My NetGalley Badges

The American Girl by Kate Horsley

Quinn is a seventeen year old exchange student who is spending the summer in France with her host family the Blavette's. Everything seems fine at first, but then as Quinn starts to realize all is not as it seems with the Blavette family and longs to be back home in America, events take a sinister twist.

Quinn is discovered in a confused and bloodied state after being knocked down one night, fleeing the woods. Taken to hospital Quinn doesn't know who she is or what happened that night to cause her to run blindly into the road. Most disturbing of all, the Blavette's have disappeared without trace and no-one in the small French town appears to know what has happened to them.

In steps Molly Swift, an undercover journalist who soon forms a bond with Quinn, as they both try to find out the truth of what happened that fateful night. While the police believe Quinn is not what she seems and appear to suspect her of murder, Molly fully believes Quinn is telling the truth, and is prepared to sacrifice her fledgling romance with the handsome French police detective, in order to prove Quinn's innocence.

This was a great read. I really enjoyed it. A real psychological thriller, that had me gripped from the start. Full of twists and turns, it was hard to know who to believe as everyone seemed to have secrets they wanted to hide.

I especially enjoyed the character of Molly Swift and would love to see this book as the first in a series with Molly as the protagonist, investigating crime in her unconventional way.

Kate Horsley is definitely an author I will be watching out for. I can't wait to read her next novel.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher HarperCollins UK for my free e-ARC in return for an honest review.

Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey

Clyde Barr is a drifter, a mercenary with a heart, a mountain man and a hunter. After sixteen years lending his muscle and expertise in conflicts across Africa and beyond, taking care of the little guy, fighting for the downtrodden and choosing sides in various third world conflicts, Clyde is tired and feeling his age. Having recently been released from a spell in a Mexican prison where he barely made it out alive, he is back in his native Colorado, in the mountains he loves, looking forward to retirement from conflict, and a quieter way of life, when he receives a panic-stricken phone call from his beloved sister Jen, pleading with him to "come and get her". He has no idea where Jen is or who has abducted her, but since their shared and troubled childhood, Clyde and his older sister Jen have had a particular bond. Nothing will prevent him from rescuing her.

And so it begins. Clyde's hunt for his sister is a roller-coaster of a ride through the wilderness, and small towns of America. A violent, bloody, modern day western of drug barons, hard men and hired guns. Throughout it all Clyde is driven by one thing - the need to save his sister. By day he mows down anyone who gets in his way, and at night he battles his demons, haunted by the memories of past conflicts, the women and children he failed to save, and the bloody bodies he left in his wake. Yet amid all this chaos, and the smell of gun smoke, Clyde shows us his softer side by finding the time to fall in love and rescue a damsel in distress, along the way.

This is Erik Storey's debut novel. With this book he shows us what master story teller he is, and the quality of his writing sweeps the reader along and kept me up into the early hours. I really enjoyed this book.

Thrillers are my usual genre of choice, although I don't usually go for action packed thrillers like this one. However, I really fell for Clyde Barr. He is Jack Reacher with a heart. He makes silly mistakes, really daft ones where you find yourself shaking your head in disbelief. He tries to do the right thing, he really wants to heal the world, but somehow he has to kill a load of bad men to make good things happen. This book is not for the faint hearted, but if you like thrillers, especially action thrillers, and if you long for the wild west where the lines between good and bad get a little blurry at times, and if you like your heroes, scarred, tough, and at times ruthless, and with a moral code all of their own, you will enjoy Nothing Short of Dying, like I did.

The really great news is that Nothing Short of Dying is the first book in the Clyde Barr series. The bad news is we are going to have to wait for book two! If the second Clyde Barr novel is anything like the first, it will be worth the wait, and I plan to be first in the queue!

Thank you to newbooks/nudge, the publisher Simon & Schuster UK, and the author Erik Storey for my free copy of Nothing Short of Dying, in return for an honest review.

The Eskimo Solution by Pascal Garnier

For a long time this book had me thoroughly confused, there were even times when I found excuses not to pick it up. But eventually after about 25% into the book I found I did not want to put it down!
A strange book about a man called Louis who writes a book about a man called Louis - confused? Well you should be! The first man called Louis even had a next door neighbor called Louis! Louis the author writes a book about Louis the serial killer, so really The Eskimo Effect is a book within a book.

It is dark, very very dark, and it is bleak. But it is also amusing, in a way that almost leaves you feeling guilty for being amused, I mean the man is a serial killer - what can possibly be amusing about that? And yet there are moments where you may not be laughing out loud, but moments where you find yourself smiling out loud.

Perhaps the saddest thing for me after reading this book was to realize that Pascal Garnier is no longer with us. This talented authors premature death in 2010 at the age of 60 years is a real loss, to his family, to France and to all of us who like a good story told well. The most fitting tribute I can pay Pascal Garnier is to read his back list of titles, and that is exactly what I intend to do.

Thank you to Netgalley, and Gallic Books for my free e-ARC of this book in return for an honest review. The Eskimo Solution by Pascal Garnier is published today 12th September 2016.

The Hummingbird's Cage by Tamara Dietrich

I have mixed views on this book, as while it was extremely well written and moving, it took me places I really did not want to go.

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love thrillers, especially psychological thrillers. This novel began like a psychological thriller, as the protagonist finds herself trapped in a violent, abusive and loveless marriage, but just as you start to get emotionally involved in the story and you long for Joanna to escape with her daughter the story takes an unexpected twist and you find yourself in the land of make believe.

Generally I do not read fantasy. I like my stories grounded in reality, and while reality was so bleak for Joanna and her daughter I shouldn't have been so surprised at where this book ended up.

I had a difficult task deciding what score I would rate this book, tossing and turning from 3 stars to four. In the end I decided to award 4 stars, because as books go this was a really good book. It kept me gripped from start to finish, and I had to finish it, I really had to know what happened in the end. Did I love this book? No. It went places I didn't want it to go, and I really wasn't happy with the ending, but then, I didn't write it, Tamara Dietrich wrote it, and it was a really good debut novel by an extremely talented writer, and despite myself, I will be reading her next book as i'm really curious to see where she will go with it!

Thank you to NetGalley, Orion Publishers, and the author Tamara Dietrich for my free e-ARC in return for an honest review.

Lie In Wait by G.J. Minett

Owen Hall is a mathematical genius, a big strong man who earns his living by hard physical graft as a landscape gardener. He also happens to be fascinated by number patterns and sequences. Socially awkward and with a brilliant intellect, as a child he was different to the other children his age and was bullied to such an extent that his mother had to remove him from his school. Owen has never forgotten the scars, both psychological and physical that were inflicted on him in the schoolyard, and he has not forgotten his childhood tormentors.

When a brutal murder occurs in the small town where Owen lives he finds himself once more singled out as 'odd' when the police turn the spotlight on him and he finds himself the chief suspect in their murder investigation.

Is Owen Hall a violent murderer, or is he an innocent man, an easy target for suspicion who just happens to stand out?

This is G.J. Minett's second and much anticipated novel. I have previously read his debut novel The Hidden Legacy and thoroughly enjoyed it. In many ways Lie in Wait is a very different book, although both books touch on the theme of childhood bullying.

Lie in Wait is a dark thriller, extremely cleverly plotted by the author. At times, and particularly in the beginning of the book I found it difficult to keep the cast of characters straight in my head, but G. J. Minett had no such problems as he tells his story from the perspective of each character with immense skill. Just when I thought I understood where each character was coming from and what made them tick, they would say or do something to throw all my assumptions out the window!

G. J. Minett is a very clever writer with a natural ability to tell a story that the reader won't forget in a hurry. Long after you have turned the last page you will still be thinking about Lie in Wait and the complex characters he introduces you to in this dark and twisted journey of a book. A great read, this book will keep you turning the pages long into the night.

Thank you to newbooks/nudge, netgalley, the author and the publisher for an advanced e-copy of this book in return for an honest review.

He's Gone by Alex Clare

Just when you think every angle of every book plot has been covered over and over again, along comes a new author with a new story to tell. At least I think gender dysphoria hasn't been covered before in crime fiction, or at least not where the Detective Inspector in charge of the investigation disappears for two weeks vacation and returns a woman, as is the case with this crime fiction novel.

We first meet Detective Inspector Robyn Bailley as she returns to work. Now a woman DI Robyn Bailley used to be DI Rodger Bailley but had never been happy or complete as a man. Now she had the chance to continue the job she loved, while being the gender she had always wanted to be. But things are never that simple are they? Now as a woman DI Bailley must learn to act as a woman would, dress as a woman would and put her lipstick on correctly without staining her teeth!

Apart from facing her colleagues in her new gender, DI Robyn has been thrown straight into the distressing case of a missing two year old child, Ben. This is further complicated by his mothers obvious disgust at DI Robyn's appearance. Ben's mother Melissa belongs to a strict religious cult, who frown upon any kind of gender alteration among many other things and she soon lodges a complaint against Robin with the police authorities. All this while Robyn is doing her best to find her son for her, solve a spate of increasingly violent burglaries and try to identify a dead body.

I have to say I enjoyed this book. It didn't cause me to laugh out loud but there were amusing moments for me throughout the book where I smiled quietly to myself. Whether they were intentional by the author or they just tickled my humor, i'm not sure. There were moments when I found Robyn's personal life intruding too much into the main story as I saw it, which was about a two year old boy who had gone missing and that investigation. At times I really felt for Robyn and the difficulties she had to go through to be even a little happy, but there were also times where I felt, 'forget the makeup, the bra digging into your back or where you left your handbag and just go find that little boy'. As a police procedural I was disappointed that I guessed correctly early on who had taken Ben, and who had committed the murder. But, as a story. A police procedural with a 'difference', I really liked it. I liked DI Robyn Bailley, and I really look forward to catching up with her in the second in the series so I hope I don't have to wait too soon. And i'd just like to whisper....... if there are any tv production companies out there looking for a new tv detective series please do give consideration to DI Robyn Bailley as her story would make a great tv!