REVIEW ~ Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Home is where the lies are....

Libby Day was just seven years old when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice" of Kinnakee, Kansas. She survived—and famously testified and her evidence put her fifteen year old brother behind bars. Since then, she's just been wandering through life on a daily basis but twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details as they are convinced of Ben's innocence and hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history. She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee.

Libby starts to question everything to do with the case she never dared contemplate before. Was the voice she heard her brother's? Ben was a troubled young teen in their hometown but was he capable of murder?

As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.

Absolutely LOVED this book, a very dark read in parts but full of tension and the suspense was palpable on every page, I even think I held my breath on a couple of occasions too and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I didn't know who to trust and who to believe, I thought I had it worked out on a few occasions theoughout the book but I was completely wrong.

I'll definitely check out the film too but I'm sure it'll be nowhere as good as this read. I really feel that this book was so much better than Gone Girl also, I never disliked a book so much after I'd finished it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Dark Places is available in all good bookshops, libraries, on audio and on Kindle where it is currently £5.99 at the time of publication of this review.

BLOG TOUR ~ Snakes and Ladders by Victoria Selman

Hi Everyone,

Today was my stop on the Blog Tour for Snakes and Ladders by Victoria Selman where I've an author content piece from Victoria where she introduces us to her charater, Ziba Mackenzie & also tells us about the setting of her debut nnovel Snakes and Ladders. I was thrilled to be asked by Tracy Fenton from Compulsive Readers to take part along with some other fab book bloggers. You can find out who else has taken part in this fabulous Blog Tour at the end of the author content so without further ado, here it is:

Introducing: ZIBA MACKENZIE

Her job is hunting killers. Her talent is thinking like them.

Gutsy, fierce and in your face, Ziba is confronting her own demons as well as society’s most dangerous minds- dealing with her husband’s premature death while fighting her feelings for his best friend. Navigating these challenges takes strength and skill especially since her professional life has a way of trespassing into the personal.

“Trust gets you killed faster than an MK-77”
The daughter of an adored Iranian father and an emotionally distant English mother, Ziba is a social misfit with serious trust issues whose father died suddenly when she was in her teens. As an adult, Ziba keeps her mother, Emmeline, at arm’s length. Though finally in Snakes and Ladders, we see that perhaps Emmeline understands her better than she thinks.
“His voice was deep and gravelly with a Scottish lilt. He used his hands. He planted his feet. He commanded the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The guy snared me the moment he opened his mouth.”

Less than two years after they met, Ziba’s husband Duncan was lying dead beside her on the pavement; a circular wound puncturing his forehead, an unmarked VW Crafter speeding away. His killer has never been caught. And Ziba won’t rest until he is.
“Jack makes me laugh. He calls me out on my shit. When I’m with him I’m back in my father’s study, chomping sugared almonds and listening to the Tehran Symphony Orchestra on his big old-fashioned gramophone. I’m home.”

Jack is Ziba’s lighthouse, the one person she can rely on. And in her line of work, you really need a friend. Only now she’s falling in love with him everything’s about to change- not least because moving on also means letting go.



Setting of Snakes and Ladders

In Snakes and Ladders, I move between the FBI Academy in Quantico, Scotland Yard in London and HMP Wakefield, nicknamed Monster Mansion owing to the notorious inmates it has housed. Ian Huntley, Harold Shipman and Michael Sams have all been ‘guests’ there. It’s not a nice place.
The story takes place in March with the snow falling in London as Ziba arrives back at Scotland Yard having been recalled from Quantico to join the hunt for the Pink Rose Killer, a serial murderer terrorising the capital. It’s freezing, unseasonably cold. The city is shrouded in white.
In these conditions she must to and from Wakefield trying to extract information out of the Lecter like Vernon Sange who seems to know the perpetrator’s identity. And who has a terrible price.
I wanted to use the snow to increase the oppressive atmosphere already created by the prison visits, crushing timeframe until the next murder and the perpetrator’s closed house so that the reader would feel, as Ziba does, that there is little room to breathe.