Review: The Big Chill, by Doug Johnstone

Haunted by their past, the Skelf women are hoping for a quieter life. But running both a funeral directors’ and a private investigation business means trouble is never far away, and when a car crashes into the open grave at a funeral Dorothy is conducting, she can’t help looking into the dead driver’s shadowy life.

While Dorothy uncovers a dark truth at the heart of Edinburgh society, her daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah have their own struggles. Jenny’s ex-husband Craig is making plans that could shatter the Skelf women’s lives, and the increasingly obsessive Hannah has formed a friendship with an elderly professor that is fast turning deadly.

But something even more sinister emerges when a drumming student of Dorothy’s disappears, and suspicion falls on her parents. The Skelf women find themselves immersed in an unbearable darkness – but
could the real threat be to themselves?

Fast-paced, darkly funny, yet touching and tender, the Skelf family series is a welcome reboot to the classic PI novel, whilst also asking deeper questions about family, society and grief.

Publication Date: 20th August 2020

Price: £8.99

Published By: Orenda Books

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Review: These Lost & Broken Things, by Helen Fields



Buy Link:
https://amzn.to/39I76BR


Pre-order for £2.49 for a limited time

Blurb

Maiden-Mother-Murderer

How dangerous is a woman with nothing left to lose?

The year is 1905. London is a playground for the rich and a death trap for the poor. When Sofia Logan’s husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her penniless with two young children, she knows she will do anything to keep them from the workhouse. But can she bring herself to murder? Even if she has done it before…

Emmet Vinsant, wealthy industrialist, offers Sofia a job in one of his gaming houses. He knows more about Sofia’s past than he has revealed. Brought up as part of a travelling fair, she’s an expert at counting cards and spotting cheats, and Vinsant puts her talents to good use. His demands on her grow until she finds herself with blood on her hands.

Set against the backdrop of the Suffragette protests, with industry changing the face of the city but disease still rampant, and poverty the greatest threat of all, every decision you make is life or death. Either yours or someone else’s. Read best-selling crime writer Helen Fields’ first explosive historical thriller.

Goodreads

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Review: Black Blood, by Jane Eddie

  • Paperback: 300 pages
  • Publisher: Book Guild Publishing Ltd (5 Dec. 2019)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1913208060
  • ISBN-13: 978-1913208066

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Blood-Jane-Eddie/dp/1913208060

BLURB

Danni was a trainee corporate lawyer before she was forced to flee her life in London. Having escaped a controlling and abusive partner, she now finds herself hiding from another predator – her employer.

Post-Brexit, the U.K. oil industry is on its knees and desperate to turn a profit, but at what cost?

Many companies in Aberdeen have already been forced to sell out to the Russians, but when a prominent CEO is found dead, the number of mysterious deaths offshore have escalated and oil platforms are being targeted by terrorists. But who is actually calling the shots? There is more to these attacks than meets the eye…

As Danni draws ever closer to discovering the truth, she becomes embroiled in a web of secrets and deceit where doing the right thing could cost her life.

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Review: Sister, by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Oslo Detectives are back in another slice of gripping, dark Nordic Noir, and their new colleague has more at stake than she’s prepared to reveal…

Pub date: 30 April 2020
ISBN 13: 978-1-913193-02-7
EPUB: 978-1-913193-03-4
Price: £8.99

Oslo detective Frølich searches for the mysterious sister of a young female
asylum seeker, but when people start to die, everything points to an old
case and a series of events that someone will do anything to hide…

Suspended from duty, Detective Frølich is working as a private investigator,
when his girlfriend’s colleague asks for his help with a female asylum
seeker, who the authorities are about to deport. She claims to have a sister
in Norway, and fears that returning to her home country will mean instant
death.

Frølich quickly discovers the whereabouts of the young woman’s sister, but
things become increasingly complex when she denies having a sibling, and
Frølich is threatened off the case by the police. As the body count rises, it becomes clear that the answers lie in an old investigation, and the
mysterious sister, who is now on the run…


A dark, chilling and up-to-the-minute Nordic Noir thriller, Sister is also a
tense and well-plotted murder mystery with a moving tragedy at its heart,
cementing Kjell Ola Dahl as one of the greatest crime writers of our generation.

Continue reading “Review: Sister, by Kjell Ola Dahl”

Review: Two Lives, by A Yi

Fiction: Crime & mystery fiction
Product format: Paperback
Price: £9.95; $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-78758-277-4

Seven stories, seven whispers into the ears of life: A Yi’s unexpected twists of crime burst from the everyday, with glimpses of romance distorted by the weaknesses of human motive. A Yi employs his forensic skills to offer a series of portraits of modern life, both uniquely Chinese, and universal in their themes.


FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing.
Launched recently in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and
the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

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Review: Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, by Mick Finlay

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Paperback, 400 pages
Expected publication: April 2nd 2020 by HQ
ISBN:0008324522 (ISBN13: 9780008324520)

South London, 1896.

William Arrowood, Victorian London’s less salubrious private detective, is paid a visit by Captain Moon, the owner of a pleasure steamer moored on the Thames. He complains that someone has been damaging his boat, putting his business in jeopardy.

Arrowood and his trusty sidekick Barnett suspect professional jealousy, but when a string of skulls is retrieved from the river, it seems like even fouler play is afoot.

It’s up to Arrowood and his trusty sidekick Barnett to solve the case, before any more corpses end up in the watery depths . . .

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Review: Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith

Pub. Date: 19 March 2020
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-0-85730-390-5
Binding: Paperback

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.
When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts, when twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past struggles to untangle the secrets in the midst of the town trauma.

This is a landscape of fear and ghosts, of regret and violence. It is a landscape transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding terrible secrets deeper still. Blackwood is the evil in the woods, the wickedness that lurks in all of us

Continue reading “Review: Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith”

Review: A Prison In The Sun, by Isobel Blackthorn

A Prison in the Sun

After millennial ghostwriter Trevor Moore rents an old farmhouse in Fuerteventura, he moves in to find his muse.

Instead, he discovers a rucksack filled with cash. Who does it belong to – and should he hand it in… or keep it?

Struggling to make up his mind, Trevor unravels the harrowing true story of a little-known concentration camp that incarcerated gay men in the 1950s and 60s.

Purchase Link: http://mybook.to/prisonsun

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Review: Mexico Street, by Simone Buchholz, translated by Rachel Ward

PUBLICATION DATE: 5 MARCH 2020 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £8.99 | ORENDA BOOKS

Hamburg state prosecutor Chastity Riley investigates a series
of arson attacks on cars across the city, which leads her to a
startling and life-threatening discovery involving criminal gangs
and a very illicit love story…
Night after night, cars are set alight across the German city
of Hamburg, with no obvious pattern, no explanation and no
suspect.
Until, one night, on Mexico Street, a ghetto of high-rise blocks in
the north of the city, a Fiat is torched. Only this car isn’t empty.
The body of Nouri Saroukhan – prodigal son of the Bremen clan –
is soon discovered, and the case becomes a homicide.
Public prosecutor Chastity Riley is handed the investigation,
which takes her deep into a criminal underground that snakes
beneath the whole of Germany. And as details of Nouri’s
background, including an illicit relationship with the mysterious
Aliza, emerge, it becomes clear that these are not random
attacks, and there are more on the cards…
Continue reading “Review: Mexico Street, by Simone Buchholz, translated by Rachel Ward”

Review: Black River, by Will Dean

Published by POINT BLANK
12 March 2020 Hardback £14.99
FEAR
Tuva has been living clean in southern Sweden for four months when she receives horrifying
news. Her best friend Tammy has gone missing.
SECRETS
Racing back to Gavrik at the height of Midsommar, Tuva fears for Tammy’s life. Who has
taken her, and why? And who is sabotaging the small-town search efforts?
LIES
Surrounded by dark pine forest, the sinister residents of Snake River are suspicious of
outsiders. Unfortunately, they also hold all the answers. On the shortest night of the year,
Tuva must fight to save her friend. But who will be there to save Tuva?

It may be Midsommar in Gavrik, but this is the most chilling episode yet in the acclaimed
Scandi thriller series from British writer Will Dean.
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