NetGalley Archives

Book review: It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica

August 23, 20262 min read

I had a strange sense of deja-vu as I read It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica. The electronic version I received for review is published in late August, but I noted other versions were published earlier this year so I wondered if perhaps I’d read it then. Of course Goodreads is my go-to source of info, as my own mind is akin to a sieve, and it’s not listed in my ‘read’ books. Perhaps I read a similar book, featuring brutally murdered parents of three children (aged 17, 14 and 10), with the oldest girl (17yr old Reese) missing. Feared abducted… though also unfortunately with motivation to be the killer herself.

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Book review: The One Who Walked Away by Karen Rose

August 17, 20262 min read

The One Who Walked Away by Karen Rose reminded me why I used to be such a fan of romantic suspense. I read a stack of her books back in the early 2000s, along with Nora Roberts, Sandra Brown, Elizabeth Lowell, Jayne Ann Krentz and Suzanne Brockmann. Although I’m not a fan of straight romance (ie. solely romance, not non-gay romance!) romantic suspense kinda ticks a few boxes for me, those books becoming a comfort-read of sorts. This is marked as Mendocino #1 so presumably the start of a new linked series… our main characters here being a family lawyer turned bounty hunter and a small town detective.

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Book review: Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey

July 23, 20262 min read

Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey opens with a woman’s death. Well, her murder to be more specific. Of course Casey keeps us guessing as to the who and why and throwing several twists into the whodunnit and whydunnit mix. On the case are mismatched (Irish) Gardas, Ben Butler and Liam Farrell initially trying to work out what happened to a young woman found covered in blood, and more importantly the source of the blood, which would indicate murder.

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Book review: The Shadow Step by Mark Billington

July 19, 20262 min read

The Shadow Step by Mark Billington is the third in the series featuring detective Declan (Dec) Miller and (for me) this was a return to the amazing banter and snarky droll repartee which I loved about the first in the series, The Last Dance.

Here Dec and DS Sara Xiu are called when a body is found in a pond in a park. Happily for them, someone comes forward to explain he’d argued with the man, who’d then tripped over his dog and fell into the pond. Down-on-his-luck ex soldier Barry Cheshire tells them he had no idea the man didn’t pull himself out and went to the police as soon as he heard about the body. In worse news for Cheshire however, the dead man was a drug dealer, working for the Cutlers… well-known to Dec, who (wrongly) believe their territory is under attack and decide to take revenge.

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Book review: The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter

July 4, 20262 min read

The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter is the second book in her North Falls series. I LOVED the first, We Are All Guilty Here, and was excited it was labelled #1, knowing more would come. I commented at the time how much I loved the characters and they would be wasted if we didn’t meet them again. And…. they’re back. Well… not all of them. 🙄 #ahem

We have two narrators here, Acting Chief Emmy Clifton (in the role following the events of book one) and her sister, Jude a former FBI profiler, who returned home in book one after over 40 years in the family wilderness. The case here involves a murdered cop and her barely-clinging-to-life daughter and, as the mother bore the brunt of her husband’s violent tendencies, it seems obvious he’s finally gone too far. Things change however, as a number of other factors and potential motives appear.

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Book review: The Damned by Matt Rogers

June 17, 20262 min read

The Damned by Matt Rogers is the second in the series featuring former CIA assassin Logan Booth and I just need to say I bloody loved this book. Rogers again gives us a complex and fully formed (albeit slightly flawed) character in Logan along with ex-crack addict Alice (thankfully with new teeth, her old ones ruined by her habit)*. Here Logan travels to Columbia where a former lover has been (briefly) kidnapped. Unfortunately for him, her new boyfriend is connected to a cartel family which now has multiple reasons to hunt him down.

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Book review: The Butler by Clare Mackintosh

June 13, 20263 min read

I read The Butler by Clare Mackintosh in a sitting (though it is quite short at just over 200 pages). I’ve long been a fan of Mackintosh, ever since a twist in her 2015 debut novel I Let You Go almost made me drop my iPad into the bathtub (where I read). Here, what starts as a somewhat tense week-long birthday celebration in a luxurious mansion in the French Riveria, becomes a whodunnit and I very much liked the way Mackintosh pairs amateur sleuth and butler (Baxter) up with an unlikely but surprisingly canny partner when unpicking clues, motives and means to uncover the murderer.

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Book review: The Second Wife by Ali Lowe

June 5, 20262 min read

The Second Wife by Ali Lowe is the third book I’ve read by the English-born Aussie author and features warring siblings of the grown kind and a punitive and ill-tempered father… albeit one who’s a billionaire and celebrating his 70th birthday. It unfolds from several points of view that of birthday boy Irving’s wife, (Gen), Irving’s daughter in law (Celia) and Molly the cruise concierge for the elite 9th deck revellers. Their stories are interspersed by transcripts of a podcast, made following the fateful cruise which ends in a death… or two.

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