Tag: crime fiction

Four hikers enter the mountains. Only two return. But is it tragedy? Or treachery?

When sisters Cat and Ginny travel with their husbands to the idyllic Swiss Alps for a hiking holiday, it’s not just a chance to take in the stunning scenery. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with each other after years of drifting apart–and patch up marriages that are straining at the seams.

As they head into the mountains, morale is high, but as the terrain turns treacherous, cracks in the relationships start to show. With worrying signs that someone might be following them, the sun begins to set and exhaustion kicks in. Suddenly, lost high on a terrifying ridge, tensions spill over–with disastrous consequences.

When only two of the four hikers make it down from the mountain, the police press them for their story–but soon become suspicious when their accounts just don’t add up.

What really happened up on that ridge? Who are the survivors? And what secrets are they trying to hide?

Susi Holliday grew up near Edinburgh and worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years before she started writing. A lifelong fan of crime and horror, her short stories have been published in various places, and she was shortlisted for the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham Prize. She is the acclaimed author of nine novels and a novella. The film adaptation of her Trans-Siberian-set psychological thriller Violet is currently in development.As well as working, reading, writing, walking and drinking tea, Susi provides mentoring for new crime writers via http://www.crimefictioncoach.com.You can find out more at her website, http://www.susiholliday.com, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SJIHolliday, on Twitter @SJIHolliday, and on Instagram @susijholliday

My thoughts: families are very complicated – and Cat and Ginny are very complicated. On a hiking trip with their husbands, secrets forcing wedges between both sets of spouses and the sisters. These secrets are boiling up and over as the four get lost hiking in the Swiss Alps.

Cat has a plan, but it goes sideways on the mountainside and now she has to convince the police that she’s the only one telling the truth, not the man she stumbled off the mountain with.

I love Susi’s books, they’re always smart and compelling reads, and this is no different. Cat is a mess and her plan isn’t very smart – there are better ways to deal with your sister (mine is still alive, promise).

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

AMY ROWLINGS RETURNS!

Sunday morning, and the body of Reverend Villiers has been found propped up on the vigil seat in the church’s lychgate. It appears that he has been poisoned.

When amateur sleuth and regular churchgoer, Amy Rowlings arrives she finds DI Bodkin already at the scene. Bodkin tells her about a cryptic scripture reference that has been scrawled in chalk on the stone slabs beneath the body. What the citation hints at, shocks everyone.

Amy, a huge Agatha Christie fan is determined to get involved in the investigation and despite a stern warning from the detective’s boss, Amy and Bodkin team up again to try to solve the most complex murder case he has ever been involved in. When the toxicology report comes back from the lab, the results only add to the mystery.

Meanwhile, Amy looks to her favourite Agatha Christie character, Hercule Poirot for help, and using his techniques, she narrows down the list of possible murderers to just nine suspects.

Can Amy fit together the jigsaw of clues to solve this, the most complex of cases?

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T A Belshaw is from Derbyshire in the United Kingdom where he shares a house with his chatty rescue cat, Mia. He writes for both children and adults. A former miner and computer technician, Trevor studied Advanced Creative Writing at the Open University. He is the author of Tracy’s Hot Mail, Tracy’s Celebrity Hot Mail and the noir, suspense novella, Out of Control. Following the sudden death of his wife in 2015 Trevor took a five-year break from writing, returning during lockdown in 2020, when an injury forced him to take time off work. The result of this new creative burst was the Dual Timeline, Family Saga, Unspoken and the Historical Cosy Crime Whodunnit, Murder at the Mill.

Trevor signed his first contract with Spellbound Books Ltd in April 2021. He signed a further mullti-book contract with them in the spring of 2022.

His short stories have been published in various anthologies including 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan, Another Haircut, Shambelurkling and Other Stories, Deck the Halls, 100 Stories for Queensland and The Cafe Lit anthology 2011, 2012 and 2013. He also has two pieces in Shambelurklers Return.

Trevor is also the author of 15 children’s adventure books written under the name of Trevor Forest. 

His children’s poem, Clicking Gran, was long listed for the Plough prize (children’s section) in 2009 and his short poem, My Mistake, was rated Highly Commended and published in an anthology of the best entries in the Farringdon Poetry Competition.

Trevor’s articles have been published in magazines as diverse as Ireland’s Own, The Best of British and First Edition. 

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My thoughts: this was a really enjoyable crime story about a vicar, who nobody seems to really know, left poisoned and a suspicious Bible verse chalked onto the wall behind him in the lychgate of his church on a Sunday morning.

Local detective Bodkin and newly minted PI Amy Rowlings set out to find the truth about the Rev Villiers and who could possibly have wanted to kill him.

Amy is a clever, determined sleuth, she’s the one that cracks the case, even though Bodkin gets the credit with the police. They work well together and always find time to hit the cinema or the pub with friends. In fact that’s where they pick up a few clues.

Set in a time when women had far fewer options than we do now, Amy isn’t keen on being a housewife and giving in to society’s expectations, instead she’s forging her own path and putting things to right at the same time.

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

The killer is closing in… can she find him before he finds her?
When Detective Nikki Parekh receives a set of threatening postcards, she knows it can only mean one thing… The man who escaped arrest after murdering her mother two years ago is back.
Each postcard has a similar message: You’re next Parekh.
As the post marks on the cards gradually get closer to Bradford, Nikki must do everything she can to protect her family and catch the killer before it’s too late.
But when human remains are found in a remote barn on the icy Yorkshire moors, Nikki’s attention is pulled away from her family. When a tattoo on the victim’s arm – the only means of identification –
leads nowhere, the team have already met a dead end.

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Born in Scotland, Made in Bradford sums up Liz Mistry’s life. Over thirty years ago she moved from a small village in West Lothian to Yorkshire to get her teaching degree. Once here, Liz fell in love with
three things; curries, the rich cultural diversity of the city … and her Indian husband (not necessarily in this order). Now thirty years, three children, two cats and a huge extended family later, Liz uses
her experiences of living and working in the inner city to flavour her writing. Her gritty crime fiction police procedural novels set in Bradford embrace the city she describes as ‘Warm, Rich and Fearless’
whilst exploring the darkness that lurks beneath.
Struggling with severe clinical depression and anxiety for a large number of years, Liz often includes mental health themes in her writing. She credits the MA in Creative Writing she took at Leeds Trinity
University with helping her find a way of using her writing to navigate her ongoing mental health struggles. Being a debut novelist in her fifties was something Liz had only dreamed of and she counts
herself lucky, whilst pinching herself regularly to make sure it’s all real. One of the nicest things about being a published author is chatting with and responding to readers’ feedback and Liz regularly does events at local libraries, universities, literature festivals and open mics. She also
teaches creative writing too. Liz has completed a PhD in Creative Writing on Diverse voices in crime fiction.
In her spare time, Liz loves pub quizzes (although she admits to being rubbish at them), dancing (she does a mean jig to Proud Mary – her opinion, not ratified by her family), visiting the varied Yorkshire
landscape, with Robin Hoods Bay being one of her favourite coastal destinations, listening to music, reading and blogging about all things crime fiction on her blog, The Crime Warp.

Twitter: @LizMistryAuthor / Facebook: @LizMistryBooks / Website: lizmistry.com

My thoughts: Nikki Parakh is back, and not a moment too soon. Her evil biological father is closer than ever, breathing down her neck, but she’s not allowed to pursue him. Instead she’s hunting the owner of an arm found in an abandoned barn, probably connected to illegal dog fights.

As the team try to find the arm’s body, and join the wider operation into the dog fighting ring, Nikki takes her eye off the ball at home, with potentially deadly consequences.

As gripping, clever and twisting as always, both cases are shocking and brutal, but it’s nice to finally be getting somewhere with the over arcing plot regarding Nikki’s terrible monster father. He needs to pay for the awful things he’s done.

Hopefully there won’t be too many repercussions for Nikki – emotionally or at work, she’s dedicated but distracted and that could go badly. Only book 6 will tell!

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

The Skelf women live in the shadow of death every day, running the family funeral directors and private investigator business in Edinburgh. But now their own grief interwines with that of their clients, as they are left reeling by shocking past events. A fist-fight by an open grave leads Dorothy to investigate the possibility of a faked death, while a young woman’s obsession with Hannah threatens her relationship with Indy and puts them both in mortal danger. An elderly man claims he’s being abused by the ghost of his late wife, while ghosts of another kind come back to haunt Jenny from the grave … pushing her to breaking point. As the Skelfs struggle with increasingly unnerving cases and chilling danger lurks close to home, it becomes clear that grief, in all its forms, can be deadly…

Doug Johnstone is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Great Silence, described as ‘A novel [that] underlines just how accomplished Johnstone has become’ by the Daily Mail. He has been shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year three times, and the Capital Crime Best Independent Voice one; The Big Chill was longlisted for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions, and has been an arts journalist for twenty years. Doug is a songwriter and musician with five albums and three EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. He’s also player-manager of the Scotland Writers Football Club. He lives in Edinburgh.

My thoughts: I’m very much #TeamSkelf so I loved this fourth outing for the intrepid women of Skelf Funerals and Private Investigations – even if the second half of that business seems to run on Dorothy’s altruism and not money.

There’s several cases on the board this time, and Jenny’s starting to crack up too, especially after a body, that might be scumbag ex-husband Craig, washes up.

Hannah’s got a stalker, Dorothy’s helping two very different men deal with their grief, Indy’s keeping the paying business going and Schrodinger the cat’s just, well, being a cat. It never slows down in Skelf-land!

Tremendous fun as always, I raced through it, laughing all the way. Now I have to wait for the next one (please be a next one).

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

Welcome to the book tour for Old Sins by Lynne Handy! Read on for more details and exclusive excerpt!

Old Sins (A Maria Pell Mystery)

Publication Date: August 23rd, 2022

Genre: Thriller

Battered by her archeologist lover’s betrayal, poet Maria Pell flees to an Irish village to study prehistoric people and write her next volume of poetry, but her sanctuary is invaded first by her moody cousin and then by her Togolese lover who unexpectedly show up on her doorstep. When the discovery of a girl’s body on a rocky shore reawakens Maria’s devastating childhood memory of finding a dead baby floating in a stream, her days become haunted by this child’s death. As teenage girls disappear, villagers are terrified that sex-traffickers are targeting their community. With crimes to be solved, both past and present, Maria risks her life to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Excerpt

In the summer of 1988 when I was ten, I found a baby girl caught in the cattails of a stream running through my parents’ property. At first, I thought she was another baby Moses waiting to be discovered in the bulrushes. It was when I knelt to free her from the fronds that I saw her ashen face, her vacant eyes, and knew she was dead.
I see it all in slow motion now: I, in a yellow sundress, scrambling to my feet, knowing something was horribly wrong that a baby had been thrown in the creek. I ran toward my house crying, “There’s a dead baby in the creek!”
My academician father was sitting in the porch swing, reading a newspaper. He threw it down and came running. The kitchen door banged behind my mother. “John? What is it?”
I ran to her and pressed my face against her chest.“It’s a dead baby,” I sobbed.“She’s wearing a pink dress.”
“A pink dress?” My mother folded her arms around me and stared after my father, who admonished her to stay where she was. I’m sure my mother looked at the baby afterward, but not on the day that I found her.
No one ever claimed her. No one ever admitted throwing her in the creek. The town called her Baby Doe. The coroner said she’d been alive when she went in the water. She had been a throwaway child. Until finding her, I had not known that children could be so unloved they would be discarded. I was so distressed that my parents sent me to a psychiatrist who told my mother that I had merged my psyche with that of the unwanted infant and feared no one would ever want me.
How many times during my childhood had my mother asked if I knew how much she and my father loved me? Taken literally, it was a difficult question to answer, so I had kept silent. How do you measure love? Fear of abandonment helped form the woman I became, and in some ways, I remained stuck emotionally in my tenth year.

Available on Amazon

About the Author

The eldest child in a farm family, I grew up in western Indiana where the tall corn drove me inward to create fantasy worlds. Books were my salvation. I was drawn to poetry in the beginning. Wordsworth and other poets taught me that metaphor, sound, and cadence made a good poem. From authors like Dickens, I learned that rhythmic sentences advanced plot. Hemingway taught me about verbs. Upon graduating from library school, I worked as a librarian in Illinois, Texas, and Michigan. In retirement, I co-founded Open Sky Poets, a collaboration of poets in the western suburbs of Chicago, and published poems and short stories in literary journals. I self-published three novels—two are mysteries. Current projects involve a mystery series with author Jake Westin, who, like Christie’s Miss Marple, somehow lands in the middle of murder investigations. I live in a brick house with roses in front and two rescue dogs who bark at passersby.

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My thoughts: this was a really interesting book, the way the past and present kept colliding in Maria’s life, the echo of the Baby Doe case from her childhood that still haunted her as an adult and the current murders and disappearances that brought it back up. Her relationship with her cousin Elizabeth was also intriguing – they were sharing the cottage but seemed to be very different and even uncomfortable with each other, not as close as you might expect really.

The presence of her estranged husband presented more past reflected into the present. She was still undecided on her feelings for him and yet they were connected by the tragedies and their interest in Irish history.

As more teenage girls were kidnapped and tensions among the community grew, the book gets tenser, Maria’s outsider status makes it hard for her to connect but she involves herself in the case, pushing to find out the fate of these children. As though doing so would resolve the Baby Doe case that troubles her. Clever and twisting, the answers buried in the past still haunting the present.

Book Tour Schedule

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In every person’s story, there is something to hide…

From award-winning author Sulari Gentill comes a mischievous, twisty crime novel in the vein of Only Murders in the Building and White Lotus.

Four strangers in the Reading Room at Boston Public Library are introduced by a scream. Caught up in the subsequent murder investigation, each one finds themselves revealing more than they intended about their pasts as they race to solve the murder before one of them gets hurt. Whilst their stories unfold, so does another.

Dear Hannah…

As correspondence between the author and an avid fan becomes interwoven with the core tale, the boundaries between what is fiction and what is real life begin to blur, highlighting the lengths people will go to keep their secrets. Through these entwined narratives, Gentill delves into the complicated nature of friendships, the lives we show versus the lives we lead and the ways in which art can imitate life. Or perhaps it’s the other way around?

A sharply thrilling literary adventure, The Woman in the Library is contemporary crime with a clever twist.

After setting out to study astrophysics, graduating in law and then abandoning her legal career to write books, Sulari now grows French black truffles on her farm in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains of NSW. Sulari is the author of The Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, historical crime fiction novels (ten in total) set in the 1930s. Sulari’s work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book), the Davitt Award, the Ned Kelly Award and the ABIA. She won the Davitt Award for the A Decline in Prophets, and the Ned Kelly Award for her most recent standalone novel, Crossing the Lines. @SulariGentill

My thoughts: this was a very clever story within a story. There’s the murder at Boston Public Library that brings four strangers together and then there’s the increasingly disturbing emails written to the author of that story. One feeds the other and vice versa. As the letter writer gets closer to the object of his affection (?) and his letters become more sinister, the four library friends become involved in a nasty mess of their own, and there’s a body count. So, who’s the killer? You’ll have to read it and see…

I really enjoyed both the concept and the two intertwining narratives, in both stories you get increasingly invested in what is going on. Is Hannah safe? Is her novel giving us clues or just using up ideas from Leo’s letters. How much of Hannah is in her heroine? I did enjoy all the metatextual stuff but also the whodunit itself, the mysterious scream in the library, was that the victim or the person who found her? Lots of clever little hints and plot twists around. Highly enjoyable and lots of fun.

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

The Santa Killer is coming to town…
One night less than two weeks before Christmas, a single mother is violently assaulted. It’s a brutal crime at the time of year when there should be goodwill to all. When DI Barton begins his investigation, he’s surprised to find the victim is a woman with nothing to hide and no reason for anyone to hurt her.
A few days later, the mother of the woman attacked rings the police station. Her granddaughter has drawn a shocking picture. It seems she was looking out of the window when her mother was attacked. And when her grandmother asks the young girl who the person with the weapon is, she whispers two words.
Bad Santa.
The rumours start spreading, and none of the city’s women feel safe – which one of them will be next?
He’s got a list. It’s quite precise. It won’t matter even if you’re nice.
Purchase

Ross Greenwood is the author of crime thrillers. Before becoming a full-time writer he was most recently a prison officer and so worked everyday with murderers, rapists and thieves for four years.
He lives in Peterborough.

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My thoughts: a final case for DI Barton and the team before he takes a job at force HQ with regular hours and less danger (trainees can be lethal!). It’s Christmas and someone dressed as Santa is bopping women over the head and leaving them bloodied and terrified.

Barton is soon on the case, digging into suspects and it all seems to centre on a bathroom and kitchen shop just outside town. Both victims worked there. Something isn’t right and Barton is keen to find out. A similar spree of violence across several counties seems to be headed towards Peterborough. Can Barton identify the perpetrator in time?

Another excellent read, lots happening and suspects abound. Barton continues to be a strong protagonist and holds the story together well, it’s a shame this is the last in this series – although I’m looking forward to the author’s next project.

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