BLOG TOUR ~ A Dark Matter by Doug Johnson

Hi Everyone,

Today is my stop for the Blog Tour for A Dark Matter by Doug Johnson where I have a review from his latest novel. I was thrilled to be asked by Anne Cater from Random Things Tours who organised this tour in conjunction with Orenda Books 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 this review so without further ado, here it is:

Set in Edinburgh we meet the Scelfs, a well known family in the area and proprietors of a long-established funeral home business and on top of that Private Investigators. When the patriarch Jim dies, the business is left to three generations of women, his wife Dorothy, his daughter Jenny and his granddaughter Hannah to take over both businesses which leads to an unexpected series of events. Dorothy discovers mysterious payments to another woman which suggests that Jim wasn't the husband she thought he was.  Hannah's best friend Mel goes missing from University, where is she and will Hannah and the police find her in time? And what seems like a simple adultery case that Jenny takes on leads to something stranger and far darker then any of them could have imagined. As all three women struggle to terms with their grief and manage the businesses which threaten to overwhelm them, secrets from the past start emerging which change everything.

Well, where do I start with this one other than I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it. It was delicious-illy dark, tense and addictive read where I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. It was great to have a main cast of three women who were all heroes in my eyes by the time I turned the last page. They were unforgettable characters and I was delighted when I realised that this is the start of a new series which is certainly addictive and welcomed. To be honest I was so shocked when things were revealed towards the end of the book, I couldn't believe it, bravo Doug for revealing what you did and I can't wait to read the next instalment featuring the Scelfs (no pressure).

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

I briefly met Doug at the Theakstons Crime Festival in Harrogate on one of the evenings in July last year but he was on his way to get some food but hopefully I'll get to say a proper hello again one day.

A Dark Matter is available from all good bookshops,libraries, on audio and on Kindle where it is currently £3.79 at he time of publication of this review so go and pick it up as you won't regret it.

REVIEW ~ Big Woods by May Cobb

It's 1989 when ten year old Lucy disappears the sleepy town of Longview in Texas where there have been a string of other unsolved kidnappings and Lucy's parents, the police, and the community all brace themselves for the worst news, assuming her body will soon be found in Big Woods just like the others.

But Lucy’s fourteen year old sister Leah, starts having dreams about Lucy and these dreams reveal startling clues as to what happened. Leah begins her own investigation where no-one seems to believe her from the police to her parents but she soon she meets a reclusive widow who may hold the key to finding Lucy but this is only if she can find the courage to come forward.

Well, I didn't like it, I absolutely LOVED it. It was such a brilliant debut novel, packed full of mystery, emotion, thrills and spills, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. Set over a 3 month period and each chapter alternating between Leah and the widow I had to find out would she find her little sister Lucy or would she be too late?

This novel delves into the paranoia surrounding cults in the 1980's and everything in the novel had a definite 1980's nostalgia to it. It even read like it was a novel from the 1980's not 2019, May has everything researched and well written to a T! I'd even go as far as to say I'd love to see this as a movie.

Big Woods is a dark read in places but is an emotionally charged thriller where I felt an enormity of grief and sadness in parts of the story too especially with Leah and Lucy's parents and what it did to them but also gives you hope of the magical bond between these sisters and a small town's dark and sinister secrets. I'll definitely be more cautious when I go walking in forests again (just incase) after reading Big Woods.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

Big Woods is available in all good bookstores, libraries, on audio and on Kindle where it is currently £8.15 at the time of publication of this review.

BLOG TOUR ~ The Mothers by Sarah J Naughton

Hi Everyone,

Today was my stop on the Blog Tour for The Mothers by Sarah J Naughton where I've a review from her latest novel. I was thrilled to be asked by Tracy Fenton from Compulsive Readers in conjunction with Trapeze Books 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 this review so without further ado, here it is:

Five Women.
They meet at their NCT Group. The only thing they have in common is they're all pregnant.

Five Secrets.
Three years later, they are all good friends. Aren't they?

One Missing Husband.

Now the police have come knocking. Someone knows something.

And the trouble with secrets is that someone always tells.

Well, where do I start with this review only with I LOVED it. This book mainly centres around 2 characters Bella and her husband Ewan. The chapters alternate between present time and over the last 3 years and right upto the events where we discover what has actually happened with the missing husband. The police are on the case where we meet DI Iona who is told in the present time where she is asking questions of all the friends where she soon discover that things don't seem to add up and she suspects that the five friends know more than they're letting on.

As the story unfolds we see a side to Ewan that I wasn't very keen on & did feel sorry for Bella and her son Teddy. The past is all told from all five women's point of view and as the tension builds as to what happened I couldn't turn the pages fast enough and when what happened to the husband is finally revealed I was left open mouthed, I didn't see that twist coming which I loved as nothing worse guessing what's going to happen before you finish. There were plenty of twists and shock and throughout this read but the finalone was a jaw dropper. I've read a few books by Sarah and I've loved each one of them and she is becoming one of my favourite thriller writers and I can't wait to see what she does next.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The Mothers is available in all good bookshops, libraries, on audio and on Kindle where it is currently £3.99 at the time of publication of this review.

BLOG TOUR ~ The Home by Sarah Stovell

Hi Everyone,

Today is my stop for the Blog Tour for The Home by Sarah Stovell where I have an extract from her latest novel. I was thrilled to be asked by Anne Cater from Random Things Tours who organised this tour in conjunction with Orenda Books 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 this review so without further ado, here it is:

She always said that if we ever got married, ours would be a black wedding in the tiny stone church by Meddleswater. She wanted the ceremony in the half-light of a December morning, when the lake would lie hard as glass, the church barely visible in the mist from its waters. 

I can picture her now, sweeping up the aisle towards me, no father on her arm, no mother of the bride at the front of the church, no train of bridesmaids behind her. There would be only her, white-faced and spectral, her black dress whispering across the floor, her eyes shrouded behind a veil, and at her throat the choker I bought her. There might be flowers, too – black tulips in her hands, black roses at the altar. 

And we would be married, she and I, and we’d step into another life, the life we’d dreamed was waiting for us after this one, where we could be together without others trying to part us, where no one would tell us we were too young, or too broken, or too fragile to know what we were doing. 

Because we were young, it was true. We were fragile, too. But we weren’t fragile like flowers. We were fragile like bombs.

1

This isn’t how we’d planned it. They’ve just found her on the ground outside the church, wailing beside my body. 

She’s going to make lots of mistakes over the next few days, but hanging around my corpse is her first. She should have run. She should have run far away from here, back to the arms of strangers, or the arms of anyone who’d have her… 

No one knows what to do with her. The police are murmuring about her age, putting her at around fifteen. They’re right. But on the inside, she’s ancient as the world. We both are. 

They can’t stop her crying. They can’t get her to move. She’s shouting and protesting and holding on to me, but I am already cold. 

I’m furious with her for doing this. She used to say she’d come with me. ‘If you go, I’m going too,’ she’d say, taking my hand in hers and looking me straight in the eye. It was a promise as sacred as a wedding vow, but like everything else between us, it ended up broken long ago. 

I’m going to haunt her. I’m going to make her think she’s losing her mind and tip her slowly over the edge until she can bear it no longer and joins me here. 

Would that be murder? Maybe; but no more murderous than what she’s just done to me.

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.

BLOG TOUR ~ Through The Wall by Caroline Corcoran

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday was my stop on the Blog Tour for Through The Wall by Caroline Corcoran where I've a review from her debut novel but I had a senior moment and was convinced that it was today so I'm really sorry that this is a day late. I was thrilled to be asked by Sabah Khan from Avon Books 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 review so without further ado, here it is:

Lexie’s got the perfect life. And someone else wants it…

Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it – and loved, thanks to her boyfriend Tom.

But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing…

Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad – but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand.

Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop…

Well, where do I start with my review other than with I didn't like it, I LOVED it. A very slick, well written and constructed debut novel, although it took me a little while to get into but I think that was just me with having so much on lately but once I got really excited engrossed in it, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, told over the period of almost a year and from two different characters with Lexie been one but I'm not going to say who the other is and I wasn't sure how they would fit into the story but you're never going to look at your neighbour in the same at again and if you live in an apartment then you're going to want to check everything, especially double checking and even triple checking EVERYTHING and even to go as far as saying checking over your shoulder more often!!

I could feel my heart beating in my ears at times as I turned the pages and it's such a creepy thriller, definitely one to read on these cold dark nights but don't forget to triple check everything. I'd even go as far as to say I'd love to see this been made into a tv series as it has great potential.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Through The Wall is available from all good bookshops, libraries, on audio and on Kindle where it is currently £0.99 at the time of publication of this review.