press mogul Duncan Fern is coming back to the Isle of Wight, the scene of his family’s childhood holidays, to celebrate Christmas with his grown-up
children and their partners, his new glamorous wife Kirsten who is forever dripping with diamonds, and the spikey editor of his paper the Morning Flame, Antoine. The newly-refurbished luxurious
Bishopstone Manor is the perfect setting for a festive break, and all Susan has to do is help Meera host.

But when a snowstorm descends over the island, and the following morning a body is found, Christmas at the Manor takes a darker turn. Can Susan get to the bottom of the mystery before the murderer strikes again…

Purchase 

Mary Grand writes gripping, page-turning suspense novels, with a dark and often murderous underside. She grew up in Wales, was for many years a teacher of deaf children and now lives on the Isle of Wight.

Facebook Twitter Instagram Newsletter

My thoughts: Christmas is a murderous time of year, people get together with their families – the people they most love and hate at the same time and old resentments as well as new rows burst out. 

Susan thinks helping Meera out at the Manor will be easy, but the family they’re hosting aren’t an easy group. Media mogul Duncan Fern, his second wife, his children and their partners, and one of his business partners as a last minute addition.

Fern used to bring his family to the island when his children were young and his first wife, their mother, was still alive. They’ve all got some memories, good and bad, of that time and daughter Hayley is struggling with that.

She used to spend time with Alice, Susan’s friend, and the shrewdest person around, who always solves all the mysteries and murders without ever needing to leave her retirement home. I love her.

After Duncan is found dead in his bed, from a heart attack, Susan thinks it’s not straightforward, there’s some things that don’t add up. So she starts digging, asking questions and clearly someone gets threatened as she’s pushed down the icy outside steps and almost drowned.

Susan has great instincts but she’s not good at taking basic safety precautions, she doesn’t really tell anyone what she’s doing or take her phone (or walkie talkie, there’s no signal at the Manor).

I really enjoyed this book, it’s a bit in the mould of the Golden Age country house murders but with a festive (and modern) twist. Everyone there has secrets, some of them more deadly than others.

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

Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything she’s spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides. But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted.

With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna. Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice. As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI MIstry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself – all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today.

Born and raised in South Gloucestershire, Bonnie Burke-Patel studied History at Oxford. After working for half a decade in politics and policy, she changed careers and became a preschool teacher, before beginning to write full time. She lives with her husband, son, and needy cat in south east London, and is working on her next crime novel about fairy tales, desire, and the seaside.

My thoughts: I know there’s a tendency to compare modern crime novels to the Golden Age ones – easy to say “like Agatha Christie was alive in the 21st Century” but apart from a setting, this is not the same sort of crime novel (and I love Golden Age crime so this isn’t a slight at Agatha).

It’s a modern, intelligent novel that grapples with sins of the father, race in rural England, relationships and the dwindling influence of the landed classes.

Anna is a former ballerina, whose career was ended by injury, and has moved to a small cottage with an outsize garden, growing and selling fruit, veg, jam and cakes at the local market. She pays no rent as it’s managed as part of the estate of the local National Trust type house.

Digging in the garden she finds human remains and calls in the local police in the firm of another recent incomer to Upper Magna, DI Hitesh Patel, recently moved from London after the death of his mother. (Side note; the area his father lives in, Kingsbury, is about 20 minutes away from where I live).

There’s an instant connection between the two, navigating their different forms of grief, as they look into whose remains are in the garden and what led to them being there. Anna, despite being told to leave it alone, can’t help asking questions, and attracting the wrong kind of attention.

I really enjoyed this book, the moving back and forth between Anna and Hitesh, and the memories of a young woman at Fallow Hall in the 60s. Slowly the story of the body in the garden is revealed, and as Anna and Hitesh get closer, a new story for Upper Magna and Fallow Hall is being written.

The ending is shocking and full of twists, and so good too. I really hope this author writes more books this clever and compelling and maybe even revisits these characters.

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

What do you do when you’ve buried four husbands and not yet found a fifth?

Wealthy Lady Bumstead takes a cruise down the Mekong in Vietnam with a hired female companion, Anne de Tonkin. Annie is not just a kind old lady, she is a brilliant listener and soon knows all about the other travellers. But, on the last day of the cruise she is murdered.

Lady Bumstead, unable to see any reason why Annie should be murdered, is convinced the killer was after her. She hires the SeeMs Detective Agency to protect her and find the killer. At the same time she decides to do some sleuthing herself, and, with the help of her high powered hearing aid, she begins listening to all the conversations around her.

As the SeeMs Detectives investigate the crime, they find Annie had a rich past and connections with almost everyone else on the boat. There seem to be plenty of reasons for killing her, but who did the
deed?

Will Lady Bumstead and the SeeMs Detectives find the killer before he/she strikes again? Will Lady Bumstead find a fifth husband? Or will she become another victim?

Written in the first person by Lady Bumstead this novel will be particularly enjoyed by readers of Agatha Christie and A Man Called Otto. Or anyone interested in whodunnits.

Amazon UK Amazon US

Gina has worked as a pilot, physiotherapist, freelance writer and dog breeder. As a child, Gina’s parents hated travelling and never went further than Jersey. As a result she became travel-addicted and spent years bumming around SE Asia, China and Australia, where she worked in a racing stables in Pinjarra, South of Perth. She then lived and worked in various places in Spain, the
USA and London before settling in West Sussex with her husband and dogs. This is her fifth crime novel in the SeeMs Detective Agency series. This book is set in Vietnam.

Website Instagram Facebook Reedsy TikTok

My thoughts: I found Lady Bumstead (yes, it’s a silly name) quite self involved and annoying, she claims not to understand why her family don’t want anything to do with her, and even seems rather fed up to be on holiday. She’s not nice to or about the companion, Annie, that she’s hired, or her fellow travellers.

When Annie is found murdered in the cabin next door during the cruise part of the trip (an incredible tour of Vietnam that  most people would be delighted to be on), there’s plenty of suspects – she seems to have been connected to every one of the guests.

The SeeMS Detective Agency are hired, by Lady Bumstead’s companion agency to look after her and find out who killed Annie. They also have a link to a family on the trip. The only witness to Annie’s death is Catherine’s granddaughter Lagatha.

As the team look into Annie’s past and the passengers on the Mekong cruise ship, Lady Bee is thinking back over her own past – her collection of husbands, her former career as a nurse and tries to work out which passenger is one of former stepsons.

Funny, clever and enjoyable, Annie’s story is full of twists and surprises, and the agency have their hands full solving the case, there’s almost too many suspects!

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