See How They Run by Tom Bale

Looking for something to read over the weekend ?

Nothing on your book radar that is screaming ‘read me’?

Take a look at my Friday Favorite. It may be new. It may be old. It may be written by a famous author, or by someone you have never heard of. But wherever in the spectrum it falls, it will be a book that is special to me, one that has captured both my imagination and my heart.

One thing I love about doing this feature is rediscovering authors that I have loved that have, for one reason or another, dropped off my reading radar. Tom Bale is a case in point.  Despite my good intentions, I have yet to read another of his books. But now he is firmly back in my sights . 😎

 

EXCERPT: Any noise in the night could wake him now. Eight weeks since the birth of his daughter and Harry barely remembered how it was to sleep for seven hours straight and wake naturally, refreshed and ready for a new day. All the warnings from their friends about the misery of sleep deprivation had turned out to be spot on.

The sound had come and gone by the time he registered he was awake, eyes glued shut, heart beating fast. Not the baby, he was sure of that. It must have been something outside, perhaps in the alley out the back where urban foxes prowled.

Harry waited, trying to recreate the feeling he’d had, the sense of a dream interrupted by a . . . a thud, a scrape: a surreptitious noise as though something – someone – was trying to go unheard.

Or maybe it had been part of the dream itself. Either way, now that he was awake, he ought to take a look out of the window; check on Evie, and see how much time there was before her next feed. . .

Harry knew he should do these things but he couldn’t. He was frozen in place, eyes tightly shut, not even daring to breathe.

There was an intruder in their home.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: How far would you go to save your family?

In the dead of night, new parents Alice and Harry French are plunged into their worst nightmare when they wake to find masked men in their bedroom. Men ruthless enough to threaten their baby daughter, Evie.

This is no burglary gone wrong.
The intruders know who they’re looking for – a man called Edward Renshaw.
And they are prepared to kill to get to him.

When the men leave empty handed, little do Alice and Harry realise that their nightmare is just beginning. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Who is Renshaw? And what is he hiding?

One thing is clear – they already know too much.

As Alice and Harry are separated in the run for their lives, there is no time to breathe in their fight to be reunited. And with their attackers closing in, there is only one choice:

STAY ALIVE. OR DON’T.

MY THOUGHTS: 💖💖💖💖.5 for See How They Run by Tom Bale.

See How They Run had my heart pounding and my blood racing in the first few pages.

Tom Bale knows people, and this shows in his writing. He knows how we tell each other little lies, harmless lies, and just how these can backfire.

Alice gets a parcel in the post addressed to someone she doesn’t know. And when soon after the delivery, a man turns up to claim it saying his sister had gotten the address wrong, she hands it over and thinks no more about it.

Even when intruders break into their home in the early hours of the morning demanding to know the whereabouts of the man and the parcel, assaulting her and threatening the life of Evie, their baby daughter, she denies all knowledge. And she doesn’t even tell Harry, her husband, about the parcel.

And Harry, when he meets a woman called Ruth who knows what happened that night and offers to help, does not tell Alice.

Oh what a tangled web we weave……

If you want a good thrilling read, I strongly recommend this book. This is my first Tom Bale, it won’t be my last. This is an author I am going to be following closely.

THE AUTHOR: Tom Bale has had a variety of jobs including retail assistant, claims negotiator and project manager, but none was as exhausting as the several years he spent as a househusband with two pre-school children. Tom has been writing since the age of seven, and completed his first novel at fifteen. After twenty years and hundreds of rejection slips, his first novel SINS OF THE FATHER was published under his real name, David Harrison. With his next book, SKIN AND BONES, he acquired an agent, a pseudonym and a book deal that enabled him to write full-time.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to NetGalley and publishers Bookouture for providing a digital ARC of See How They Run by Tom Bale for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

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