For Reasons Unknown by Michael Wood

EXCERPT: She turned and went back into the room. Jonathon had drawn two adults, a child, and was currently on a second child: his family. Dr McCartney bent down next to him and watched him draw in all the details: the hair, the clothes, the eyes, the smiles. He then picked up a red felt-tip and with a forceful action that caused the doctor and the PC to jump, he scribbled all over the picture. He didn’t stop until his mother, father and brother were completely covered in blood.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Two murders. Twenty years. Now the killer is back for more…

DCI Matilda Darke has returned to work after a nine month absence. A shadow of her former self, she is tasked with re-opening a cold case: the terrifyingly brutal murders of Miranda and Stefan Harkness. The only witness was their eleven-year-old son, Jonathan, who was too deeply traumatized to speak a word.

Then a dead body is discovered, and the investigation leads back to Matilda’s case. Suddenly the past and present converge, and it seems a killer may have come back for more…

MY THOUGHTS: This is another series that I started mid-way through and liked so much that I have gone back to reading from the beginning. I started with #4, The Hangman’s Hold, and currently also have the fifth, The Murder House, on my shelf waiting to be read.

We have a police officer in crisis, a cold case, and a whole cast of very interesting characters. I was wavering right up to the end about who had actually killed Jonathon’s parents, and I was wrong, despite being right about a number of other things that occur during the book.

The plot is great….reminiscent of a locked room murder.

This is going to be an enjoyable series, and I will be devouring the lot.

***.5

THE AUTHOR: Before he became an author, Michael Wood used to serve as a journalist and a proofreader. Wood resides in Sheffield, Yorkshire. For Unknown Reasons was Michael Wood’s debut novel, which was published in the year 2015. HarperCollins published the second installment, Outside Looking In in 2016.

DISCLOSURE: I listened to the audiobook of For Reasons Unknown by Michael Wood, narrated by Stephanie Beattie, published by Killer Reads, via Overdrive. All opinions expressed in this review are my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system, please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page, or the about page on sandysbooksday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1561730340?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

The Other Woman by Jane Isaac

EXCERPT: The moments before death were not at all how she imagined them to be. No images, carved from the recesses of her memory, flashed before her. No celebrated successes or missed opportunities. Instead, an overwhelming fear beat a tune beneath her skin, faster and faster, picking up momentum, immobilising her organs, one by one.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: When Cameron Swift is shot and killed outside his family home, DC Beth Chamberlain is appointed Family Liaison Officer. Her role is to support the family – and investigate them.

Monika, Cameron’s partner and mother of two sons, had to be prised off his lifeless body after she discovered him. She has no idea why anyone would target Cameron.

Beth can understand Monika’s confusion. To everyone in their affluent community, Monika and her family seemed just like any other. But then Beth gets a call.

Sara is on holiday with her daughters when she sees the news. She calls the police in the UK, outraged that no one has contacted her to let her know or offer support. After all, she and Cameron had been together for the last seven years.

Until Cameron died, Monika and Sara had no idea each other existed.

As the case unfolds, Beth discovers that nothing is quite as it appears and everyone, it seems, has secrets. Especially the dead…

Previously published as After He’s Gone.

MY THOUGHTS: While I didn’t struggle with The Other Woman, nor was I engaged by it. I found it difficult to connect with any of the characters, and failed to feel excited at any point during the read. Having said that, there is nothing that I can really criticise, either. This is the first book in the DC Beth Chamberlain series.

The plot is good, with plenty of red herrings, and a twist at the end that lifted it from a 2.5 star read to 3. This is a good quick read, ideal if you don’t want to exercise the grey cells too vigorously.

🙂🙂🙂

#TheOtherWoman #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Jane Isaac is married to a serving detective and they live in rural Northamptonshire, UK with their daughter and dogs. Jane’s debut novel, An Unfamiliar Murder, introduces DCI Helen Lavery and was nominated as best mystery in the ‘eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook awards 2013.’

The Truth Will Out, the second in the DCI Helen Lavery series, was nominated as ‘Thriller of the Month – April 2014’ by E-thriller.com and winner of ‘Noveltunity book club selection – May 2014′.

Jane’ s seventh novel, Presumed Guilty, is the second in the highly acclaimed DC Beth Chamberlain (Family Liaison Officer) series. The third DC Beth Chamberlain novel is scheduled for release in 2020.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Aria via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Other Woman by Jane Isaac for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3051776578?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

EXCERPT: ‘It was just out there where your Land Rover was parked. They must have been hiding behind the stone wall. Two of them, they said. Gave him both barrels of a shotgun and sped off on a motorbike. Point blank range. Dr McCreery said that he wouldn’t have known a thing about it.’

‘I’m sure that’s the case,’ I said and tried to let go, but still she held on.

‘He only joined for the money. This place doesn’t pay anything. We’ve forty sheep on twelve acres of bog.’

‘Yes, the–‘

She pulled me closer.

‘Aye, they say he didn’t know anything but he was still breathing when I got to him, trying to breathe anyway. His mouth was full of blood, he was drowning in it. Drowning on dry land in his own blood.’

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Sean Duffy knows there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close.

Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood-however faint-that always, always connects a body to its killer.

A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance.

So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat…

MY THOUGHTS: 1982 Northern Ireland. The Troubles. The Falklands war. The hope that the manufacturing plant for the De Lorean brings. This is the backdrop for the second book in the Sean Duffy series, I Hear The Sirens in the Streets’.

McKinty does a wonderful job of portraying the atmosphere…’the curling pigtails of smoke from hijacked cars, Army helicopters hovering above the city like mosquitoes over a water hole, heavily armed soldiers and policemen walking in single file on both sides of a residential street…’, the smell, the sound, the taste of a country at war with itself, the grinding poverty, the hopelessness and despair of both the people and the situation.

But overriding all this is the body in the suitcase and the brick walls he keeps hitting during his investigation.

I initially read the third book in this series, In the Morning I’ll be Gone, and fell in love with Sean Duffy, for all his faults, and so have gone back and am reading the series from the beginning. Loving it. McKinty has me reading late into the night, nails digging into palms, gasping, and laughing. Yes, laughing. Mr. McKinty has quite the sense of humour. Add to this his descriptive prowess and his brilliant ability to create characters far more human than I thought possible, and you have a winning combination.

I guess it helps that McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus, the setting for this series, but the whole time I am reading, I am also hearing the story in a lilting Irish brogue. Such is the strength of his writing.

If you haven’t yet read any of this author’s books, I urge you to give him a try. Highly recommended.

❤😯😳🤯.5

A few of my favourite lines from I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty:

‘….that tea’s too wet. I’ll get some biscuits.’

‘Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting.’

‘…the coffee itself tasted like it had been percolated through a tube previously used for stealing petrol from parked cars.’

THE AUTHOR: Adrian McKinty is an Irish novelist. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Victoria Council Estate, Carrickfergus, County Antrim. He read law at the University of Warwick and politics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He moved to the United States in the early 1990s, living first in Harlem, New York and from 2001 on, in Denver, Colorado, where he taught high school English and began writing fiction. He lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.

DISCLOSURE: I borrowed my copy of I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty, published by Serpent’s Tail, from Waitomo District Library. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2994284920

Watching What I’m Reading…

Happy New Year y’all. I hope you have had a happy and safe holiday season. I don’t know what it was like wherever you may be, but we had brilliant weather up in the Bay of Islands. I had forgotten how beautiful it is up there and we’re planning on heading back up there soon.

I have just started reading

And OMG! What an opening chapter…I can feel an all nighter coming on.

I need to download a new audiobook fo my walk to work tomorrow, but at this point have no idea what it will be.

This week I am planning on reading

You’ve met Mrs Bright. She’s that nice woman who lives three doors down and always smiles at you in the mornings. She’s planning her thirtieth wedding anniversary with her husband. She wants to travel, read endless books and take beautiful pictures. She’s been waiting for this forever.

For the past twenty-nine years, Kay Bright’s days have had a familiar rhythm: she works in her husband’s stationery shop, cooks for her family, tries to remember to practice yoga, and every other month she writes to her best friend, Ursula, and Ursula replies. Kay could set her calendar by their letters: her heart lifts when the blue airmail envelope, addressed in Ursula’s slanting handwriting, falls gently onto the mat.

Ursula is the only one who knows Kay’s deepest secret, something that happened decades ago that could tear Kay’s life apart today. Ursula has always been the person Kay relies on. Knowing she will hear from Ursula is like being sure the sun will rise tomorrow.

And now Ursula has stopped writing. Three missing letters doesn’t sound like a lot, but Kay gets out her shoebox of notes from her best friend, in case there’s something she overlooked. Ursula seems fine, but the further back she goes, the more Kay begins to question every choice she has made in her life. Which might be why, at ten o’clock one morning, Kay walks out of her yellow front door with a just a rucksack, leaving her wedding ring on the table…

When Cameron Swift is shot and killed outside his family home, DC Beth Chamberlain is appointed Family Liaison Officer. Her role is to support the family – and investigate them.

Monika, Cameron’s partner and mother of two sons, had to be prised off his lifeless body after she discovered him. She has no idea why anyone would target Cameron.

Beth can understand Monika’s confusion. To everyone in their affluent community, Monika and her family seemed just like any other. But then Beth gets a call.

Sara is on holiday with her daughters when she sees the news. She calls the police in the UK, outraged that no one has contacted her to let her know or offer support. After all, she and Cameron had been together for the last seven years.

Until Cameron died, Monika and Sara had no idea each other existed.

As the case unfolds, Beth discovers that nothing is quite as it appears and everyone, it seems, has secrets. Especially the dead…

I have received five new ARCs since I last posted, just prior to Christmas.

Happy reading my friends.
Cheers
Sandy
❤😍📚

The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

EXCERPT: I shone my flashlight and then I saw her.

She was fully clothed, hanging under the limb of an oak tree. She had set up the noose, put her head in it, stepped off a tree stump and then regretted it.

Almost every person who hanged themselves did it wrong.

The noose is supposed to break your neck, not choke you to death.

Lucy had tried desperately to claw through the rope, had even managed to get a finger between the rope and her throat. It hadn’t done any good.

She was blue. Her left eye was bulging out of its socket, her right eyeball had popped onto her cheek.

Apart from that and the lifeless way the breeze played with her brown hair she did not look dead. The birds hadn’t found her yet.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Two dead.

One left in a car at the side of a road. He was meant to be found quickly. His killer is making a statement.

The other is discovered hanged, deep in a forest. She is surely a suicide.

Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job – especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA, but last seen discussing business with someone from the UVF. Add to that the fact that as a Catholic policemen, it doesn’t matter which side he’s on, because nobody trusts him – and Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation.

MY THOUGHTS: I discovered Sean Duffy late in this series, but loved him so much that I have gone back to read this series from the beginning.

McKinty’s writing is, though often brutal, like liquid honey. It flows easily, even as Duffy makes huge leaps of deduction, often unfounded and misguided. But he is no bumbling fool, merely a man who feels too much, who longs to make a difference, who wants to help stop the madness of the Irish troubles.

Set in the reign of Margaret Thatcher, with the marriage of Prince Charles to Diana Spencer looming, resources are stretched thin. Riots are an every day occurrence, political prisoners are on hunger strikes, and innocent civilians are being killed in the random bombings.

And yet amongst all this carnage and hatred, McKinty manages to convey that there are still good people, people not interested in either side winning, people invested in finding an equitable peace. He even manages to insert a little Irish folk lore – ‘My grandmother told me that the forest was an opening to someplace else. Where things lurked, things we could only half see. Older beings. Shees. Shades of creatures that once walked the natural world, redundant now, awaiting tasks, awaiting their work in dreams.’

McKinty is one of the most talented writers I have ever read for setting atmosphere. As I read, I can hear every inflection, every nuance in the voices, I can smell the odour of death, of putrefaction, I can taste the food, even the whisky – ‘It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.’ He brings his work alive.

😍😲😍😲.5

My favourite quote from The Cold, Cold Ground: ‘William Burroughs said that a paranoid is somebody who knows what is actually going on.’

THE AUTHOR: Adrian McKinty is an Irish novelist. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Victoria Council Estate, Carrickfergus, County Antrim. He read law at the University of Warwick and politics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He moved to the United States in the early 1990s, living first in Harlem, New York and from 2001 on, in Denver, Colorado, where he taught high school English and began writing fiction. He lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.

DISCLOSURE: I borrowed my copy of The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, published by Serpent’s Tail, from Waitomo District Library. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2994284793

Shatter the Night by Emily Littlejohn

EXCERPT: ‘Time’s up, old friend. I will take your eyes and then your tongue, leaving you unable to see or speak. Only then will your lies end. I’m one nightmare you’ll never wake up from.’

ABOUT THIS BOOK: It’s Halloween night in Cedar Valley. During the town’s annual festival, Detective Gemma Monroe takes a break from trick or treating with her family to visit an old family friend, retired Judge Caleb Montgomery, at his law office. To Gemma’s surprise, Caleb seems worried—haunted, even—and confides in her that he’s been receiving anonymous threats. Shortly after, as Gemma strolls back to her car, an explosion at Caleb’s office shatters the night.

Reeling from the shock, Gemma and her team begin eliminating suspects and motives, but more keep appearing in their place, and soon another man is killed. Her investigation takes her from a chilling encounter with a convicted murderer at the Belle Vista Penitentiary, to the gilded rooms of the renovated Shotgun Playhouse, where Shakespeare’s cursed play Macbeth is set to open in a few weeks.

Yet most disturbing of all is when Gemma realizes that similar murders have happened before. There is a copycat killer at play, and if Gemma can’t stop him, he’ll carry out his final, deadly act.

MY THOUGHTS: This is the second book of four in this series that I have read. This is an exciting read with just the right balance between Gemma’s professional and private lives.

As the countdown to her wedding begins, there is an explosion that rocks the town in more ways than one. Set at Halloween, it involves injustices and revenge.

Just like Gemma, I kept coming up with suspects, but I was wrong every time. I enjoyed this fairly fast paced read and it was almost a five star read for me except for two things…one would be a spoiler so I’m not going there, and the second is that I found the ending, although exciting, a little jumbled and untidy.

This is a series that I intend to continue to follow. I like the characters and the setting of Cedar Valley. I do recommend that, should you want to read this book, you start at the beginning of the series. While Shatter the Night could work as a stand alone, references are made to incidents in the previous books, and there are things in the characters histories that you will not understand. This series would make an ideal holiday binge read.

Highly recommended.

😍😲😍😮

Two quotes from this book that I just loved:

‘Halloween. What a joke. The ghouls are here now, they’re always here. As if they’d only come out on one night to play.’

‘Marriages are like leftovers in the fridge; you stop paying attention and pretty soon you’ve got mold on what was once a nice meal.’

#ShatterTheNight #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Emily Littlejohn writes the Detective Gemma Monroe mysteries, called “a series to watch” by Booklist.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to St Martin’s Press via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Shatter the Night by Emily Littlejohn for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and my https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3051772178

The Girls in the Lake by Helen Phifer

EXCERPT: The glow from the lamps along the quay gave just enough light to see there was something in the water; in the shadow of the boat it looked as if a clump of reads had got tangled in the anchor chain. Leaning further over, he blinked a couple of times and focused his vision, realizing too late that they weren’t reeds at all.

It was a woman, floating face down in the water, her long blonde hair fanned out around her shoulders and snagged onto the anchor chain.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: The discovery of a young student floating face down in Lake Windermere, her naked skin almost translucent in the freezing water, looks like yet another tragic teen suicide. But the victim’s lack of clothes make Forensic Pathologist Beth Adams want to investigate further. Anything to distract her from the arrival of her abusive ex-boyfriend’s body on the mortuary table that morning.

With witnesses keeping tight-lipped and any clues washed away by the tides, it’s up to Beth to find the evidence her team needs. But then another girl is found in the lake, this time still clinging to life. She tells them she was at a party on a boat, and that she was pushed…

As more bodies surface, Beth finds tiny traces of boat paint present on each victim. It’s a critical lead that links these attacks back to a tragic accident involving a group of school children years ago.

Faced with a killer hungry for revenge, and with her own life spiralling out of control, it’s going to take every ounce of skill and determination for Beth to catch this monster before he takes another innocent life. But will Beth realise he’s been right beside her all along?

MY THOUGHTS: I am afraid that I like The Girls in the Lake even less than The Girl in the Grave, and I thought that was barely an okay read. With The Girls in the Lake, I seriously contemplated dnfing it several times. By the time I finished I really didn’t care who had done what to whom.

I disliked it for all the same reasons as the first book in this series. The action in this book takes place a mere month after the previous book finishes so Beth and Josh’s relationship is still relatively new. But she is sneaking around following him. They are also trying to keep their relationship secret from their coworkers, so why would she contemplate taking him breakfast at work?

There’s a lot of silly little errors that spoiled my enjoyment, and some not so small. Beth takes it upon herself to collect a paint sample to match against samples from under the dead girls fingernails, but does so without a warrant, in stormy weather, and despite evidence that there could be someone on board the boat to which the dinghy is tied.

The writing is mostly simplistic and flat. Beth goes outside. She gets (something) from her car. She comes inside. She sits down. You get the idea…..

Reading is a personal and subjective experience, and what appeals to one may not please another. If you enjoyed the excerpt from The Girls in the Lake by Helen Phifer, and the plot outline appeals, please do go ahead and read it. You may well love it, as many other people have.

Not a book I will be recommending, nor a series that I will be following.

😕😕

#TheGirlsInTheLake #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Phifer was born in Barrow-in-Furness, a small town. She grew up there and continued to live there as an adult with her husband and children. She says that the town can occasionally receive some not great press, but confirms that it is a nice area to live in. It is surrounded by gorgeous scenic coast line and is fairly close to the Lake District, which is another beautiful area.

Helen confesses that she has always loved reading as well as writing. When it comes to reading, she likes to pick books that make the hair on her neck go up! Helen always has had a penchant for scary stories. When she eventually could not find enough books in this genre to suit her requirements, she decided that she would boost the amount of scary story books out there by writing some of her own!

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Bookouture via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Girls in the Lake by Helen Phifer for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3067787582