Crime Fiction – Page 76

New-to-Me Books from Barter Books

Published on June 20, 2018 by Margaret7 Comments

Yesterday I went to my favourite bookshop Barter Books, one of the largest secondhand bookshops in Britain. This is where you can ‘swap’ books for credit that you can then use to get more books from the Barter Books shelves.

These are the books I brought home:

River of Darkness by Rennie Airth – I was hoping to find this book as Cafe Society recommended it. It’s the first book in his John Madden series. Inspector John Madden of Scotland Yard investigates the murder of a family in the post-World War I British countryside. A veteran of the war, Madden immediately recognizes the work of a soldier, but discovering the motive will take longer.

Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill. I always check to see if there are any of his books on the shelves that I haven’t got/read, so I was pleased to find this one. It’s the third Dalziel and Pascoe book in which Pascoe finds his social life and work uncomfortably brought together by a terrible triple murder. Meanwhile, Dalziel is pressuring him about a string of unsolved burglaries, and as events unfold the two cases keep getting jumbled in his mind.

Beryl Bainbridge is another author whose books I always look out for, and this visit I found Every Man for Himself. This novel is about the voyage of the Titanic, on its maiden and final voyage in 1912.

Sirens by Joseph Knox. I wasn’t looking for this book, or for books by Knox, but it caught my eye as I browsed the shelves and I remembered that earlier this year I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed The Smiling Man. Set in Manchester, Sirens is Knox’s debut book featuring DC Aidan Waits. Young women are lured into enigmatic criminal Zain Carver’s orbit and then they disappear.

Once more I’m torn between reading these as soon as possible, or reading from my TBR shelves and review copies from NetGalley. It’s a dilemma :)

What do you think? Have you read any of these? Do they tempt you too?

Stalker by Lisa Stone

Published on June 18, 2018 by Margaret4 Comments

Someone is always watching…

Derek Flint is a loner. He lives with his mother and spends his
evenings watching his clients on the CCTV cameras he has installed inside their homes. He likes their companionship – even if it’s through a screen.

When a series of crimes hits Derek’s neighbourhood, DC Beth Mayes begins to suspect he’s involved. How does he know so much about the victims’ lives? Why won’t he let anyone into his office? And what is his mother hiding in that strange, lonely house?

As the crimes become more violent, Beth must race against the clock to find out who is behind the attacks. Will she uncover the truth in time? And is Derek more dangerous than even she has guessed?

A spellbinding crime novel from the worldwide bestseller
Cathy Glass, writing as Lisa Stone.

Stalker is the first book by Lisa Stone (or Cathy Glass) that I’ve read. It’s a quick easy read, with a straight forward third person narrative, but its simple plot (great if you’re wanting a comfort read) is rather predictable and unconvincing in parts.

I liked Lisa Stone’s portrayal of Derek Flint, a loner, computer savvy, but very naive, who still lives with his mother. Having set up CCTV cameras in his clients’ homes and businesses, he believes he is helping them as he watches what they are doing from the comfort of his bedroom, even going as far as intervening if he doesn’t like what he sees. He’s creepy but not scary. It’s the result of his good intentions that ends in violence and that is truly scary. When some of his clients become victims of crime, the police, DC Beth Mayes and her colleague DC Matt Davies, begin to suspect that Derek is involved.

The subject matter – cyber stalking – is unsettling. It’s a book of two parts, with the second part involving violent and gruesome scenes with some very nasty characters. I had to read on to find out how it ended, but I didn’t enjoy the experience. It’s definitely not comfort reading.

It’s a timely book as security issues on line have recently been highlighted in the media with emphasis on checking your own systems and the need to change your passwords regularly.

Many thanks to Avon Books UK for a review copy via NetGalley.

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 876 KB
Print Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Avon (14 Jun. 2018)
My Rating: 3*

WWW Wednesday: 13 June 2018

Published on June 13, 2018 by Margaret8 Comments

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WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

I’m currently reading:

The Grapes of Wrath On Beulah Height (Dalziel & Pascoe, #17)

I’m making good progress with The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and I’m still loving it.The Joads have arrived in California and it’s not what they expected – too many homeless, hungry people desperate for work being moved on from place to place. Steinbeck’s writing is detailed and richly descriptive. I feel as though I’m on the road with the characters.

I’m also reading On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill, crime fiction about missing children in a Yorkshire village. A little girl took her dog out for a walk early one morning and didn’t come home. Three little girls had disappeared 15 years earlier and their bodies were never found. I’ve read nearly half the book and as usual with Hill’s books I love the characterisation, the humour and his use of dialect. It’s the first of my 10 Books of Summer.

Recently finished: Come a Little Closer by Rachel Abbott – definitely creepy and disturbing. It’s the first book of hers I’ve read, but the seventh one she’s written. It reads well as a standalone. It’s described as a psychological thriller and the characters are certainly unstable, stressed and in complex and dangerous relationships. I gave it three stars on Goodreads – maybe that’s being generous, as I’m not at all sure I did ‘like’ it.

Come A Little Closer (DCI Tom Douglas #7)

Synopsis:

They will be coming soon. They come every night.
 
Snow is falling softly as a young woman takes her last breath.
 
Fifteen miles away, two women sit silently in a dark kitchen. They don’t speak, because there is nothing left to be said.
 
Another woman boards a plane to escape the man who is trying to steal her life. But she will have to return, sooner or later.
 
These strangers have one thing in common. They each made one bad choice – and now they have no choices left. Soon they won’t be strangers, they’ll be family…
 
When DCI Tom Douglas is called to the cold, lonely scene of a suspicious death, he is baffled. Who is she? Where did she come from? How did she get there?
 
How many more must die? Who is controlling them, and how can they be stopped?

I may write more about this book once I’ve sorted out my thoughts about it.

Reading next: Stalker by Lisa Stone, due to be published tomorrow 14 June.

Synopsis:

Someone is always watching…

As the crimes become more violent, Beth must race against the clock to find out who is behind the attacks. Will she uncover the truth in time? And is Derek more dangerous than even she has guessed?

Have you read any of these books? Do any of them tempt you?

The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton

Published on June 11, 2018 by Margaret5 Comments

Orion Publishing Group 3 May 2018 |432 pages|e-book |Review copy|4.5*

Devoted father or merciless killer?

His secrets are buried with him.

Florence Lovelady’s career was made when she convicted coffin-maker Larry Glassbrook of a series of child murders 30 years ago. Like something from our worst nightmares the victims were buried…ALIVE.

Larry confessed to the crimes; it was an open and shut case. But now he’s dead, and events from the past start to repeat themselves.

Did she get it wrong all those years ago?
Or is there something much darker at play?

It’s been a while since I read one of Sharon Bolton’s books, so I was looking forward to reading her latest book – The Craftsman. I must admit that I was a bit dismayed when I realised that most of it is written in the present tense, but as soon as I began reading I was immediately drawn into the story, forgot about the tense, and just had to read on.

This is one of her standalone books and I have found each one really scary, creepy books and The Craftsman is no exception. In 1969 WPC Florence, ‘Flossie’, Lovelady began to work in Sabden, a small town in Lancashire under the shadow of Pendle Hill, notorious for witch trials back in the 17th century. But the book begins in 1999 when Florence, now an Assistant Commissioner returns to Sabden for the funeral of Larry Glassbrook who died after thirty years in prison, convicted for the murders of three teenagers buried alive in 1969. Taking her fifteen year old son Ben with her, she goes to Larry’s house where she had lodged and discovers a clay effigy similar to the ones found buried with the three teenagers. She revisits the scenes of the burials, meets some of her old colleagues and starts to think that maybe Larry wasn’t the murderer after all.

And so the nightmare begins, going back to 1969 as Flossie, a clever young woman, found it hard to be taken seriously at first by her colleagues in the police. And she was aware of how different she seemed to the local people in a place still steeped in superstition and belief in the supernatural. Her investigations, looking for connections between the victims, ad exploring the local history of witches and their covens raised an atmosphere of suspicion and near hysteria in the community.

Sharon Bolton’s writing is so descriptive, both of the beautiful landscape and the main characters, that I was inescapably drawn into this chilling and terrifying story with the horrors of being buried alive clearly described. She has produced a remarkably powerful book, full of tension and fear, but also focusing on the culture and attitudes of society at the end of the 1960s. I thought the pace of the book dragged a bit in the middle section only to be ramped up to the utmost as it drew to it conclusion, which I have to say I hadn’t expected and am not sure I can believe. It is a compelling and absorbing book that left me thinking about it days after I finished reading.

Many thanks to Orion Publishing Group for a review copy via NetGalley.

Amazon UK link
Amazon US link

Bats in the Belfry: A London Mystery (British Library Crime Classics ) by E C R Lorac

Published on June 7, 2018June 29, 2018 by Margaret7 Comments

Poisoned Pen Press 2018 |233 pages|e-book |Review copy|4*

This was first published in 1937 by Collins Crime Club. This edition has an introduction by Martin Edwards.

Description:

Bruce Attleton dazzled London’s literary scene with his first two novels – but his early promise did not bear fruit. His wife Sybilla is a glittering actress, unforgiving of Bruce’s failure, and the couple lead separate lives in their house at Regent’s Park.

When Bruce is called away on a sudden trip to Paris, he vanishes completely – until his suitcase and passport are found in a sinister artist’s studio, the Belfry, in a crumbling house in Notting Hill. Inspector Macdonald must uncover Bruce’s secrets, and find out the identity of his mysterious blackmailer.

This intricate mystery from a classic writer is set in a superbly evoked London of the 1930s.

E C R Lorac was a pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958) who was a prolific writer of crime fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a member of the prestigious Detection Club. Little has been written about her life. By the time of her death she had produced more that seventy books but she seems to have been a forgotten author and I hadn’t heard of E C R Lorac until quite recently.

I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed Bats in the Belfry, which is set in London in the 1930s. There is the occasional anti-Semitic comment, offensive now but it seems to reflect the period in which Lorac was writing. However, it’s full of descriptive writing painting vivid pictures of the streets of London and in particular the spooky, Gothic tower in which a corpse is discovered, ‘headless and handless‘. For a while the identity of the murdered man is in doubt – is it that of Bruce Attleton who had unaccountably disappeared or that of the mysterious stranger, Debrette who it seems had been blackmailing Bruce?

Chief Inspector Macdonald of New Scotland Yard is called in to investigate Bruce’s disappearance. I liked Macdonald, a ‘long lean faced’ Scot. He’s a shrewd detective, not easily ruffled or fooled. The other characters are well defined, including Bruce’s wife Sybilla, both of whom are having affairs, and his friends, one of whom, Robert Grenville, is in love with his ward Elizabeth, a lively and resourceful young woman. The plot is complex, with enough twists and turns to keep me guessing until very nearly the end of the book.

I think this is one of the better Golden Age Mysteries that I have read, and I’m now looking forward to reading another of her books, Fire in the Thatch, set in Devon.

Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press for a review copy via NetGalley.

Amazon UK link
Amazon US link

First Chapter First Paragraph: The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton

Published on June 5, 2018 by Margaret24 Comments

Every Tuesday First Chapter, First Paragraph/Intros is hosted by Vicky of I’d Rather Be at the Beach sharing the first paragraph or two of a book she’s reading or plans to read soon.

On Sunday I thought I’d just have a quick look at Sharon Bolton’s latest book, The Craftsman and was immediately hooked and had read 20%. I’ve had to put the other books I’m reading on hold as I just have to know what happens next.

The book opens with a letter from Sharon Bolton:

Dear Reader,

On a spring day in 1612, a mill owner called Richard Baldwin, in the Pendle forest of Lancashire chased two local women off his land, calling them ‘witches and whores’, threatening to ‘burn one and hang the other’, and in so doing, set in motion events that led to the imprisonment, trial and execution of nine women on the charge of murder by witchcraft: the infamous Pendle Witch Trials.

Like Sharon Bolton the north of England is my homeland and just as she has always wanted to write a book about witches, I have always been fascinated by such books. So it’s no wonder that I am now immersed in her book. It’s not about the Pendle Witch Trials as such, but is set in the shadow of Pendle Hill and moves between the events of 1969 and 1999.

Chapter One

Tuesday, 10 August 1999

On the hottest day of the year, Larry Glassbrook has come home to his native Lancashire for the last time, and the townsfolk have turned out to say goodbye.

Not in a friendly way.

Blurb (Amazon):

Devoted father or merciless killer?

His secrets are buried with him.

Larry confessed to the crimes; it was an open and shut case. But now he’s dead, and events from the past start to repeat themselves.““

Did she get it wrong all those years ago?
Or is there something much darker at play?

What do you think – would you read on?