4.5 Stars!
Sometimes I’ll read a book and think, “I wish I could write that well.” Cold Hillside is one of those books. If you like your stories linear, I wouldn’t recommend this. Mr. Cooper likes to skip around in time and tense, a juggler tossing up a new ball without fanfare, until you realize he’s got eight or ten in the air, and all you can do is applaud. Personally, I never had any problem following the timeline, and the shifts in tense were done with such skill that they never jarred More...

Martin Cooper's Cold Hillside is one of the books that keeps you focused until the very end.

Cooper spins the tale of two brothers in Southern England, one a dealer of all kinds of items, and the other a folk musician. Their lives separate as most sibling lives do, but they keep in touch. Giles dies in a road accident, forcing Simon to take stock of his inheritance. This peoves a daunting task as more and more irregularities appear, and eventually the book evolves into a full-fledged cr More...

(My full Cold Hillside review can be found at Agrippina Legit)

Cold Hillside is the kind of book that demonstrates just why self publishing is beginning to really take off in the current publishing climate. With the bigger publishing houses currently focussing on genres and ideas that are proven best-sellers (the Dan Brown-style thriller, the supernatural teen romance), there is little room for books that deviate from the fashions of the moment. Self publishing allows books like Cold More...

Simon Coltraine is a professional songwriter and musician who left the family home in Dorset to make his way in the music world in London. Older brother Giles is a bit of a wheeler dealer with fingers in various pies. Simon knows from experience that maybe not all of those pies are legitimate ones but when details of Giles' life begin to unravel after his death he discovers his brother was in deeper than he ever thought.

The book is written largely in the first person, from Simon's vi More...