Tag: crime fiction

Read my review of Firewatching

After the gut-punch ending of Firewatching, DS Adam Tyler returns to another shocking cold case…

A body has been discovered in Sheffield’s beautiful Botanical Gardens. A young woman, dead from a stab wound, buried in a quiet corner. Police quickly determine that the body has been there for months, and would have gone undiscovered for years – but someone has dug it up.

Who is the victim? Who killed her and buried the body, resting two ancient Roman coins over her eyes? And who dug her up? DS Adam Tyler will find himself drawn into the secretive world of nighthawkers: treasure-hunters who operate under cover of darkness, seeking the lost and valuable, and willing to kill to keep what they find…

Russ Thomas was born in Essex, raised in Berkshire and now lives in Sheffield. After a few ‘proper’ jobs (among them: pot-washer, optician’s receptionist, supermarket warehouse operative, call-centre telephonist, and storage salesman) he discovered the joys of bookselling, where he could talk to people about books all day.

His highly-acclaimed debut novel, Firewatching, is the first in the DS Adam Tyler series and published in February 2020. Nighthawking, the second book in the series, will publish in February 2021.

My thoughts:

This was really good, a mix of crime procedural, personal drama and an alternate version of gentle comedy The Detectorists.

When a body is found buried in the Botanical Gardens, a series of dodgy dealings starts to unravel. The nighthawkers have found some treasure but instead of declaring them they tried to sell them and now someone wants them all. Is that person responsible for the dead woman? Or does it have something to do with her PhD in botanical science?

DS Tyler is distracted by his personal stuff, his dad’s murder, his brother’s reappearance, his faltering relationship, will this affect his ability to get the crime solved?

I felt sorry for his DC, Mina, who ends up doing the brunt of the investigation, carrying two sergeants who are busy thinking about something else, but not getting the respect and acknowledgement she deserves. In a way this is her book, I learnt a lot about her, whereas in Firewatching she was in the background a lot more.

Tyler is a mess, despite his supposed brilliance, he’s all over the place and the case seems like the least important thing to him.

I was completely gripped by the story, it was very clever and each new fragment of information added complications and new suspects to the case. The ending was shocking and I didn’t have a clue who the villain was, I was blindsided by the reveal. Really, really good stuff.

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

HORSEY MERE
The remains of a 17th Century witch, an MP found hanging above a five-pointed star, and three girls with powers beyond anyone’s control.
As DI Tanner and DS Evans endeavour to make plans for their big day, the chance discovery of Norfolk’s last known witch, tried and hanged by Norfolk’s infamous Witchfinder General, sparks a chain of the most horrific events, none of which Tanner seems able to stop.
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THE WHERRYMAN
Four missing children, three murdered men, and the helm of a boat with a blood-red sail, hiding a
secret only he can tell.
Returning to the Broads after nearly two years at sea, Tanner moors up next to a boat to find the body of a man whose five-year-old daughter is nowhere to be seen. As a torrent of unwanted memories begins flooding through his mind, an attractive Broads Ranger arrives at the scene with a disturbing tale; one of children being taken by a ghostly figure, standing at the helm of an old wooden boat.
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Consistently ranked within the top 30 most read authors on Amazon.co.uk, David Blake is a full-time author living in North London. To date he has written eighteen books along with a collection of short stories. He’s currently working on his nineteenth, The Wherryman, which is the next in his series of crime fiction thrillers after Broadland, St. Benet’s, Moorings, Three Rivers and Horsey Mere. When
not writing, David likes to spend his time mucking about in boats, often in the Norfolk Broads, where his crime fiction books are based.

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My thoughts:

These were both excellent, slightly macabre, crime novels, set amongst the Norfolk Broads, drawing on folklore and history, strange figures among the reeds.

Horsey Mere concerns witchcraft and the fact that in the 17th Century more women were executed as witches in East Anglia than anywhere else in England. A suspected witch’s skeleton is found on the mere and it unleashes a spree of madness, with supposed modern witches targeted and attacked. It also comes with a body count; starting with the local MP. Local detectives race against time to stop more people dying, but for Tanner and Evans they might just run out of time.

The Wherryman takes place two years later, as the next in the series, so there’s some character changes at the police station. Someone is abducting children and then a man is found murdered and his daughter gone. Tanner starts to investigate and it all seems linked to some unpleasant London gangsters who’ve moved east.

Both clever and well written, with spots of genuinely amusing humour and also terrible darkness inside people, I’m going to be catching up on the previous titles in the 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.

Has the ancient Egyptian cult of immortality resurfaced in Brighton?

When a freshly-mummified body is discovered at the Brighton Museum of Natural History, Detective Francis Sullivan is at a loss to identify the desiccated woman. But as Egyptian burial jars of body parts with cryptic messages attached start appearing, he realises he has a serial killer on his hands. Revenge, obsession and an ancient religion form a potent mix, unleashing a wave of terror throughout the city. Caught in a race against time while battling his own demons, Francis must fight to uncover the true identity of the Embalmer before it’s too late…

My thoughts:

This was really good, totally weird and creepy but thoroughly enjoyable and gripping too.

A mummified body is left in a local museum, complete with canopic jars containing organs, more bodies, and jars, start to turn up.

The team, led by DI Sullivan, are racing against time to find their killer, but Sullivan gets a bit distracted by another case that hits closer to home, and doesn’t give this his full focus at times.

I really liked the relationships between the different detectives, the tensions added more depth to the characters and provided an extra dimension that made them seem more realistic. The use of Ancient Egyptian iconography and hieroglyphs was also rather intriguing, making it all seem a bit more sinister than just leaving dead bodies.

Balsham uses the Brighton location really well with set pieces on the pier and at the famous Pavilion. Even if you don’t know Brighton you might well have seen these locations on TV and can imagine the fading splendour of the Regency buildings.

A cracking read and a really enjoyable crime thriller, that as a series, is set to run and run.

*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 Three Locks – a gripping new Sherlock Holmes adventure by Bonnie MacBird – is published by Collins Crime Club, an imprint of HarperCollins, on 18 March 2021. It is the fourth in her acclaimed series.

The year is 1887 and an Indian Summer broils London and Cambridge. A mysterious impregnable box arrives for Watson, locked and with a secret from his past. Then a famous escape artist/conjurer fails to unlock his “cauldron” and burns to a crisp during a performance at Wilton’s Music Hall. And in Cambridge, three suitors including a priest, an aristocrat and a young physicist vie for the love of a spiteful beauty, who vanishes after her lookalike doll is found dismembered in the Jesus Lock on the River Cam. The cases convolve as Holmes and Watson tangle with clergy, police, academics and scheming siblings, risking life and limb to solve the murders and to keep the innocent from the gallows.

MacBird’s stylish updates to Conan Doyle’s canon bring all the wit, camaraderie and deductions one expects from Holmes and Watson, but with the extended arc of a novel allowing not only more character development but also action, which carries them far beyond the locked room mystery and into danger.

Each of MacBird’s four Holmes books explores a theme. Just as Art in the Blood revealed the perils and gifts of the artistic temperament, Unquiet Spirits uncovered the danger of letting ghosts of the past lie unresolved, and The Devil’s Due touched upon the cost of corruption, The Three Locks examines the risk of keeping dark secrets locked away.

Meticulous research and attention to period detail enrich the reading experience. The Three Locks is a must-read for fans of the original Sherlock Holmes adventures and for readers new to the genre.

Bonnie MacBird was born and raised in San Francisco and fell in love with Sherlock Holmes by reading the canon at age ten. She now lives in London and Lost Angeles. Her long Hollywood career includes feature film development at Universal, the original screenplay for the movie TRON, three Emmy Awards for documentary writing and producing, numerous produced plays and musicals, and theatre credits as an actor and director. In addition to her work in entertainment, Bonnie teaches writing at UCLA Extension, as well as being an accomplished watercolourist.

She is active in the Sherlockian community in both the UK and the US, and lectures regularly on Sherlock Holmes, writing, and creativity.

Bonnie’s previous three Sherlock Holmes adventures are: Art in the Blood; Unquiet Spirits and The Devil’s Due. Her books are now available in 17 languages worldwide.

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My thoughts:

I’m always a little wary of books that take well known and loved characters created by other authors and create new stories. A lot of them are…not good. Thankfully however this was very enjoyable and felt very true to Conan Doyle’s original stories.

I really felt like I’d been sat with my enormous copy of the original Strand stories (a required text for my long ago degree, but at that price now a permanent resident on my bookcase). There was no slip into modern vernacular, no weird things that hadn’t actually been invented yet, Holmes hadn’t acquired any odd affectations beyond his existing ones.

You can really tell that MacBird knows her source material and has spent a lot of time getting inside Conan Doyle’s style and approach. Her Holmes and Watson feel like the original crime solving duo.

The plot was a lot of fun, and typically manic, with the intrepid duo bouncing around London and Cambridge in a succession of trains and hansom cabs, Holmes high as a kite on his various solutions, Watson attempting to rein his friend in and remind him how to behave around other people.

The way the two cases, that of Dellie in Cambridge and the vanished magician in London are casually linked was nicely done and as always Holmes is three steps ahead of any police detective or dodgy criminal.

I also enjoyed that Watson’s own story and the tragedies that marked his early life came to the fore with a mysterious locked box. It was nice to see his gentle humanity in stark contrast to Holmes’ otherworldly obliviousness.

A very pleasing addition to the various unofficial Holmes spinoffs.

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

Read my review of Containment

The passionate, young police officer Sam Shephard returns in a taut, atmospheric and compelling police procedural, which sees her take matters into her own hands when the official investigation into the murder of a local businessman fails to add up…

The New Zealand city of Dunedin is rocked when a wealthy and apparently respectable businessman is murdered in his luxurious home while his wife is bound and gagged, and forced to watch. But when Detective Sam Shephard and her team start investigating the case, they discover that the victim had links with some dubious characters.

The case seems cut and dried, but Sam has other ideas. Weighed down by her dad’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and by complications in her relationship with Paul, she needs a distraction, and launches her own investigation. And when another murder throws the official case into chaos, it’s up to Sam to prove that the killer is someone no one could ever suspect.

Vanda Symon is a crime writer, TV presenter and radio host from Dunedin, New Zealand, and the chair of the Otago Southland branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors.

The Sam Shephard series has climbed to number one on the New Zealand bestseller list, and has also been shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger.

She currently lives in Dunedin, with her husband and two sons.

My thoughts:

This was a very clever and highly enjoyable read but I expected nothing less. The Sam Shepherd series has been one I’ve really liked reading, and Bound is the next chapter in a truly excellent series.

Sam is a great protagonist, with strong instincts and a determination to get justice – even if it puts her at loggerheads with her boss and colleagues. There’s more development of her personal life too – her growing relationship with Paul, and the struggles with her family. This makes her more interesting and realistic.

The plot brings the police into conflict with two rather nasty criminals, ones readers of the series may recognise, and throws up complications for the case. As straightforward as it looks, there’s something else going on.

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