Tag Archives: thriller

#BookReview ‘Nightfall’ by @stephenleather #supernatural #thriller #crime

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The first page was really intriguing and locked me into the character of Jack Nightingale, a police negotiator turned private detective. He is a troubled man, troubled by what he has seen through the course of his job though nowadays he earns his living from following unfaithful spouses. Nightfall by Stephen Leather is the first of the Jack Nightingale series, described as a ‘supernatural thriller.’ Stephen LeatherThis is a different kind of detective story, which begins when Jack is told he has inherited a mansion from a man who claimed to be Jack’s natural father. That’s not all, his ‘father’ leaves a warning: at Jack’s birth his soul was sold to the devil and a devil will come to claim it on his thirty-third birthday. That’s only three weeks away. So Jack is in a race against time to find out the truth. Was he really adopted? Who is Ainsley Gosling? What is going on? Is he suffering from stress? Hearing things? Imagining things? Is he going to lose his soul? Or is it one big con? When people around him start to die, Jack begins to lose his sense of perspective. ‘You are going to hell, Jack Nightingale’ are the last words he heard at the end of his career as a police negotiator but now he hears those words again, said to him by strangers.
A page-turning thriller with a fresh angle on the crime novel. Not what I was expecting at all, if I’d been offered the chance to read a ‘supernatural thriller’ I would have said ‘no thanks.’ But I enjoyed this. Why? Stephen Leather knows how to keep the story moving, he really works the trick of finishing a chapter in a way which makes you read the next even though it is midnight. And I like the main character, Jack Nightingale. For once he is not a tortured depressed detective with relationship issues, and that made this book a refreshing read. The supernatural detective thing is very different, the most similar crime book I’ve read is The Silent Twin by Caroline Mitchell where the detective is sensitive to the spiritual vibes of recent murder victims.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Silent Twin’ by Caroline Mitchell
‘Wilderness’ by Campbell Hart
‘Snow White Must Die’ by Nele Neuhaus

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#BookReview ‘Then She Was Gone’ by @lisajewelluk #thriller

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Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell is a delight, the page-turning story of a disappeared teenager whose experience was something I did not expect. An excellent un-thriller; that’s a phrase I use after giving it some thought. This is not a psychological thriller in that it is frightening. It didn’t make my pulse race with a sense of danger, but it did make me very curious. Lisa JewellEllie Mack is fifteen the day she fails to come home from the library, she is due to take her GCSE examinations the following week. She is a clever student, a golden girl. But she disappears, never to be seen again. Life goes on. Except it doesn’t for her family, each being trapped in some way by Ellie’s absence. Until ten years later when Ellie’s mum Lauren, now divorced, meets a nice bloke in a café. Her ex, Paul, has a new partner and so do Ellie’s siblings. Laurel is the one who is really stuck, visiting her elderly mother bed-ridden after a stroke. Then she meets Floyd and his daughters Poppy and SJ, and she blossoms.
I would like to say from the beginning I had unsettling feelings of the ‘that’s not quite right’ variety, but I didn’t. Instead the doubts crept in stealthily until the full truth dawned on me at 72% on my Kindle. And then it hit with a sledgehammer.
This is a clever book written by an author who has matured enormously over the years in the subjects she tackles.
Then She Was Gone doesn’t set out to be frightening, at least I don’t think that is the author’s primary intent. I think she started with a ‘what if’ scenario and let it unfold from there. It is a puzzle involving characters so real you feel you know them, that it could be happening to you; and that’s what makes it so powerful.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
I FOUND YOU
THE GIRLS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Good Girl’ by Mary Kubica
‘Chosen Child’ by Linda Huber
‘Stolen Child’ by Laura Elliot

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
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#BookReview ‘The Escape’ by CL Taylor @callytaylor #thriller

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The Escape by CL Taylor fairly gallops along without time to take a deep breath. It is a tale of escape, pursuit, lies, vulnerability, long-hidden secrets and selfishness. At times I didn’t know which character to believe and I didn’t particularly like any of them. I wanted to sit them down at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits, and bang their heads together. There appear to be so many lies it is difficult to sift out the truth, which became a little frustrating after a while. In the end, there are many types of escape. CL TaylorJo and Max have a toddler daughter Elise. Max, an investigative journalist, has just completed a long-running story which resulted in a conviction, and he is jubilant. Jo, who became agoraphobic after the loss of their first child Henry, lives from day to day, her small world surrounding Elise. Jo feels Max is less sympathetic to her condition than he used to be. Max tries to be patient but is finding it increasingly difficult. Into this fragile world steps Paula, a stranger, who threatens Jo and Elise. The first crack appears as Max doubts Jo’s judgement of the threat. Is she panicking again, exaggerating it, imagining it?
Faced with danger to her child, Jo runs. That is the escape of the title. The agoraphobia which made it a trial to take her daughter to nursery every day fades as, driven by her maternal defence mechanism, she packs Elise into her car and flees to Ireland. Ireland, we know vaguely, is where her mother came from years ago but of which she will not speak. More mystery. As she runs, Jo appears more unbalanced, sees threats on all sides and is forever planning escape routes. But where is the danger actually coming from? Is she seeing clearly, could it be that some of the lies which frighten her are actually the truth? And vice-versa. Is she a reliable witness? The need for flight seems to over-ride all historic connections of love and trust, she runs from the people who try to help her. So, is she misguided, confused? Or correct? And in escaping with Elise, in all good intentions to protect her daughter, is she putting her two-year-old daughter in further danger of her life?
This is a psychological thriller which asks some difficult questions. About how we react to stress, how our judgement of others can be influenced, and when to trust your own deep-seated instincts.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers by CL Taylor:-
THE ACCIDENT
THE LIE

If you like this, try:-
‘One Step Too Far’ by Tina Seskis
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone
‘The Last of Us’ by Rob Ewing

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#BookReview ‘The Travelers’ by Chris Pavone #thriller

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What a non-stop ride this is. I resented everything which made me put this book down. The Travelers by Chris Pavone is a spy thriller about an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job who finds himself in an extraordinary position. It reminded me a little of Robert Redford in the film Three Days of the Condor. Chris PavoneTravel writer Will works for New York-based Travelers, a luxury travel magazine. Married to Chloe, who works as a freelance for the same magazine, they live in a rundown money-pit in Brooklyn. Things change in a short space of time. On a press trip in France, Will flirts outrageously with an Australian journalist and goes home, relieved he didn’t succumb to temptation. But on his next press trip to the wine area of Argentina, Elle is there again and this time they do have sex. Except Elle isn’t what she says she is, her name isn’t Elle and she isn’t Australian. She gives Will a choice. Cooperate, supply information about his contacts and people he writes about, or else he will be exposed to his boss Malcolm and to Chloe. And so he cooperates.
The action is rapid. Some sections – identified only by the location, not the person – are only half a page and for the first third of the book this is disorientating. I couldn’t work out who was spying and who was being spied upon. A man in an office sits at a computer terminal and monitors targets, the flights they take, the hotels and rental cars they book. An un-named woman goes to Capri to kill a man. An American man wants to disappear. Malcolm has a hidden office with secret files.
The threads are tangled thoroughly. The answer is not one I predicted. It is impossible to explain the plot without giving away secrets, but the ending in Iceland will make a great action sequence in a film.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here’s my review of another thriller by Chris Pavone:-
THE ACCIDENT

If you like this, try:-
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black
‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE TRAVELERS by Chris Pavone via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2lT

#BookReview ‘I Found You’ by Lisa Jewell @lisajewelluk #thriller

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Alice Lake sees a man sitting alone on a beach in the rain and invites him into her home. He has lost his memory. When Lily’s new husband doesn’t come home from work, she goes to the police for help and discovers he has a false name. A family from Croydon take a traditional English holiday by the sea. These are the three storylines in I Found You by Lisa Jewell. The common denominator is location: a northern seaside town called Ridinghouse Bay. Lisa JewellTwo inter-connected themes run throughout I Found You. Memory – the fugue of the man on the beach, and the dementia suffered by Alice’s parents – and identity, disguised, mistaken, forgotten. Jewell is so good at writing believable characters, good at exploring human nature in a simple, accessible way. And though there is evil in this story, there is also good, kindness, humanity, heart.
The menace is subtle, building slowly from the beginning even when the connections are unclear. It’s just a feeling. Gray watches his younger sister being chatted up by Mark, an older teenager, and feels uneasy: ‘There was something just off about him. Something shadowy and cruel. There were too many angles in his face. Too much thought behind each gesture, each word, each action. Even his hair colour was too uniform, Gray felt, as though he could tug at it and mark’s whole face would come off to reveal his true identity, like a Scooby Doo villain.’
Alice is too easy to trust, it has got her into trouble before. But her least-trusting dog likes the man from the beach, who her youngest daughter names ‘Frank’. But even Frank doesn’t know if he is trustworthy. How much do you need to know about someone before you trust them? Is it dangerous to rely on instinct? Or is that the most reliable test?
Two things in the story rang untrue for me – the police today use mobile phone records and CCTV to quickly trace missing people; and the behaviour of some characters in the intervening years seems far-fetched. But that aside, this is a satisfying puzzle to solve.

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
THE GIRLS
THEN SHE WAS GONE

If you like this, try:-
‘The House on Cold Hill’ by Peter James
‘The Good People’ by Hannah Kent
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview I FOUND YOU by Lisa Jewell @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Lg

My Porridge & Cream read: Lev D Lewis

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Today I’m delighted to welcome debut crime novelist Lev D Lewis. His ‘Porridge & Cream’ read is Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household.

“Confession, at the risk of being branded an imposter and ritually kicked off your blog: I don’t really have a Porridge & Cream read; the last thing I feel like doing when I’m ‘tired, ill, or out-of-sorts’ is staring at words. If anything, I find those states more creative than consuming; I just want to bury myself under the duvet and let my mind take over.
Lev D LewisI do have a long list of books I want to re-read, headed by Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (I’ve studied Classical Civilization since I first read it, and it would be interesting to reread with that extra bit of knowledge) but my TBR pile tends to win out.

There’s only one book I’ve read more than once for pure pleasure, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, so I present that as my Porridge & Cream book.

It about an unnamed British huntsman who aims his rifle at an unnamed foreign dictator, just for laughs (apparently). He’s chased back to England, retreats into an underground lair and is trapped there by his pursuer.

I can’t remember the exact year I first read it: I was a young teenager, and I found it on my dad’s bookshelf. I don’t know what drew me to it (perhaps the striking cover: the macho title in bold, pink font) but remember being totally gripped. Rather than returning it, I kept it to be re-read (which is why I still have the same copy today). But it was some thirty years later before I finally went back to it, prompted by hearing part of a reading on, I think, the now defunct BBC Radio 7 – I wasn’t disappointed. It’s slim, only 192 pages, so I’ve really no excuse for not rereading it more often which I now vow to do!”

Lev D Lewis’s Bio
Lev was born and raised in South Norwood: the wrong side of Croydon. If you’re unfamiliar with London-speak, Croydon is shorthand for ‘the armpit of the capital’. This maybe so – but he is still living there. After various false starts, he qualified as a solicitor. His legal career was cut short, not because of any disreputable deeds à la his hero/antihero, Frank Bale, but through ill-health. That’s when he started writing, basically as occupational therapy, but it’s led (after quite a few years and creative writing courses) to his debut novel, Jellyfish.

Lev D Lewis’s links
Website
Twitter
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Goodreads

Lev D Lewis’s books

Lev D LewisWhen Frank Bale was a lawyer, he wore Savile Row suits. Now he has holes in his trousers and serves papers for other, successful, lawyers. Life is bleak but he is kept going by a Philip Marlowe obsession and a longing to prove himself. When a student winds up dead, he gets the chance to investigate a real crime, relying on advice found in an old Tradecraft Manual and the sayings of his nan. But neither the manual nor his nan nor Marlowe prepare him for handling the slimiest of London’s underbelly, jellyfish, who hit back first with fists, then with golf clubs and finally with guns. Can Frank stay alive long enough to find the killer – and get the girl?

Lev is now working on the next instalment of the Frank Bale story. Read my review of Jellyfish.
‘Jellyfish’ by Lev D Lewis [UK: Alleyway Press] 

Lev D Lewis

What is a ‘Porridge & Cream’ book? It’s the book you turn to when you need a familiar read, when you are tired, ill, or out-of-sorts, where you know the story and love it. Where reading it is like slipping on your oldest, scruffiest slippers after walking for miles. Where does the name ‘Porridge & Cream’ come from? Cat Deerborn is a character in Susan Hill’s ‘Simon Serrailler’ detective series. Cat is a hard-worked GP, a widow with two children and she struggles from day-to-day. One night, after a particularly difficult day, she needs something familiar to read. From her bookshelf she selects ‘Love in A Cold Climate’ by Nancy Mitford. Do you have a favourite read which you return to again and again? If so, please send me a message via the contact form here.

Lev D Lewis

 

‘Rogue Male’ by Geoffrey Household [UK: Orion]
Listen to Geoffrey Household on ‘Desert Island Discs’, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1980.

Discover the ‘Porridge & Cream’ books of these authors:-
Judith Field
Rachel Dove
Lisa Devaney

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#BookReview ‘Deerleap’ by Sarah Walsh #familyhistory #mystery

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One day Grace Chalk sees her boyfriend standing at the other side of the street. Except Alex is dead. And so starts Deerleap by Sarah Walsh, a combination of love story [Grace and Alex], detective story [is Alex really alive, if so where is he?] and the nature of blame [marriage breakdown] and grief. Sarah WalshWalsh has written an assured story, handling the emotional complexities with a gentle touch making the twists and turns even more surprising when they arrive.
When the story opens, seven years have passed since the car accident in which Grace’s father and her stepmother Polly were killed, her sister Rita seriously injured, and her boyfriend Alex disappeared. Alex’s body was never found. Rita has never talked about what happened, she is emotionally vulnerable, spiky and prone to hitting her sister. Grace’s mother still resents being deserted by her husband and Grace worries that her anger will turn into depression and suicide. At the centre of the story stands Deerleap, the remote country house where Alex grew up and where Grace visits her father as he sets up his new home with Polly. It all sounds idyllic, except seven years later, Deerleap stands empty awaiting the legal deadline when Alex can be declared legally dead and the house sold. This is the catalyst which sparks this chain of events.
The emotional vulnerability in Grace’s family made me at times question her own reporting of events, we are told the story entirely through her eyes. She is an artist, painting portraits of from her studio in Bristol. She looks into people’s faces and sees the truth. Can she find out the truth of what happened to Alex?
The Somerset countryside sounds marvellous, a stark contrast to the streets of Bristol where Grace’s troubled mother and sister live. The family ties, responsibilities and lies create a web of mystery through which you glimpse the answer. And then there is a twist at the end which I didn’t expect. This is a quiet book which really grew on me. A psychological mystery, rather than a psychological thriller, it explores the nature of grief, depression, guilt and love.

If you like this:-
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘The Distant Hours’ by Kate Morton
‘Foxlowe’ by Eleanor Wasserberg

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#BookReview ‘Visions’ by Helen J Christmas @SFDPBeginnings #thriller #romance

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Crammed with Eighties references from Margaret Thatcher, Echo & the Bunnymen and Jane Fonda aerobics to Laura Ashley décor, Visions quickly immerses you in the world of Eleanor Chapman. Visions is part two of Eleanor’s story which started in the 1970s in Beginnings and will ultimately end far into the future. Helen J Christmas‘Same Face Different Place’ by Helen J Christmas is an ambitious thriller series focussing on a single gangland incident which has reverberations across the decades. It is a study of how to react to threats and violence, the nature of victimhood, and the power of fighting back.
There are times in Visions when it covers old ground from book one, but nevertheless the story slowly reeled me in. After the events of Beginnings, Eleanor and her son Elijah live in a caravan in a Kent village, safe from the London criminals who threatened them. Their neighbours, James Barton-Wells and his children Avalon and William become close friends. However Westbourne House, the ancestral home of the Barton-Wells family, is crumbling. When the house is declared a ruin and the repairs too expensive for James to pay, a sinister property developer offers to help. All too soon, his nasty son and equally nasty sidekick bring terror to the quiet village as the tentacles of threat from the past find Eleanor’s hiding place.
There are scenes of nasty violence which remind the reader this is not simply a story of petty crime. Eleanor, her family and new friends must face intimidation, assault, sinister stalking and abduction. At the heart of their survival is a defiance born of knowing they are right.

Click the title to read my reviews of the next books in this series:-
BEGINNINGS #1SAMEFACEDIFFERENTPLACE
PLEASURES #3SAMEFACEDIFFERENTPLACE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Truth Will Out’ by Jane Isaac
‘No Other Darkness’ by Sarah Hilary
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview VISIONS by Helen J Christmas @SFDPBeginnings http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2q6 via @Sandra Danby

#BookReview ‘Butterfly on the Storm’ by Walter Lucius #thriller

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This crime thriller is the first of a trilogy billed, as many thrillers are, as the new Millennium Trilogy. Butterfly on the Storm by Walter Lucius does feature horrific examples of abuse, it does feature a campaigning journalist, but for me it fell short of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. Without that expectation, I would probably have enjoyed this thriller while at the same time being irritated that so much was crammed in. Walter LuciusThe action starts from page one and doesn’t stop to breathe. A young girl is the subject of a hit-and-run accident in the Amsterdam woods. In hospital, it becomes clear the girl is a young boy, dressed as a girl dancer and sexually abused by Afghan men now living in Holland. I found the portrayal of immigrant life in Holland fascinating and almost wish the author had examined this in more depth but the story spreads out to South Africa and Russia and its tentacles become confusing.
Accompanying the child to hospital is Dr Danielle Bernson who, following medical experience in Africa, is traumatized when she sees the child suffer. At the hospital, they meet journalist Farah Hafez, originally from Afghanistan, Farah’s identity was changed when she arrived as a child in Holland. She too has a lot of emotional baggage. Farah’s boss teams her with a more experienced journalist, Paul Chapelle, who she knew in Afghanistan. On the police side we have the pair of detectives assigned to the hit-and-run case, Joshua Calvino and Marouan Diba, a sort of young/old, idealistic/world-weary, good cop/bad cop pairing. There is a huge list of characters to accommodate the various storylines which include child trafficking, police corruption, political corruption, Russian violence and international terrorism. There is too much going on.
In the Millennium Trilogy, the first book had a clear distinctive story which allowed the reader to get to know the key characters which would move forward to book two. In Butterfly on the Storm, the first book feels like the episode of a television series where the ending has a hook to make you watch next week. This may work with television, but it left me feeling the novel was incomplete.

If you like this, try:-
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch
‘The Long Drop’ by Denise Mina
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone

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#BookReview ‘The Ice’ by Laline Paull @LalinePaull #contemporary #thriller

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The Ice by Laline Paull is a climate change thriller which takes place partly in the Arctic and partly in a courtroom in Canterbury. Sean and Tom met as students when Tom attended a meeting of the exclusive Lost Explorers’ Society and Sean was a waiter. They became friends because of their shared fascination for the Arctic. Both go on to forge careers revolving around the Arctic; Tom becomes an environmental campaigner, Sean a businessman. Their friendship, agreements and arguments are key to this novel. When, in chapter one, Tom’s body is revealed by an iceberg calving from a glacier it is the catalyst for all that follows. Laline PaullTom was known to be dead, having died in an accident in an ice cave on Svalbard three years earlier, an accident which Sean survived. An inquest is called, Sean’s business partners fly in to give evidence and to support Sean who is seeing visions of Tom around every corner. It becomes clear that Sean, now divorced and living with one of his investors, Martine, is not hands-on with his business in Svalbard. Midgard Lodge is an exclusive retreat where businessmen and politicians can meet to do deals. Sean’s upfront motivation is to encourage the capitalists to see the Arctic surrounding them, the polar bears, whales and glaciers, and convert them to environmentalism. With this in mind, he recruited Tom to the business. His partners however – the odious Joe Kingsmith and irritating Radiance Young – set my alarm bells ringing very early on. What exactly goes on at Midgard Lodge and why doesn’t Sean, supposedly the CEO, find out? And how could Tom not ask more questions before signing his contract?
There are some big topics touched on here: the opening of shipping channels over the North Pole, the political and military ramifications, the melting of the ice, the wealthy tourists who demand to see the polar bear they were promised in the holiday brochure, business executives who take the money and avoid asking difficult questions because that’s the easiest and most convenient thing to do. To reduce it to essentials, this is a novel about greed and love. How greed can destroy everything: not just business, but friendships, families and ultimately the ice.
I enjoyed The Ice but was left feeling vaguely dissatisfied. A day after I finished reading it, I realized why: it feels like it started out as a thoughtful novel about climate change, but at a later draft was turned into a thriller. The environmental message seemed preachy at times, the business sections were factual and dry, both of which took the edge off the suspense. Told from Sean’s viewpoint, the lack of Tom’s voice for me made the novel weaker. Perhaps it would have been more thrilling if various viewpoints had been juggled so the lies, risks, double-crossing and betrayals happen in real time, rather than the past.

Read my review of POD, also by Laline Paull.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Surfacing’ by Cormac James
‘Under a Pole Star’ by Stef Penney
‘Thin Air’ by Michelle Paver

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#BookReview THE ICE by Laline Paull @LalinePaull http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2zZ via @SandraDanby