I stumbled across Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne series at number 13. Amazingly it wasn’t a problem at all that I’d missed the first dozen and the two (Time of Death and Love Like Blood) I’ve read since could easily be read as stand-alone novels for those who haven’t previously met the English homicide detective. (Bringing me to the 15th book in the series and my third!)
I’d planned to just read a few chapters of this book before launching into Lost in Space on Netflix last Saturday night (hee hee, see what I did there? Not on purpose incidentally, but… #whatevs). I probably should know myself better as once I started I kept reading until the end, needing to know what had happened to baby Midas.
Fans of Kate Forsyth will appreciate this tale of a young woman 15 years after she discovered the father she adored kidnapped her 16yr old mother and held her captive until the pair escaped when Helena was 12. Apparently (I say, because I’d never heard of it), there’s a (1858) Hans Christian Anderson fairytale called The Marsh King’s Daughter which centres around the child born to a princess captured by the evil Marsh King. And the plot of this book (told in the then, when Helena was young; and the now) unfolds in a way that kinda mirrors the fairytale.
Jessica Treadway’s If She Did It (aka Lacy Eye) was published here in Australia in early 2015. It was a book I adored and couldn’t put down. Better still it had a kinda shocking ending. Which I hate to love. Or love to hate. Whatever…
Treadway’s latest is another attention-grabber, but though enjoyable, didn’t have quite the same addictive pull as its predecessor.
Clare Mackintosh’s 2015 release, I Let You Go, was one of my favourite books of the year. It featured a mid-story twist which almost made me drop my iPad in the bathtub. (In related news, thank god for LifeProof covers!)
So… you can imagine my excitement when I discovered Mackintosh had a new book being released… and fortunately her latest, I See You offers up the complex and twisty plot we’ve come to expect from the former police officer.
I reviewed Alex Marwood’s The Killer Next Door just over a year ago (and enjoyed it) but the English journalist (who writes under a pseudonym) is best known from her debut novel, Wicked Girls… which I must get to at some point.
Her latest, The Darkest Secret, centres around the disappearance of a child and I must admit the 2007 case of 3yr old Madeleine McCann–who disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment while her parents dined nearby—came to mind as I tore through this novel.
It’d been a while between Tony Hill / Carol Jordan drinks for me on the book front when Val McDermid’s 9th novel in the series arrived in my letterbox.
I’m a huge fan of the series and was a lover of the TV show based on the series (though vaguely recall losing interest for some reason which now alludes me. Was there a change of characters? Or perhaps it just finished?). Anyhoo… I excitedly tuned in for the latest instalment and was (again) forced to change dinner plans so I could read the book in a night!
I really enjoyed Michael Robotham’s 2014 stand-alone thriller, Life or Death. I admitted at the time I had been struggling with his series featuring psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, so the change gave me the respite I was looking for.
I didn’t find O’Loughlin as unlikeable as Nicci French’s Frieda Klein, but I really wasn’t really engaging with his character and couldn’t get a handle on who he was.
However Robotham’s latest (and the eighth in the Joe O’Loughlin series), Close Your Eyes sees a return to the Joe I thought I once knew.
Follow me!