Simon & Schuster Australia Archives

Book review: The Reckoning by Vikki Petraitis

September 17, 20262 min read

I received The Reckoning by Vikki Petraitis for review a while ago and dived on in shortly after it arrived. It was only then I realised I’d not read the second in the series featuring Detective Antigone Pollard and the opening pages made it seem like I’d missed some juicy stuff. So I put it aside with the intention of getting hold of book two. I’d enjoyed book one and was reminded how much I liked Antigone the first time I was introduced… but then time passed and life happened (my mum broke her hip!) and all of my writing and reading disappeared into the ether. When I finally found time nothing else on my reading list tempted me, so I returned to Deception Bay despite having missed some of the more recent happenings.

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Book review: The Death Row Club by VA Vazquez

June 30, 20262 min read

The Death Row Club by VA Vazquez was the second book I’d read in a short amount of time involving an adult daughter discovering their father was (in fact) a serial killer. Though this has a very different flavour to Happy Woman.

I found elements of this a little confusing and I’m unsure if Vazquez means for that to be the case (duping us), or if it doesn’t flow as well as it could or I missed obvious details or foreshadowing. For example, it’s not clear (initially) that Nicola’s father’s murders were committed twenty years earlier. And there’s reference to true crime show host Greer playing a role in uncovering Nicola’s father’s crimes but then we learn Nicola had been helping Greer on the case. And it seems that was coincidental until we (eventually) learn it wasn’t. Huh? That aside, I became sufficiently invested in the unfolding events so needed to hang in there.

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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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