Oliver Clarke's Blog: Little Slices of Nasty, page 16

The Last Widow by Karin Slaughter #BookReview

A mysterious kidnapping

On a hot summer night, a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control is grabbed by unknown assailants in a shopping center parking lot. Vanished into thin air, the authorities are desperate to save the doctor.

A devastating explosion

One month later, the serenity of a sunny Sunday afternoon is shattered by the boom of a ground-shaking blast—followed by another seconds later. One of Atlanta’s busiest and most important neighborhood’s has been bombed—the location of Emory University, two major hospitals, the FBI headquarters, and the CDC.

A diabolical enemy

Medical examiner Sara Linton and her partner Will Trent, an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, rush to the scene—and into the heart of a deadly conspiracy that threatens to destroy thousands of innocent lives. When the assailants abduct Sara, Will goes undercover to save her and prevent a massacre—putting his own life on the line for the woman and the country he loves.

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Title: The Last Widow | Author: Karin Slaughter | Series: Will Trent #9 |Publisher: HarperCollins | Pages: 464 | ISBN: 9780008303389 | Publication date: 13th June 2019 | Source: NetGalley

I read Karin Slaughter’s first few novels years ago and enjoyed them, but then somehow fell out of the habit of reading her. I’m kind of regretting that lapse now, because her latest ‘The Last Widow’ is great. It’s a gripping, action-packed and emotionally charged thriller that mixes a solid plot¸ convincing characters and a breakneck pace. It reminded me a little of Lee Child, only with a greater focus on interpersonal relationships. It’s the ninth of Slaughter’s ‘Will Trent’ books, but can be read as a standalone. I went into it without having read any of the previous books and got on fine with it.

The plot is about a far-right terrorist group planning a domestic
atrocity in Georgia (the US state, not the country). Georgia Bureau of Investigations
officer Will Trent and his girlfriend, doctor Sara Linton, stumble into it
right at the start, with Sara kidnapped by some of the terrorists and Will fighting
to save her. That might sound like a hackneyed “boy saves girl” plot, but rest
assured that Sara is every bit as much of an active player as Will.

The first third of the book night be the fastest paced, most
gripping thing I’ve read in ages. It’s insanely tense and exciting. Unputdownable
is a word that gets used to describe thrillers a lot, but it certainly applies here.
It reads like an episode of TV show ‘24’, with a breakneck pace that is so
unrelenting it’s exhausting to read. Slaughter uses long chapters, rather than
the really short ones favoured by the likes of Dan Brown and James Patterson,
meaning the reader gets no chance to come up for air. It works brilliantly, but
boy is it gruelling to read, especially when you throw in Slaughter’s fondness for
forensic detail.

It’s almost a relief when the pace slows down a bit for the
middle third of the book, which focusses more on the investigation into the
terrorists. Slaughter brings in a broader range of characters and the detail of
how law enforcement works, inter agency rivalry and all, feels credible. The
pace picks up again for the final act, which isn’t quite as tense as he first, but
is still pretty blistering stuff.

Slaughter’s plotting and characters are spot on throughout.
Will is appealingly fallible for a tough guy hero, and the villains are truly repellent.
She works in topical detail on far right extremism in the US, which all adds to
the effectiveness of the book.

What works less well is her decision to replay scenes from
multiple viewpoints. At times this adds to the novel’s richness, but at others it
borders on the tedious. Reading exactly the same conversation twice feels unnecessary
and frustrating. When I say the same conversation, I mean word for word the same
dialogue, it isn’t even paraphrased.  Elmore Leonard wrote that authors should leave
out the parts that readers tend to skip. Slaughter and her editor should have paid
attention to that rule.

Fortunately, that habit is only really present near the start of the book, and it’s my only problem with what is otherwise an excellent thriller. It’s hellishly exciting, politically astute and emotionally engaging. Needless to say the first thing I did after finishing it was buy the first Will Trent book.

4/5

Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain #BookReview

Detective Steve Carella thought he had an open and shut case. He had a confessed killer, clear fingerprints, and a witness. But when the dead lady’s husband seemed less than mournful at her death, and when her little black book turned up a mile-long record of her love adventures, Carella knew it was time to call in the 87th precinct.

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Title: Sadie When She Died | Author: Ed McBain | Series: 87th Precinct #26 | Publisher: Pan | Pages: 160 | ISBN: 9780330240123| Publication date: 1972 | Source: Self-purchased

After the enjoyable smorgasbord approach of ‘Hail Hail the
Gang’s All Here’, the next book in the 87th Precinct series, ‘Sadie
When She Died’, is a far more focussed and sombre affair. I think that the very
best crime novels shed a light on the darkest corners of the human condition in
a way that is reflective and cathartic. McBain’s novel does that with aplomb,
and is a great mystery to boot.

This time around, McBain’s detectives (with Steve Carella
very much at the forefront) investigate a single case, the brutal stabbing of a
woman in her apartment. It appears to be a simple case of a burglary gone wrong
and a likely suspect is soon identified and arrested. However, as Carella
investigates further, and comes to know the dead woman’s husband, it becomes
clear that there is far more going on.

It’s hard to say too much more about the plot without giving
too much away, but as the case develops the book becomes an examination of
marriage and the devastating effect two people can have on each other’s lives
when matrimony goes sour. McBain digs into both the male and female psyche and
creates, in the couple, two characters who are completely convincing and
memorable. This feat is even more impressive given that the woman is dead
throughout and we only come to know her through the recollections of others.

It’s an extremely effective, disturbing and memorable read.
It still has the elements of humour we expect from McBain, but the overall
effect is different from many of his books. The resolution of the crime at the
end feels comes not with a feeling of victory of good over evil, but of bleak
inevitability. It’s a book that has stayed with me in the weeks since I read
it. For that reason, I’ve upped the rating I originally pencilled in for it
from 4 to 5 stars.

5/5

Peepland by Christa Faust #BookReview

When a chance encounter for Peepbooth worker Roxy Bell leads to the brutal murder of a public access pornographer, the erotic performer and her punk rock ex-partner Nick Zero soon find themselves under fire from criminals, cops, and the city elite, as they begin to untangle a complex web of corruption leading right to city hall.

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Title: Peepland | Author: Christa Faust, Gary Phillips and Andrea Camerini | Publisher: Hard Case Crime | Pages: 128 | ISBN: 9781785851193 | Publication date: 1st August 2017 | Source: Self purchase

I’ve yet to read something by Christa Faust that I didn’t like.
Her Angel Dare books ‘Money Shot’ and ‘Choke Hold’ (both also available from Hard
Case) are blisteringly enjoyable hardboiled thrillers. Her lesbian detective
novel ‘Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick – Double D Double Cross’ is a blast and her
entry in the ‘Dead Man’ series ‘The Death Match’ was probably the best. In ‘Peepland’
she turns her hand to comics and the result is a semi-autobiographical tale of sex
workers in 1980s New York that’s filled with the frank grittiness of the Angel
Dare books. It’s explicit, grim, heartfelt and I loved every page.

The book collects issues 1 to 5 of the ‘Peepland’ comic and
tells the story of Roxy Bell, a performer in a peep show who finds herself in
possession of a video tape which documents a murder. Needless to say the killer
wants it back, and Roxy and her punk boyfriend end up trying to avoid getting killed
while also clearing the name of the son of one of Roxy’s co-workers who is
falsely accused of the killing.

The book is dripping with atmosphere and rich with
incidental detail, drawing on Faust’s experiences as a sex worker. It’s funny,
honest and unexpectedly warm. That sets the backdrop for a plot involving a powerful
businessman and corrupt officials which isn’t desperately original, but which
is told with passion and a powerful narrative drive. It’s bleak stuff at times,
but always engaging, with detestable villains and likeable underdog heroes.   

Faust shares writing credits with comic writer and novelist Gary
Phillips. I’ve not read him before, but based on ‘Peepland’ I will be again.
The art is from Andrea Camerini and it’s great – vibrant, colourful and packed
with energy. The book also features all of the cover art for the individual
issues (which is often great) and nice postscripts from Faust, Phillips and
Hard Case editor in chief Charles Ardai.

It’s a quick read, but an enjoyable one that I can see myself revisiting. An easy recommendation for crime and graphic novel lovers and another hit from Faust.

4/5

Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here by Ed McBain #BookReview

There are 186 patrolmen and a handful of detectives in the 87th Precinct, but it’s never quite enough. Because between petty crimes and major felonies, between crimes of hate and crimes of passion, the city never sleeps — and for these cops, a day never ends…

The night shift has a murdered go-go dancer, a firebombed black church, a house full of ghosts, and a mother trying to get her twenty-two year-old to come home. The day shift: a naked hippie lying smashed on the concrete, two murderous armed robbers in Halloween masks, and a man beaten senseless by four guys using sawed-off broom handles. Altogether, it’s a day in the life. But for a certain cop in the 87th Precinct, it could just be his last…

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Title: Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here | Author: Ed McBain | Series: 87th Precinct #25 | Publisher: Pan | Pages: 180 | ISBN: 9780330235495 | Publication date: 1971 | Source: Self-purchased

‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ is like one of those
episodes of a long running TV show where they let the writers have a bit of fun
rather than sticking to the normal formula. Such experiments can end in
disaster, with a result that only please the writers (anyone remember that
episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ with the fly?), but when they’re done well, they can
be a delight. This is McBain, so naturally for me it fell into the latter camp.

In this, the 25th of the ‘87th
Precinct’ novels, McBain bins the format of the previous 24 books, which
typically sees the bulls of the 87th tackling one or two central
mysteries. Instead, this book presents a day in the life of the precinct. 24
hours pass, with the detectives and patrolmen tackling a variety of crime,
large and small, with none of them dominating. Both the day and night shifts
are covered, and so we get to see all the characters we’ve come to grow and
love. This being McBain, the crimes are wonderfully varied. Some are humorous –
an apparent haunting, a businessman trying to get two prostitutes that have
propositioned him arrested. Some serious – a stabbing outside a theatre, a
woman who has murdered her family. And some political – the firebombing of a
black church. Most get solved, including some that solve themselves by the
times the cops find time to investigate, but not all.

To all of this, McBain brings the crisp prose and expert characterisation that makes his work such a joy. This being a book of many small vignettes, his talent from creating people who jump off the page after only a few sentences, comes to the fore. It’s not a typical 87th book, but it is one of the most purely enjoyable, and a pleasure to read from beginning to end.

4/5

Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal #BookReview

The lost pulp crime novel by great American novelist Gore Vidal! Hired to smuggle an ancient artefact out of Egypt, Pete Wells finds himself the target of killers and femme fatales – and just one step away from triggering a revolution that will set Cairo aflame!

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Title: Thieves Fall Out | Author: Gore Vidal (as Cameron Kay) | Publisher: Hard Case Crime | Pages: 240| ISBN: 9781781167922 | Publication date: 10th April 2015 (originally published in 1953)| Source: Self purchase

‘Thieves Fall Out’ is a 1953 novel by famed writer and intellectual Gore Vidal. It was originally published under the pen name Cameron Kay and has now been reissued by Hard Case. As you might expect from that description, it’s nothing like the kind of social satire Vidal is best known for (disclaimer: it’s the first book I’ve read of his). Instead it’s a sight, cheap, pulpy thriller that isn’t ground-breaking, but kept me entertained for a few hours.

The book is set in post-war Egypt and starts with the hero,
Pete Wells, waking up penniless after a drunken night in Cairo and with no
recollection of where his money has gone. He gets picked up by a mysterious woman,
who hires him to retrieve a valuable necklace from Luxor and return it to her.
The first quarter is taken up with fun scene setting and the beginnings of the
plot. 50s Egypt is just how you’d imagine it described in a novel of the time,
2 parts ‘Casablanca’ and 1 part steamy exoticism with just enough grit to make
it not seem vaguely real. We get passages like:

He took a deep breath, inhaling all the strange odors of Cairo: musk and food, urine, drugs, filth and sandalwood.

And      

She ordered champagne again. The orchestra played Cole Porter. A beautiful silver blonde danced by with a short fat man wearing dark glasses. Pete found it hard to remember where he was, that a few miles away the pyramids stood at the edge of an ancient desert.

Once that’s done, the plot proper kicks in and there’s lots
of running around, a few fight scenes, several double crosses and various
romantic liaisons for Pete. He makes a tolerable, but not desperately
interesting hero. Exactly, the kind of rough diamond westerner you’d expect in
a 50s thriller set abroad. The other characters broadly speaking play up to their
respective racial stereotypes: shifty Arabs, duplicitous Frenchmen and stiff
upper lip Brits. It lost me a bit for a while, and I felt my attention
drifting, but the climax in smouldering Cairo had enough thrills and twists to
grab my attention again.

Overall then, this is exactly what you’d expect from a 50s American thriller set in Egypt, but maybe not one penned by Gore Vidal. It’s a diverting read if you like that kind of thing (which I do) and an interesting curio.

3/5

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris #BookReview

Twenty-five million dollars in cartel gold lies hidden beneath a mansion on the Miami Beach waterfront. Ruthless men have tracked it for years. Leading the pack is Hans-Peter Schneider. Driven by unspeakable appetites, he makes a living fleshing out the violent fantasies of other, richer men.

Cari Mora, caretaker of the house, has escaped from the violence in her native country. She stays in Miami on a wobbly Temporary Protected Status, subject to the iron whim of ICE. She works at many jobs to survive. Beautiful, marked by war, Cari catches the eye of Hans-Peter as he closes in on the treasure. But Cari Mora has surprising skills, and her will to survive has been tested before.

Monsters lurk in the crevices between male desire and female survival. No other writer in the last century has conjured those monsters with more terrifying brilliance than Thomas Harris. Cari Mora, his sixth novel, is the long-awaited return of an American master.

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Title: Cari Mora | Author: Thomas Harris | Publisher: William Heinemann| Pages: 308 | ISBN: 9781785152207 | Publication date: 16th May 2019 | Source: Library

I seem to have liked ‘Cari Mora’ more than a lot of people did. Perhaps that’s because I went into it with my expectations set fairly low, or maybe it’s because I’m a fan of the kind of book it is – a fairly low key character driven crime drama. I’ve read most of Thomas Harris’s other books – liked ‘Black Sunday’, loved ‘Red Dragon’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs’, disliked ‘Hannibal’ and so didn’t bother with ‘Hannibal Rising’. What I wasn’t expecting in ‘Cari Mora’ was something like one of the Lecter books, so when that’s exactly what I didn’t get, I wasn’t disappointed.

The plot, very simply, is that there is a fortune in cartel
gold buried beneath a mansion in Miami and competing groups of unsavoury types
want to get their hands on it. Caught in the middle is the title character,
Cari, who works as a housekeeper in the mansion, looking after guests who rent
it. The book is about the hunt for the gold, the battle between the groups, and
Cari’s attempts to protect herself and her friends from harm.

That setup makes for a gripping quick read. The characters
are convincing, especially Cari who I ended up really rooting for. The twists
and turns of the plot are engaging and enjoyable, and Harris’s talent for
building atmosphere adds a lot to the tale. In particular, his description of
the underground cavern beneath the mansion is wonderfully other worldly.

My one significant problem with the book was Hans-Peter
Schneider, the principal villain of the piece. He’s a twisted and creative
psychopath who is obsessed with Cari (ring any bells). My issue wasn’t the
character himself, who I found enjoyably creepy, but the way he felt somewhat
shoe-horned into the rest of the book. It’s almost as if (and I’m not
suggesting for even one minute this is the case), Harris turned in the
manuscript and someone said “Can you make it a bit more Hannibal-y?”

That aside it’s a really solid thriller – gripping and engaging with some good set pieces and a memorable heroine. Ignore the bad reviews and give it a try, but for God’s sake don’t pay full price for it, it’s practically a novella. The 300+ page count is achieved through a large font and margins you could drive a bus through.

4/5

A question of balance – my commitment to give minority authors visibility

When I’m not reviewing crime and thrillers here, I’m reviewing horror and science fiction over on scifiandscary.com. The team there have been talking a lot recently about the importance of giving visibility to works from minority groups. Or to put it really simply, anyone who isn’t a straight, white dude. On SF&S, I’ve made a commitment to publish two reviews a month by minority authors. If I hate the book, it’ll get a bad review, but at least it (and the author) will be getting visibility.

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Which brings us to CriminOlly. I’ve been neglecting this blog lately (sorry), but I’m back in the game now and have just written six reviews which are scheduled over the next couple of months. Guess what, though? They’re all by straight, white dudes.

Looking back over what I’ve reviewed to date I’ve actually not done too badly. Of the 35 reviews I’ve published here, 17 are for books by authors who are women, LGBT+, or people of colour. So, despite the coming glut of straight white dudes, I’ve actually struck a reasonable balance. This is partly due to the fact that in 2018, when I started CriminOlly, I was only reading books by women. In other words, I gave myself a head start, but I need to make sure I consider balance going forward.

My commitment for CriminOlly, then, is that for every review I publish for a book by a straight, white dude, I’ll publish one for an author who isn’t all those things. The crime genre has great representation from female authors, so it shouldn’t be hard, but I’m keen to make sure other groups get a look in too, so if you have any recommendations please add them in the comments.

Hipster Death Rattle by Richie Narvaez #BookReview

Hipsters are getting slashed to pieces in the hippest neighborhood in New York City: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As fear and tension rise in the summer heat, police detectives Petrosino and Hadid eye local gangbangers for the crimes. Meanwhile, slacker reporter Tony Moran and his ex-girlfriend Magaly Fernandez pursue a cold case involving an old woman who mysteriously disappeared a year before. But the closer they all get to the truth, the closer they get to losing their heads.

Filled with a broad cast of local characters and told with sardonic wit, this fast-moving, intricately plotted story plays out against a backdrop of rapid gentrification, skyrocketing rents, and class tension, written like only a true native could.

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Title: Hipster Death Rattle | Author: Richie Narvaez | Publisher: Down & Out Books | Pages: 362 | ISBN: 9781948235631| Publication date: 11th March 2019| Source: Review copy provided by the author

‘Hipster Death Rattle’ is very much a book of two halves. At
times it’s brilliant, but at others it’s rather lacklustre and whilst it left a
lasting impression on me it wasn’t always the most engaging of reads. The book is
set in a community in Brooklyn that is slowly being invaded by rich, white
youngsters who are driving up prices and forcing out the Latinx inhabitants. An
unknown attacker is killing members of the community with a machete. When he
kills a colleague of local reporter Tony Moran, Tony learns some things about
his co-worker that lead him to investigate the disappearance of a neighbourhood
woman. Naturally there is more to both the machete attacks and the disappearance
than there appears to be, and the plot ends up examining all aspects of the
life in the district.

What is great about the book is the richness that Richie
Narvaez brings to both his characters and the place they live. They’re a varied
bunch, but all vibrant and believable. None of them are perfect, but few are
truly bad either. The shifting plot, with its many twists and red herrings,
reveals them all to be as multi-faceted and mercurial as people really are.
Similarly, the fabric of the community itself is richly described and it came
to be a real and convincing place in my mind.

Where the books scores fewer points is in the story itself.
The plot, as noted above, is nicely twisting, but I was never as gripped by the
mysteries as I wanted to be. I think there are two problems. Firstly, the
slasher never feels like that much of a threat. Many of his victims escape with
their lives, and they tend to be characters who are introduced only to get
attacked, rather than ones that I had come to care about. Secondly, it feels
like there is too much going on. The competing sub-plots ended up clashing with
each other. I found that my attention was split between the two and I therefore
never felt like I was fully invested in either.

These problems are a great shame, as there was so much good about this book. Aside from the wonderful characterisation, it’s often very funny and politically astute in a way that’s engaging rather than patronising. Despite my problems with the plot, Narvaez manages to bring things together well at the end. ‘Hipster Death Rattle’ shows real promise for a first novel, and I’ll certainly look out for his next book.

3/5

Blog Tour Promo: Wilderness by B E Jones

It’s easy to die out there. It’s easy to
kill too.

Two
weeks, 1,500 miles, three opportunities for her husband to save his own life.

It
isn’t about his survival – it’s about hers.

Shattered
by the discovery of her husband’s affair, Liv knows they need to leave the
chaos of New York to try to save their marriage. Maybe the roadtrip that they’d
always planned, exploring America’s national parks, just the two of them, would
help heal the wounds.

But
what Liv hasn’t told her husband is that she has set him three challenges.
Three opportunities to prove he’s really sorry and worthy of her forgiveness.

If
he fails? Well, it’s dangerous out there. There are so many ways to die in the
wilderness. And if it’s easy to die, then it’s easy to kill too.

If their marriage can’t survive, he can’t either.

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I missed out on a review copy of this new thriller from Welsh author B E Jones and I’m furious at myself because I’ve just read an excerpt and it’s seriously good.

Civilisation is flimsy at best and, believe me, you don’t have to go far beyond our well¬ groomed towns and smartly dressed cities to watch the veneer crack, see the mask slip, the old, dark shape of the beast emerge. You don’t even have to leave your own home, or what’s left of it, to open a rarely used zip pocket, click on an unexpected text, then feel the hairs on your neck rise, your claws slide out, feel yourself changing . . .

The prose has the bite of classic hardboiled crime fiction and the few pages I read left me hungry for more. Combine that with a plot which sounds like a gripping blend of the kind of domestic noir that is all the rage at the moment and a wilderness survival thriller, and this sounds like it could well be an absolute smash.

Here’s the full extract so you can make your own minds up:

No one died until six months after I saw the home video. The timing was complicated and there were important decisions to be made first, such as should I stay or should I go? Fall or fight? Mend or destroy? Curl up in a ball and die or . . .
Either way, there was no choosing on a whim, with a snap of my fingers, the toss of a coin, because what I saw in my future, if I made the wrong decision, was me all alone, scrabbling through the rubble among heaps of charred bones and the stench of death – in other words, divorced.
All right, perhaps it wouldn’t have been like that, like the actual end of the world, if I’d just left him, but that’s how it felt. So what if I wasn’t the first woman cheated on by her husband? So what if I wouldn’t be the last? It doesn’t matter that it’s a cliché, that it’s commonplace, that it’s glaringly mediocre. It still means the whole world and its end when it’s happening to you.
That’s why I’m trying to explain the last twelve months, the destruction that followed the discovery that my husband was sleeping with a skinny, skank­-whore years younger than me. Because it’s not always the noisiest things that do the most harm, not the havoc reported on the nightly news with footage of smoking craters and swooping aid choppers. There’s the carnage that takes place in silence, in the confines of a two­bedroom condo among the steel and stone canyons of New York City.
Wars are waged inside these ordinary spaces every day, unfolding quietly within four walls, within our own heads, and there’s no escape from them, no matter how many miles we travel. But we try, don’t we? We try to flee. We attempt to run. That’s how it all came down to one single second on our postcard-­perfect ‘holiday of a lifetime’, our shining ‘dream road trip’, our enviable summer vacation – even though I knew about the affair, about Will’s A­cup accomplice in infidelity. Because I’d forgiven him, except . . .
Except for that heavy-­breathing doubt in the back of my head that refused to shut up and slink away, the one pawing the ground and baring its teeth all winter on the streets of New York, snarling – the little voice whispering, Does he deserve to be forgiven? Can he ever be trusted now? Can you?
I thought the road trip would give me some perspective, to test Will’s commitment to fixing things, without more words, endless, deceitful words, so slick and slippery. I needed to know he was really sorry. And if I didn’t have clear evidence of that by the end of the trip, well, I had options under consideration.

I don’t mean I’d actually plotted to kill him then. Plot, plan, premeditate are such precise words, pickily implying logic and structure when all I really had were a few ‘contingencies’ at hand. Because it’s dangerous out there in the wilderness, inside the resting jaws of the great unknown, always waiting to snap. Civilisation is flimsy at best and, believe me, you don’t have to go far beyond our well­ groomed towns and smartly dressed cities to watch the veneer crack, see the mask slip, the old, dark shape of the beast emerge. You don’t even have to leave your own home, or what’s left of it, to open a rarely used zip pocket, click on an unexpected text, then feel the hairs on your neck rise, your claws slide out, feel yourself changing . . .
Still, when Will and I set out on the first leg of our holiday it was only my usual research that had highlighted how easily people die all the time in North America’s national parks, those vast areas where there are great heights to fall from, things that want to bite and eat you, and places to lose yourself in for ever. All it takes is one misstep; a slip, a trip, a flash of fangs and each can mean disaster when you’re miles from help, out of sight of CCTV with no signal bars on your phone.
That’s what makes it easy to die out there. Makes it easy to kill, too. Believe me, I should know.
Because by then, by the time I lost myself under the vast skies, in the empty spaces, it wasn’t just about Will’s survival, it was about mine and, if you’re honest, that’s usually the most important thing. We’ll fight for that until we’re bloody and breathless, or someone else is, lying open­ eyed and broken in the undergrowth or splayed on a hot slab of city paving stone, until the bodies pile up alongside the excuses and you have to admit what you are – no more hiding.
Nothing makes you more honest with yourself than admitting you’re thinking about ways to kill your husband, except perhaps doing it. But as I said, on a flawless June morning, with 1500 miles and four states ahead of us, it wasn’t a plan, it was a possibility.

Fortunately, there are a load of other bloggers on the tour who’ve had a chance to read and review the book, check out their thoughts at the sites below.

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‘Wilderness’ was published on 4th April and is available from the following retailers:

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilderness-B-Jones/dp/1472127943/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=wilderness+b.e.+jones&qid=1556647167&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Wilderness/dp/1472127943/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=wilderness+b.e.jones&qid=1556647562&s=gateway&sr=8-1

GoogleBooks: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Wilderness.html?id=8Si4vAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/wilderness/b-e-jones/9781472127945

Hive.co.uk: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/B-E-Jones/Wilderness–A-gripping-psychological-thriller-with-a-shocking-twist/23794583

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The Vinyl Detective: Flip Back by Andrew Cartmel #BookReview

At the height of their success, the electric folk band Black Dog invited journalists to a desolate island for an infamous publicity stunt: the burning of a million dollars. But the stunt backfired and the band split up, increasing the value of their final album vastly. It’s this album that Tinkler’s got his eye on, and he hires none other than the Vinyl Detective and Nevada to hunt a copy down.

Narrowly avoiding a killing spree, negotiating deranged Black Dog fans, and being pursued by hack celebrity Stinky Stamner and his camera crew, the Vinyl Detective and Nevada discover that perhaps all was not as it seemed on the island—and that in the embers of that fire are clues to a motive for murder…

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Title: The Vinyl Detective: Flip Back | Author: Andrew Cartmel | Series: Vinyl Detective #4 | Publisher: Titan Books | Pages: 416 | ISBN: 9781785658983| Publication date: 14th May 2019| Source: Review copy provided by the publisher

‘Flip Back’ is the fourth book in Andrew Cartmel’s excellent
‘Vinyl Detective’ series. I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed the first two books,
‘Written in Dead Wax’ and ‘The Run-Out Groove’ and the good news is that book
four is just as good as those two. The even better news (for me at least), is that
I’ve somehow missed the release of the third entry completely, so I have
another book I can read straightaway.

For anyone who hasn’t read the books, they’re about a record
collector and expert for hire (the Vinyl Detective of the title), who searches
for rare discs for clients and invariably ends up investigating related
mysteries. He has a bunch of pals of tag along – girlfriend Nevada, ice cool cabbie
Clean Head (so named because of her shaven head), and the amusingly hapless
Tinkler.

This time around, they’re trying to find the rare first
pressing of an album by folk band ‘Black Dog’ that Tinkler wants in order to
impress a girl. The search sees them get into various scrapes (two of which are
as exciting as anything I’ve read in any flat-out thriller lately), investigate
apparent paranormal activity and solve a series of murders.

It’s all told with the same charm, humour and talent for mystery that characterised the other books. Cartmel knows exactly what he’s doing and takes the reader on a marvellously enjoyable ride. If it ends up playing a little like a cosy Sunday evening detective show, then that’s only a good thing. The Vinyl Detective is the perfect antidote to the bleak, obsessive investigators that we’re so used to these days. He and his friends are so wonderfully likeable that spending time in their company is an absolute delight. The fact that the mystery they end up investigating is so tantalising, and that Cartmel sprinkles his books with fascinating nerdery are added bonuses that round out the book into a brilliantly satisfying whole.

4/5