Book review – Page 43 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Review: ‘Duck Egg Blues’, by Martin Ungless

Published By: Independently Published

Publication Date: 25th May 2017

Format: Paperback

I.S.B.N.: 978-1521495919

Price: £8.99

Blurb

This perfect slice of ‘cozy crime’ is narrated in the voice of a pre-war English butler and concerns a rich and powerful businesswoman whose daughter goes missing from their country house estate. That the story- teller is a robot belonging to an impoverished detective brings a fresh and original take on ‘cozy’, and as for ‘crime’… well, it does begin to escalate, what with MI6, criminal gangs, corrupt police, and that’s not to mention international cybercrime!

As the plot strands weave together, we discover that behind one mystery lurks a greater threat. No one is safe, not even PArdew…

This is without doubt the robot-butler-detective thriller you have been waiting for!

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Review: ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’, by Gina Kirkham #LoveBooksGroupTours

Publication Day: 19th July 2018

Publisher: Urbane Publications

ISBN: 9781911583813

Price: £8.99

Blurb

The laughter continues to flow in Gina Kirkham’s brilliant sequel to the wonderful Handcuffs, Truncheon and a Polyester Thong.

Our hapless heroine Constable Mavis Upton is preparing to step down the aisle with her fiancé Joe, but has to deal with her temperamental teen daughter, as well as investigate a serial flasher on a push bike. Throw a diva drag queen into the mix and readers can expect the usual hilarious Mavis mishaps that made the first book such a hit.

Revel in Gina Kirkham’s humorous, poignant and moving stories of an everyday girl who one day followed a dream.

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Review: ‘Tubing’, by K.A.McKeagney

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Published By: Red Door Books

Publication Date: 31st May 2018

I.S.B.N.: 9781910453568

Format: Paperback

Price: £8.99

Blurb

Polly, 28, lives in London with her ‘perfect-on-paper’ boyfriend. She works a dead-end job on a free London paper. . . life as she knows it is dull. But her banal existence is turned upside down late one drunken night on her way home, after a chance encounter with a man on a packed tube train. The chemistry between them is electric and on impulse, they kiss, giving in to their carnal desires. But it’s over in an instant, and Polly is left shell-shocked as he walks away without even telling her his name.

Now obsessed with this beautiful stranger, Polly begins a frantic online search, and finally discovers more about tubing, an underground phenomenon in which total strangers set up illicit, silent, sexual meetings on busy commuter tube trains. In the process, she manages to track him down and he slowly lures her into his murky world, setting up encounters with different men via Twitter.

At first she thinks she can keep it separate from the rest of her life, but things soon spiral out of control.

By chance she spots him on a packed tube train with a young, pretty blonde. Seething with jealousy, she watches them together. But something isn’t right and a horrific turn of events makes Polly realise not only how foolish she has been, but how much danger she is in…

Can she get out before it’s too late?

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June Bonus Review #2: ‘The Gaslight Stalker’, by David Field

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Published By: Sapere Books

Publication Date: 16th February 2018

I.S.B.N.: 9781912546039

Format: Paperback

Price: £6.50

Blurb

Jack the Ripper is stalking the streets of London. Can anyone stop the serial killer before more women are murdered?

London, 1888

Whitechapel is full of the noise of August Bank Holiday celebrations. Everyone is in high spirits until a woman – Martha Turner – is discovered brutally murdered.

Her friend, Esther, a lowly seamstress turned female sleuth, is determined to find the killer.

A young police officer, Jack Enright, takes the lead on the case, and he and Esther soon embark on a professional – and personal – relationship.

When another murder is committed and whispers of a slasher calling himself Jack the Ripper start flowing through the London streets, the search becomes even more desperate.

The police are on the wrong track and the young couple take matters into their own hands, and soon find themselves navigating through London’s dark underbelly.

Can they find the murderer before he kills again? Will anyone listen to their suspicions?

Or will this dark presence continue to haunt Whitechapel…?

THE GASLIGHT STALKER is the first crime thriller in an exciting new historical series, the Esther and Jack Enright Mysteries, a traditional British detective series set in Victorian London and packed full of suspense

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Bonus Review: ‘Testosterone Rex’, by Cordelia Fine

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Published by: ICON

Publication Date: 24th January 2017

ISBN: 9781785783180

Format: Paperback

Price: £8.99

Blurb

Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures: Women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to continue to reinforce these unbreachable distinctions, making for entrenched inequalities in modern society.

In Testosterone Rex, psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. She uses stories from daily life, scientific research, and common sense to break through the din of cultural assumptions. Testosterone, for instance, is not the potent hormonal essence of masculinity; the presumed, built-in preferences of each sex, from toys to financial risk taking, are turned on their heads.

Moving beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debates, Testosterone Rex disproves ingrained myths and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full, human potential.

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Review: ‘When the Waters Recede’, by Graham Smith

Published By: Caffeine Nights Publishing
Publication Date: 31st May 2018
Format: Paperback
I.S.B.N.: 978-1910720967
Price: £8.49

Blurb

When a car is pulled from raging floodwaters with a dead man in the front and the decapitated body of an evil woman in the boot, Cumbria’s Major Crimes Team are handed the investigation.

The woman is soon recognised, but the man cannot be identified and this leads the team and their former leader, Harry Evans, into areas none of them want to visit.

Before they know it, they’re dealing with protection scams and looking for answers to questions they didn’t know needed to be asked.

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Bonus Review #5: ‘Redemption’, by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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This edition

Published By: Penguin

Publication Date: 18th July 2013

I.S.B.N.: 9780141399997

Format: Paperback

Originally published in Danish as

Flaskepost fra P, (1st January 2009)

Blurb

Detective Carl Mørck holds in his hands a bottle that contains old and decayed message, written in blood. It is a cry for help from two young brothers, tied and bound in a boathouse by the sea. Could it be real? Who are these boys, and why weren’t they reported missing? Could they possibly still be alive?

Carl’s investigation will force him to cross paths with a woman stuck in a desperate marriage- her husband refuses to tell her where he goes, what he does, how long he will be away. For days on end she waits, and when he returns she must endure his wants, his moods, his threats. But enough is enough. She will find out the truth, no matter the cost to her husband—or to herself.

Carl and his colleagues Assad and Rose must use all of their resources to uncover the horrifying truth in this heart-pounding Nordic thriller from the #1 international bestselling author Jussi Adler-Olsen

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Bonus Review #4: ‘Children of Time’, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Published by: Pan Macmillan

Publication Date: 21st April 2016 (First published June 2015)

I.S.B.N.: 9781447273301

Format: Paperback

Price: 8.99

Blurb

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

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Alex’s Review: ‘The Planetsider’, by G.J. Ogden

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Published By: CreateSpace Independent Publishing

Publication Date: 18th February 2018

I.S.B.N.: 978-1983716720

Format: Paperback

Price: £8.99

Available from Amazon

Blurb

Several generations after ‘The Fall’, the scattered clusters of civilisation that grew in its wake live in ignorance of the past. No-one wants to know what caused such devastation or why. No-one, except Ethan. Ethan used to believe in the guardians; mysterious lights in the sky that, according to folklore, protect the survivors, so long as you believe in them. But the death of his parents shattered his faith and forged within him a hunger to know more. One night, a light grows brighter in the sky and crashes to the planet’s surface. Ethan then embarks on a heartbreaking journey in which harrowing discoveries unveil the secrets of the past, and place him at the centre of a deadly conflict. Powerful, thought-provoking and emotionally absorbing, The Planetsider is a gripping, post-apocalyptic thriller that will keep you hooked until the very end.

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Review: ‘Under The Woods’, by KA Richardson

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Published by: Bloodhound Books

Publication Date: 27th April 2018

I.S.B.N.: 9781912604241

Format: Paperback

Price:

Blurb

When a homeless woman, Cheryl Whiffen, hears voices in her head telling her to do bad things, she can’t help but obey.

But when Cheryl becomes the victim of a serial killer who is collecting angels, this time the voices can’t help her. She is deemed not worthy of being an angel and the killer has to find another way to dispose of her body.

TJ Tulley has connections in the police force – her brother Jacob is a digital forensic analyst and her soon to be sister-in-law is a CSI. She knows many of their colleagues so when someone breaks into her house at the riding stables she owns, it’s not a surprise when the police dispatch CSI Jackson Doherty.

Is there a link between a suspicious fire at the stables and the serial killer?

As TJ and Doherty get closer to the truth they don’t realise the danger they are in. He is a killer – he’s angry at their investigation and he’ll do just about anything to protect his angels…

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