The husband: in over his head with no way of knowing the truth. The mistress: blinded by love, betrayed by her family… The neighbour: will stop at nothing to protect the life he has fought to create. The wife: a woman bent on revenge, but how far is she willing to go…?
My thoughts: This short story from thriller writer Jack Jordan might be brief but it packs a punch all the same.
Told from multiple view points, the unravelling story lays out how a woman who will stop at nothing goes about dismantling her husband’s life to hold onto tight control. She sees off the mistress, the blackmailer, every possible threat to her perfect life. Her husband has recently learned that she’s probably capable of murder, and now he’s seen how she manipulates things to her advantage. He won’t be going anywhere, unless she says so.
Clever, dark and with a few twists, this is a tense thriller about betrayal, secrets and how we don’t always know the person we sleep beside.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
For a hundred years, the residents of a rural Welsh village have been hiding the truth.
Now, a newcomer has started digging around, uncovering more than just buried secrets.
Retired detective, Graham Williams, has moved to Bethgelert for a fresh start, determined to put the horrors of last year behind him. He has seen his fair share of disturbing scenes, but nothing prepares him for what he sees hanging in the gnarly old tree outside his front window.
Only one man can help him uncover the truth …
Stephen Mallow has come a long way since he helped solve the mystery of Cherry Hollow. When his old nemesis calls and asks for help, he jumps in the car, ignoring the pain in his head and the hole in his heart. He’s ready to take on another weird and creepy small town mystery.
These two unlikely allies, whose main form of communication is bickering, start to work together to dig up the disturbing secrets of ‘The Hanging Tree’, but they soon realise there’s more to the story than they first thought.
A teenage girl is missing. The town butcher isn’t telling them everything. The tree seems to be speaking to Stephen …
Jessica Huntley is an author of dark and twisty psychological thrillers, which often focus on mental health topics and delve deep into the minds of her characters. She has a varied career background, having joined the Army as an Intelligence Analyst, then left to become a Personal Trainer. She is now living her life-long dream of writing from the comfort of her home, while looking after her young son and her disabled black Labrador. She enjoys keeping fit and drinking wine (not at the same time).
My thoughts: There’s a slight air of Hot Fuzz here (one of my favourite films), with a small town full of secrets that date back years, though no insane gun fights, just an intensely disturbing air of menace and some possibly evil banana bread.
Having retired from the police and bought a cottage on the outskirts of the village, Graham might think he’s put his time solving crimes behind him. Until he sees a scarecrow hanging from a noose in the big tree behind his house. Standing tall at the top of a hill, the oak is probably hundreds of years old. And there’s a growing call for it to be pulled down.
At the village council meeting, Graham learns about the tree’s history and why it’s regarded so negatively. But there’s some things he isn’t told and as events take a dark turn and he becomes convinced there’s more to the stories he’s heard, he calls in an ally. Stephen Mallow, investigative journalist, and dedicated researcher.
Only Stephen has been dealing with issues of his own, issues that leave him somewhat compromised. As the two men search for answers, Stephen’s problems become more pronounced. Will he manage to stay the course or will Graham find himself alone?
Tense, gripping and sinister, this is a cleverly written and smart thriller.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
Riley earns a living by digging up the past. But some secrets are better left buried.
Archaeologist Riley Donovan has had it rough. Her beloved fiancé has passed away, her career is crumbling, and lately she feels like she’s losing the will to live.
But when she meets Corbin Cross, a charismatic YouTube historian, Riley finally sees a glimmer of hope. He’s charming, brilliant, and seems to understand her pain. With the support of her loyal friend Grace, Riley begins to rebuild her shattered life.
But there’s a problem – nothing is as it seems.
And when Riley wakes in a hotel room with a dead body beside her and blood on her hands, the police immediately have her down as suspect number one.
As they close in, Riley desperately tries to piece together the truth of what happened that night. And the deeper she digs, the more she realizes that it’s Corbin’s dark secret life that has landed her in this terrifying situation.
Now Riley must navigate a deadly web of treachery and obsessive revenge to prove her innocence. But in a world built on lies, can she trust anyone—including herself?
Forget Me Not – the gripping psychological thriller perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Liane Moriarty, and Sally Hepworth.
Leah Cupps is a Multiple-Award Winning Author and Entrepreneur. She writes Thriller, Mystery, and Suspense as well as Middle-Grade Mystery Adventure Books. Leah’s novels are fast-paced thrillers that will keep you up at night as you can’t wait to see what happens in the next chapter. Leah lives in Indiana with her husband and three children. When she isn’t losing sleep writing her next novel or scaling her next business, she enjoys reading, riding horses, working out, and spending time with her family.
My thoughts: Riley is struggling when she meets Corbin – and as she knows he’s lost his fiancée too, a friend of hers as it happens, they bond over their trauma, but not everything Corbin says can be trusted.
Did he really just accidentally stumble over the archaeological find of the century or is he lying? Did his fiancée really just tumble over a cliff? It doesn’t entirely add up.
But Riley is determined to rebuild her life, to finish the book her publishers are waiting on, to move on. Even with the warning signs. And it isn’t just Corbin who’s lying to her.
When things take a dark turn, who can Riley trust? Piecing together the truth will be the only thing that can save her.
Full of twists, unreliable characters and with a protagonist who is only just about hanging in there, this is gasp out loud stuff.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
I won’t let my four-year-old daughter Skylar go through what I had to. I won’t let my father do to her what he did to me and my sister.
I know how to play the good daughter. The perfect mother. The wife who smiles on cue.
But you don’t grow up in a house like mine without learning how to survive—how to keep secrets buried so deep they almost stop hurting.
Almost.
Last night I finally did something unforgivable. I tried to kill my father. Only . . . my mom picked up the wrong glass.
Now she’s lying in a hospital bed, unconscious. And I’m the dutiful daughter by her side, pretending to be shocked . . .
Alesha Dykema is a thirty-something-year-old author of thriller novels.
She lives in the dreadful Midwest with her strange husband, head-banging toddler son, a neurotic dog, and warden cat.
Besides writing, Alesha loves to read (like every other author in the world). Alesha is also a health and fitness junkie and a dabbler in furniture refinishing. She is extremely anti-social and wishes she lived off-grid in the middle of the woods, but her husband hates good ideas and happiness and won’t allow this to happen.
Even though she’s pretty anti-social, she still likes to make new friends and have casual chats about people’s childhood traumas.
When Amelia relocated to Cambridge for love, she never imagined her new life would become a nightmare. After uprooting her beauty therapy business to be with her fiancé Noah, Amelia receives the first message—anonymous, threatening, impossible to ignore.
As more sinister messages follow, Amelia’s new life begins to fall apart. It seems someone is watching her every move and now her clients are abandoning her for no reason she can see. It’s as if she’s done something wrong, but what?
And Noah is no help. He seems strangely distant, then conveniently vanishes to care for his sick father. Alone and terrified, Amelia suspects everyone. Then, when a photo arrives which proves she’s being stalked, Amelia realizes she’s not being paranoid – the danger is very real.
Trapped in her flat, jumping at shadows, Amelia must uncover who’s tormenting her—and why. Because in this game of psychological warfare, the people closest to her might be the most dangerous of all. Trust no one. Question everything. Survive.
Pretty Little Lies – the gripping psychological thriller perfect for fans of Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware, and Freida McFadden.
Jessica Huntley is an author of dark and twisty psychological thrillers, which often focus on mental health topics and delve deep into the minds of her characters. She has a varied career background, having joined the Army as an Intelligence Analyst, then left to become a Personal Trainer. She is now living her life-long dream of writing from the comfort of her home, while looking after her young son and her disabled black Labrador. She enjoys keeping fit and drinking wine (not at the same time).
My thoughts: I felt really sorry for Amelia, she’s uprooted her whole life, her business, everything, to move to Cambridge with Noah and just as things seem to be going well for her, she starts receiving nasty messages, someone is posting anonymous bad reviews of her services, and Noah basically abandons her.
She doesn’t know who to trust, she only has a few friends in the area and her fiance is MIA. The messages keep getting nastier and she’s completely bewildered as to why whoever this is, is targeting her.
When she finally gets some answers, it’s upsetting and a bit of a shock, but she’s incredibly understanding and just wishes she hadn’t been kept in the dark. Luckily so are her friends, and now she knows who she can trust.
The twists in this are pretty good, compelling and I spent ages trying to figure out what Charlotte (one of the characters keeping her secrets) was up to. Amelia was great, she was just trying to be good at her job and be present in her relationships.
I really liked this one, Jessica’s books are always good and she tackles some big issues here well.
*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 world is on fire. Only one man can extinguish the flames.
Snakeriver – a shadowy private company that handles missions the U.S. government can’t touch. Former Navy SEAL Travis Delta is Snakeriver’s top gun. When Mossad and the CIA discover that Russia and Iran may be plotting to seize control of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Travis is tasked with stopping them – by whatever means necessary.
The intel is chilling: first, Iran will obliterate Israel with Russian nuclear weapons. Then, while the Middle East burns, Russia’s ruthless president will seize Europe and resurrect his empire.
Delta covertly crosses into Iran, extracting critical intelligence with unexpected help from Nickie Chandler—a journalist and former lover.
From the treacherous streets of Tehran to a black site interrogation in Poland, Delta follows the conspiracy all the way to the heart of the Kremlin itself. There he embarks on what seems like a suicide mission – while the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Hollow Point – book 1 in the stunning action series featuring ex-Navy SEAL, Travis Delta.
Perfect for fans of Lee Child, Jason Kasper & David Archer.
Russ Stone’s longtime interest in counterintelligence prompted him to create Travis Delta, the protagonist of his international conspiracy series. Each of these fact-based novels explores the growing threat posed by rogue nations, foreign agents, and terrorists, both foreign and domestic. Reviewers point to Stone’s crisp prose and highly credible plots as the twin engines that drive his stories.
He has published twenty-nine novels, among them police procedurals, satiric comedies, and psychological thrillers. His multifaceted career includes time spent as a university literature teacher, a U.S. military officer, a college vice president, a managing director of a major U.S. investment bank, and a professional watercolor artist.
A ninth-degree black belt in taekwondo, he has been a martial artist for more than fifty years and is a two-time U.S. national champion.
This is his first action thriller with Inkubator Books.
My thoughts: Snakeriver operates outside of the law, they do the jobs that the alphabet agencies can’t, but fully aware that everyone will deny knowing anything about the organisation. Travis Delta is their top operative.
When Russia and Iran decide to join forces and enact a rather terrible plan to eradicate Israel and rebuild the Soviet Union by throwing the world into chaos, neither the Israelis nor the Americans can be seen to interfere. But Snakeriver can.
Travis is tasked with putting an end to this plot, by any means necessary.
This means travelling around the globe to put his plans into action. His enemies are everywhere, but he’s an intelligent and ruthless operator.
This was a really cracking geopolitical thriller, while Travis’ methods may not be to everyone’s taste, they certainly get the job 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.
Can one man stop a nation from going up in flames?
James Ryker, former intelligence agent, is thrust into a high-stakes conspiracy that will test his limits, and his loyalty, to the max. Sent to Atlanta, Georgia, his mission to find a missing governor’s daughter quickly spirals into a deadly pursuit of ex-special ops agent Caleb Marshall. A man presumed dead, but very much alive, and with a terrifying thirst for vengeance.
As Ryker navigates a treacherous landscape of radical right-wing factions, underground networks, and devastating terror attacks, he uncovers a plot of unimaginable scale. Marshall’s meticulous plan to plunge the USA into chaos is playing out before his eyes, and with just a handful of allies, Ryker finds himself in a desperate race against time to stop the world’s leading power combusting from within.
Rob Sinclair is the million copy bestseller of over twenty thrillers, including the James Ryker series. Rob previously studied Biochemistry at Nottingham University. He also worked for a global accounting firm for 13 years, specialising in global fraud investigations.
My thoughts: James Ryker always sails close to the wind and none of his adventures are entirely sanctioned by anyone, so when he’s sent to the States ostensibly to find a governor’s missing daughter, who might have got involved with white supremacist terrorists, it’s not entirely surprising no one wants to help when he uncovers a huge and quite deadly scheme.
Caleb Marshall is a man on a mission, feeling betrayed and abandoned by his country, he’s planning a terrible revenge. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt along the way. There’s people on his list he needs to kill and then he can put his final plan into place, and if a home grown terror group can be of use to him for a while, then that’s fine too. He genuinely doesn’t care about their aims or beliefs, but until they stop being useful, he can pretend.
When Ryker realises Marshall has plans of his own, that go far beyond the small terror cell, he needs help, but apart from a journalist and her ex-sister-in-law, GBI agent Cindy, he’s on his own, and not exactly thrilled about it. Could this be beyond his special skills?
Gripping, thrilling stuff, and if you’re a Reacher fan, then you should be a Ryker fan too.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
London, Christmas 1999. The world is on edge. With the new millennium just days away, fears of the Millennium Bug are spiralling– warnings of computer failures, market crashes, even global catastrophe.
But fifty miles east, on the frozen Blackwater Island, a different kind of mystery unfolds. A child’s body is discovered on the bracken, untouched by footprints, with no sign of how he died. And no one has come forward to claim him. At the International Tribune, reporter Jonny Murphy senses something is off. Police are appealing for relatives, not suspects. An anonymous call led officers to the scene, but no one knows who made it.
While the world fixates on a digital apocalypse, Jonny sees the real disaster unfolding closer to home. With just twenty-hour hours before the century turns, he heads to Blackwater– driven by curiosity, desperation, and the sting of rejection from his colleague Paloma. But Blackwater has secrets buried deep in the frozen ground. More victims– some dead, others still paying for past sins. And when Paloma catches up to him, they stumble onto something far bigger than either of them imagined. Something that could change everything.
The millennium is coming. The clock is ticking.
Can Jonny stop it? Should he?
And what if Y2K wasn’t a hoax, but a warning…?
Sarah Sultoon is an award-winning journalist and writer, whose work as an international news executive with CNN and for Channel 4 News has taken her all over the world, from the seats of power in both Westminster and Washington to the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her debut thriller, The Source, was a Capital Crime Book Club pick, won the Crime Fiction Lover Best Debut Award, was nominated for the CWA’s New Blood Dagger, was a number one bestseller on Kindle and is currently in production with Lime Pictures. It was followed by the critically acclaimed The Shot, Dirt and Death Flight.
My thoughts: a new book by Sarah Sultoon is pretty much a guaranteed stay-up-all-night-totally-gripped read. And so this one is.
Set in 1999, when I was 13, the eve of the Millennium, when Y2K was a paranoid fear, when computers weren’t as prevalent as they are today but still heavily relied on, people genuinely thought aeroplanes might fall out of the sky. But everyone was also geared up for a massive party with fireworks and the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Arena) was a huge tourist draw.
However, in a quiet Essex backwater, on an island designated a Special Scientific area of Study and therefore off limits, things are happening of a different nature. A young boy’s body is found on the island, he’s dressed in strange clothes and seems to have come from nowhere. No one is that bothered, and the only police officer in the area can’t do much.
Reporter Johnny has been sent to find out more, his editor desperate for something other than the Millennium to fill the pages of the newspaper. Finding the tiny village with its pub and not much else is one thing, getting anyone to talk about the island is another.
But out there in the marshes is a story bigger than anything Johnny has covered before, if he survives long enough to file it.
Intelligent, engaging and utterly brilliant, this is a book that will not only keep you up all night but leave you gasping and utterly hooked. Clear your calendar.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own
Rejected by her family and plagued by insomnia, Rose Shaw is unravelling day by day.
Her life is a blur of exhaustion, until one evening a man running through the streets collides with her before quickly vanishing, dropping a journal at her feet.
Inside are Finn Matthews’ frantic, desperate words. He was convinced he was being hunted. Now he’s missing, and nobody is looking for him.
Rose decides to dedicate her sleepless nights to obsessively search for answers about what happened to Finn. Why did he think someone wanted to kill him? And why, in the midst of a string of murders, won’t the police investigate his disappearance?
The deeper Rose digs, the more determined she becomes to uncover the truth. But she has no idea what it will cost her…
My thoughts: What happened to Rose and her family is a truly awful tragedy, and she’s been vilified for it ever since, both by her family and by the wider community, although it was an accident and many would say she’s paid for it.
Her insomnia is utterly consuming, she just can’t sleep. I have it too, but nowhere near as badly and I felt for her. It affects your whole life, not getting proper sleep, and it can be really hard to find the right means and methods to stop it.
Finding the notebook with Finn’s desperate story gives her a focus and a project, but also leads her into danger, not least from the local police force. Finding herself more isolated than ever, she’s determined to get justice for Finn, even if she can never get it for herself.
A gripping and haunting tale of injustice, abuse, loneliness and one woman’s single minded determination to help a complete stranger.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 