Tag: thrillers

In Stockholm for a G20 summit, the interpreter Weaver is summoned by the White House Chief of Staff to an off-therecord meeting with a Russian general.

Expecting routine diplomacy, what Weaver gets instead is a chilling glimpse into a secret arrangement between Washington and the Kremlin. Warned never to divulge what has been said, Weaver discovers he has accidentally recorded the meeting – the only evidence that it took place. Now under threat, he escapes to the safety of a friend’s house in the English countryside, and then on to London.

Yet even there he senses danger. Unsure where to turn, Weaver finds unexpected help from the enigmatic Lily Churchill, whose own loyalties are a mystery. As the two begin to grasp the significance of what Weaver has heard, he and Lily are forced to go underground to hide from their unknown pursuers, who seem determined to silence Weaver for good.

The Interpreter’s Secret is a sophisticated literary thriller about corruption, conspiracy, and the lethal confusions of language.

The inspiration for The Interpreter’s Secret was a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in 2017. The only other person in the room was a lone interpreter. At the end of the meeting, according to The Washington Post, Trump confiscated the translator’s notes, ensuring there was no record of the encounter. Andrew Rosenheim was struck by this unusual precaution, and by the unsung role of high-level interpreters. He began to imagine a story of an interpreter who unexpectedly becomes privy to classified information he is not meant to have.

Andrew Rosenheim was born in Chicago and came to England as a Rhodes Scholar. He has lived outside Oxford ever since, and is the author of a memoir and nine novels, including the Nessheim trilogy (Fear Itself, The Informant, and The Accidental Agent) and Hands On, the first novel to explore AI-generated poetry.

My thoughts: I used to work with someone whose wife was an interpreter and she made so much money at her work he was able to take redundancy and be a house-husband for several years. I don’t know how high level her work was, but I don’t think it was as dangerous as this.

Weaver is supposed to be translating Italian and French at a rather boring G20 summit, but when the usually picked first Mrs Macauley is unable to assist, he’s asked to step in and interpret in a top secret meeting between a White House official and a Russian General.

He’s also been given a secretive recording device at some point, disguised as a pen. It’s only after the meeting, the incredibly tense, paranoid meeting, that he realises he has a record of the discussion. Rather than immediately destroy it, he packs it in his bag and heads off for a week’s leave in the UK.

Chaos ensues as he’s followed, by men who might be Russian, might be from his own government. He’s stumbled onto something dangerous and he doesn’t even understand what he knows.

As he careens around London, he’s assisted in avoiding his potential death by Lily, a former MI6 employee who has some useful contacts and the beginnings of a plan. If they can stay ahead of their pursuers.

Intense, full of twists and turns, this was a gripping and intelligent thriller that felt very up to the minute and realistic.

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

It’s a liar’s paradise

Wittering Lodge, Stann Creek, Belize

In the dead of night, lying in her father’s jungle lodge, Laelia watches her partner Aid sleeping – her mind racing with everything that’s brought her to this moment.

The heady Caribbean holiday when they first met.

The rum-fueled passion that, day by day, creeps into something darker.

The secrets she discovered in a hidden nook of the lodge, revealing a devastating past.

Above all, she thinks about the impossible decision she must make before dawn.

Does she stay silent and protect their newfound paradise? Or does she confront the lies which run as deep and dark as the lagoon – surfacing a dangerous truth from which there’s no return…

JO MOREY is a graduate of the Faber Academy and the Curtis Brown Breakthrough Mentoring Scheme. The Night Lagoon is her first novel, a literary suspense, for fans of The White Lotus and Where the Crawdads Sing. It was selected as The Sunday Times ‘Book of the Month’, is one of Good Housekeeping’s ’20 Hottest Books of the Summer’ and has been described by US Publishers Weekly as ‘Lush and immersive with a chillingly effective payoff.’

Like her protagonist, Jo wears hearing aids and suffers constant tinnitus. She lives in West Sussex at the foot of the South Downs with her husband, two boys and two Portuguese Water Dogs. Jo is currently working on her next novel, set on the North Island of New Zealand where she used to live.

My thoughts: Belize isn’t somewhere I know anything about, beyond the fact that it was once occupied by the British.

Laelia’s father is an academic specialising in orchids, of which Belize has many species. She and her sister Chloe are visiting him for his birthday, with their partners and children.

When he has a terrible accident and ends up in hospital, she decides to stay and look after his home, prepare it for his return. But as she and her partner Aid settle in with her children, Ella and Dylan and become part of the community, things start to go awry.

Aid has secrets, secrets Laelia needs to learn in order to stay safe. Her father knew some of them and if he ever wakes up, he’ll be able to tell her. But Aid isn’t behaving like his usual self and his past is beginning to intrude into their present.

Gripping and fascinating, with a great protagonist whose disability makes it harder for her to be sure what is true and what she’s heard.

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

Leo and Viv’s Friday night starts out like any other. A bottle of wine, a takeaway from their favourite Chinese restaurant, a movie, then an early night.

But when Leo wakes up, he finds he’s not in London anymore; he’s naked and alone in an unfamiliar bed, in an anonymous hotel, on the other side of the world. Viv wakes up to a ringing phone. It’s Leo – he claims that he’s in Australia, despite the impossibility of it. An emergency passport is arranged.

A return flight to London is booked, but before Leo can make it onto the plane, there’s a flicker in the corner of his vision, and he wakes up in another bed, in another hotel room, in another country.

Disoriented, Leo soon discovers he’s not alone. Someone with access to a groundbreaking technology and an axe to grind is beaming a group of individuals around the globe – and hunting them down, one by one, committing perfect, untraceable murders.

As Leo fights for his life, back in London, Viv is struggling to understand what’s happening. But as her investigation deepens she starts to unearth secrets from Leo’s past. Dark secrets. Secrets that might be enough to make someone want to kill him. And the more she learns about Leo, the less she seems to know and the less certain she is that her husband is a man worth saving.

Robin Brookes grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Brighton, England. She has worked as a playwright, copywriter and bookseler. The idea for The Arrival came about after Robin heard, and misunderstood, the science behind the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics. It is currently in development as a feature film.

My thoughts: This is a very clever story, you’re as at sea as Leo and Viv to begin with, as they try to make sense of how Leo has woken up on the other side of the world, 24 hours away by plane, just seconds it seems to them.

As the story unfolds, and Viv investigates how someone could be controlling where Leo finds himself, from Australia, to North Korea and beyond, you learn they face a dangerous and angry foe, intent on revenge for the sort of incidents that fester and become larger the longer you dwell on them. They’ve had access to an incredible new technology, and they’re using it to carry out their outsized revenge plan, despite it not officially being able to transmit people, just objects.

Viv is determined to get her husband back before she gives birth, and Leo must stay alive long enough to make it home, unsure who his enemy is, or what they’re capable of.

Tense, gripping and really enjoyable, this is a brilliant thriller with an ingenious plot.

*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 kidnapped girl. An impenetrable fortress. Sounds like a job for Breed.

Keen to discover what she knows about a looming conspiracy, Breed and Stein plan to question German cabaret performer Käthe Ziegler in New York.

Their plan is derailed when Käthe is kidnapped by a team of professionals. They want her and a piece of jewelry she’s been hiding — an ancient gold seal she stole from the most dangerous man in Europe.

Karl Graf is Germany’s Vice-Chancellor, the head of a secret society of senior
politicians and industrialists, and a man with a plan to reshape the continent. He wants his seal back. He wants Käthe back. And he’s prepared to kill anyone who gets in his way.

Breed and Stein discover that Kathe has been taken to a castle high in the Bavarian
Alps. Against all odds, they climb to the fortress, which sits atop a lethal three-thousand-foot peak.

Inside, they find Käthe, Graf, and the truth about an eighty-year-old conspiracy that
began in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and ends — in a bloody climax —
on Christmas Eve.

Blood Pact — Book Thirteen in the stunning Breed action thriller series. Perfect for fans of Jason Kasper, Jack Carr, and Lee Child.

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Cameron Curtis has spent thirty years on trade floors as a trader and risk manager. He was on the trade floor when Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, when the air wars opened over Baghdad and Belgrade, and when the financial crisis swallowed the world.

Having written fiction as a child, he is the author of the Breed action thriller series.

My thoughts: Breed and Stein are in Germany, which is supposed to be an ally, but as they attempt to keep Käthe from her captors, they discover a conspiracy that dates back to during WWII and the Nazi obsession with the supernatural.

As with all the Breed thrillers, the plot moves very quickly and I found the parts where Käthe is relating the history of her family and their relationship with the Grafs, quite slow in comparison.

There’s also a lot of gunfights and dead bodies – obviously they’re mostly henchmen so even their employer doesn’t really care, even when Breed is chucking them down the cliff the German castle they’re holed up in, stands on.

As Käthe fills in the back story, Stein and Breed are working out what the group of powerful politicians are up to in their castle stronghold at Christmas. Could they be preparing to bring down the world as it currently stands and go back to their grandparents’ time?

Thankfully Breed and Stein are there, as there seems to be a mole and worryingly their Director and President might be a bit more involved in this than either operative would like.

We still don’t learn anything about Breed, his past is a closed book, but he does get to be the hero of the hour, and even if he doesn’t believe in the supernatural element of this mission – he is very clear on the potential fall out should it succeed. 

After another success, he and Stein must head back to the US to confront their Director and try to locate the mole – the one who almost cost their lives this time. 

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

There’s something wrong with Haddon Hall…

In 1876, Eleanor Teague lives in a lonely house far from the glamorous London Society she once knew. Confined to Haddon Hall by agoraphobia, bedevilled by nightmares of the death of her daughter, and haunted by the guilt of a terrible crime she committed, Eleanor depends on the household servants and on her husband Ezra, who is kind, patient… and controlling.

But when an apparition appears at her bedside, and mysterious voices urge her to find the ‘Shadow House’,she’s convincedan uncanny presence dwells within the walls of Haddon Hall, and that the staffare lying to her – they, in turn, fear she’s descending into madness.

As Eleanor’s world starts to fracture, the very foundations of Haddon Hall seem to shake. Why is the attic room locked? What is the Shadow House? Who is the strange woman in the woods? The shocking truth will shatter everything Eleanor thought she knew about her life.

A haunting, high-concept thriller with a jaw-dropping twist,The Strange Lives of Eleanor Teaguewill enthral readers of John Marrs, Gillian McAllister and Stuart Turton

M.K. Hill was a journalist and an award-winning music radio producer before becoming a full-time writer. He’s written the Sasha Dawson series – The Bad Place, The Woman In The Wood – and the Ray Drake series – The Two O’ClockBoy and It Was Her – as well as acclaimed psychological thriller One Bad Thing, and the espionage thriller Zero Kill. He lives in London.

My thoughts: This was very clever and without giving anything away, the concept is really well done and sinister, especially given the rapid growth of technology in our century.

Eleanor (who shares a name with my sister) is riddled with guilt about the death of her daughter and the crime she committed. She’s completely dependent on her husband and their tiny household staff for everything, and feels trapped. But something isn’t right.

Her memories are confusing and muddled, things are strange in the house and when her sister and brother-in-law visit, they seem very worried about her.

She is the only person who can find a way through all the mysteries and confusion, her husband becomes increasingly controlling and distant. The staff don’t seem able to help her, referring to Ezra whenever she asks for anything. But she must leave the house, somehow.

Tense, claustrophobic and creepy, Eleanor’s life spirals out of her control and she needs to regain it if she hopes to survive with her mind intact.

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