The Crime Warp

It's not often you get a crime book dealing solely with the how and the why rather than the who...but that's what you get with Shot Through The Heart by Isabelle Grey. When Russell Fewell opens fire on his ex-wife's boyfriend, ex-cop Mark Kirkby, on Christmas Day and then kills a further four people before killing himself, the identity of the murderer is not in doubt.

It's taken me a bit of time to get round to reading Alert but, finally here's my review.  How can you not empathise with a hardworking NYPD cop, who is also a widower with ten kids, a gorgeous Irish nanny (whom he loves) and roguish Irish priest as a granddad?  The simple answer is... you can't.  Mike Bennett is a fantastic protagonist and as usual, Patterson and Ledwidge provide a high octane read.

The Morgan family are close-knit fearless and dedicated to putting bad guys away. With a delicate balance of Country and Western, romance and procedural, Vulnerable is a delight to read.

How do you recover from the abduction of your baby daughter?  How do you find the strength to continue after such a catastrophic loss.  Well, Simone and Matt Porter somehow manage to do juts that and 20 years after their beloved six-month-old Helena is abducted, they are still together and still very much in love.  Then...

I’ve not read anything by Chris Pavone before and was curious about both the title and summary of the book.  It sounded quite intriguing, so I thought it was worth a try. Will Rhodes works as a correspondent for The Travelers magazine – an established publication that tells the well heeled traveller all about the exotic destinations they should visit.  Will’s job is to travel to these places stay in the swankiest hotels, dine in fine restaurants and see the sights.  It’s just about the ideal job – a permanent holiday, where the only work he has to do is write up his holiday in an entertaining way for the magazine’s readers.   On one trip he meets Elle, a vivacious and attractive writer who obviously likes (ehem!) him. Temptation is terrible thing and putting his wife Chloe to the back of this mind he sleeps with Elle.  After all “what goes on abroad stays abroad” doesn’t it? WRONG!  Will is blackmailed by Elle into a double life,...

The Ex by Alafair Burke (release date 2 nd of February 2016) This is the first Alafair Burke’s book I’ve read but I’ll certainly be reading more of them. Defence lawyer Olivia Randall feels guilty for the way she treated her ex- fiancé Jackson Harris 20 years ago. So, when his daughter, Buckley phones up asking her to defend her father, Olivia feels duty bound to help him. Jackson has been accused of murdering Malcolm Neely the father of the boy who committed a mass shooting at Penn Station – one of the boy’s victims was Harris’s wife Molly.

I’ve always thought of Stephen Leather as a versatile author – the Spider Shepherd series of thrillers, Jack Nightingale supernatural novels and a number of amusing short stories, particularly the inspector Zhang locked room mysteries. Leather also writes standalone novels.  The latest, First Response , is an unfolding drama of nine suicide bombers in separate locations around London who have handcuffed themselves to innocent people, taken group of bystanders hostage and are demanding the release of fellow jihadists from Belmarsh prison.  The drama begins during a weekday morning, with a deadline for the release of the prisoners for 6pm the same day. As Mo Kamran the Superintendent in charge tries to make sense of the unfolding events, he’s contacted by Shahid, the terrorist leader.  Despite Kamran’s attempts to negotiate, Shahid gives Kamran a simple binary choice – free the prisoners by 6pm or all the suicide bombers will blow themselves up.  The...

A cracking debut by E. S. Thomson! Beloved Poison engages from the start when the reader is drawn into the sordid underbelly of Victorian London, where life is cheap and medical practice competitive. To what lengths will the ambitious medical staff at St Saviour’s Infirmary go in their quest for standing and reputation? E. S. Thomson serves up not only a well researched and tightly plotted murder mystery set in a crumbling Victorian hospital, she has created an interesting protagonist in Jem Flockhart, the deeply troubled and enigmatic apothecary. Jem’s sidekick is Will Quartermain, a very junior architect, who arrives to start the awful task of planning the demolition of the ancient hospital and its quaggy, stinking graveyard.  Never has there been a crime book with more dead bodies or bones!