Obsession can be innocent or deadly. With Joe, it’s deadly. When Guinevere Beck enters Joe Goldberg’s bookshop, she has no notion of the consequences their mildly flirtatious banter will enable. Joe ought to know better. Joe has experienced consequences before. But from the moment he sees Beck and salivates that ‘You’re so clean you’re dirty’, […]
I loved the premise of this book. Missing schoolgirl Bethan Avery suddenly seems to be writing letters to an agony aunt asking to be rescued, but Bethan went missing nearly twenty years ago and is presumed dead, so this must be a hoax, surely? The police dismiss the letters as a cruel joke, but when […]
A lamb is dead. It isn’t what you might think. Although this is the fourth installment in Aline Templeton’s police procedural series set in Scotland, this is the first book in the series I’ve read. I’ll certainly be trying another. What’s it about? An old man is shot on his doorstep, inspiring fear in the […]
Some titles are designed to be opaque. To tease you slightly. Perhaps to hint at myriad thematic concerns. Others are less subtle and reveal an awful lot about the story within. Take ‘You Are Next’, for instance. There’s a strong implied threat, but it also feels rather cliched and a reader might justifiably anticipate that […]
Sarah Beresford has forgotten everything: who she is, what happened to her and – crucially – why. Worse than that, Sarah is immersed in a coma, leaving her unable to communicate with those around her. She can hear, and what she hears is deeply disturbing. As her family bicker at her bedside, hinting at old […]
If you were going to kill someone, would you choose to do it in front of witnesses, and inside a locked room? I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb here when I say that, no, I don’t think you would. But then, if you were going to kill someone and even confess […]
‘Nine days before her daughter disappeared, Morgan Vine paid her twenty-third visit to HMP Dungness.’ Now tell me that opening hasn’t got you hooked. Why is Morgan there? Why does her daughter disappear? How are the two connected? (Since the construction of that sentence tells you they are.) Of course, if you’re reading the opening […]
This is so good that when I picked it up to check if I read it last year, I ended up reading it again. ‘This’ is ‘The Unremarkable Heart’, a short story by well-established crime writer Karin Slaughter, and, yes, that is her birth name. (She has said previously that it’s a good thing she […]
No one could have killed Polly Carter…but someone did. This is a locked room mystery that takes place in a garden with a cliff top and some extremely convenient shrubbery. Oh, and it takes place in the Carribean. And Polly’s a celebrity (of course: who else would have a cliff top with beach access conveniently […]
It’s difficult to be original. Still, when a quick search throws up a minimum of three books sharing the same title as this one, I feel a more original option must have been available. Unfortunately, my initial and final response to this book can be summed up with one word: meh. What’s it about? Kelly’s […]