Tag: Dead Scared

Six Degrees of Separation from The Tipping Point to Five Red Herrings

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

I love doing Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month the chain begins with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, a book I haven’t read. The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. 

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

My chain is made up of a mixture of books that I’ve read or are on my TBR shelves and they are all crime fiction.

The Secret Place: Dublin Murder Squad: 5 (Dublin Murder Squad series) by [French, Tana]A Lesson in Secrets (Maisie Dobbs Mysteries Series Book 8) by [Winspear, Jacqueline]Dead Scared: Lacey Flint Series, Book 2 by [Bolton, Sharon]Time is a Killer: From the bestselling author of After the Crash by [Bussi, Michel]Five Red Herrings: Lord Peter Wimsey Book 7 (Lord Peter Wimsey Series) by [Sayers, Dorothy L.]

My first link in the chain is to the word ‘point’ in the book title – The Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah, also a book I haven’t read. It’s a psychological thriller in which Sally Thorning has a secret affair.

The Secret Place by Tana French is another book about secrets that bind  a group of adolescent girls together in a girls’ boarding school when they become involved in a murder investigation. It’s the 5th book in the Dublin Murder Squad Series. Another book I haven’t read yet.

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear – historical crime fiction set in 1932. Maisie Dobbs directed by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and the Secret Service goes undercover as a lecturer at Cambridge University to monitor any activities ‘not in the interests of the Crown.’ Yet another TBR book.

Another crime fiction book set in Cambridge University is Sharon Bolton’s Dead Scared in which DC Lacey Flint is posted at the University, after  a spate of student suicides, with a brief to work undercover, posing as a vulnerable, depression-prone student.

Sticking with the theme of crime fiction takes me to my next link – Time is a Killer by Michel Bussi, a murder mystery set in Corsica. Clotilde is determined to find out what  happened in a car crash that killed her parents and brother 27 years earlier. There is a plan showing the Revellata Peninsula, a wild and beautiful coastline, where Clotilde’s grandparents lived, and all the key locations.

I think maps and plans are really useful in crime fiction. Another book that has a map is Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers. Lord Peter is on holiday in Scotland, in a fishing and painting community when Campbell, a local landscape painter and fisherman is found dead in a burn. The map at the beginning of the book helped me follow the action – I needed the map!

 ~~~

My chain this month is linked by: crime fiction, books about secrets, books set in Cambridge and books with helpful maps. And in a way the books all link back to The Tipping Point as they all demonstrate how the little, minute things in the details of each case add up to help solve the crimes.

Next month (July 7, 2018), we’ll begin with Tales of the City, the first in the much-loved series by Armistead Maupin – yet another book I haven’t read or even heard of before!

Two Lacey Flint books by Sharon Bolton

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’ve recently read Dead Scared, Sharon Bolton’s  second Lacey Flint book and Like This, For Ever, the third book in the series:

Bolton bks

Synopses from Sharon Bolton’s website:

Dead Scared

Someone is watching you…

When a Cambridge university student dramatically attempts to take her own life, DI Mark Joesbury realizes that the university has developed an unhealthy record of young people committing suicide in extraordinary ways.

Despite huge personal misgivings, Joesbury sends young policewoman DC Lacey Flint to Cambridge with a brief to work undercover, posing as a vulnerable, depression-prone student.

Psychiatrist Evi Oliver is the only person in Cambridge who knows who Lacey really is – or so they both hope. But as the two women dig deeper into the darker side of university life, they discover a terrifying trend…

And when Lacey starts experiencing the same disturbing nightmares reported by the dead girls, she knows that she is next.

Like This, For Ever (published as Lost in the US)

Twelve-year-old Barney Roberts is obsessed with a series of murders. He knows the victims are all boys, just like him. He knows the bodies were found on river banks nearby. And he’s sure the killer will strike again soon. But there’s something else, a secret he’d rather not know, a secret he is too scared to share . . .  And who would believe a twelve-year-old boy anyway?

Like This, For Ever is a twisty, addictive, up-all-night thriller from a writer who loves nothing more than to play with your mind.

Two perfect books for the RIP Challenge. they are both totally absorbing murder mysteries – maybe Like This, for Ever is even better than Dead Scared. I did have an inkling quite early on who was pulling Lacey’s strings in Dead Scared, but I just didn’t know how it was being done – nightmares, hallucinations, bizarre suicides and vulnerable students. It is terrifying in parts.

With Like This, For Ever I had no idea until very near the end who the killer was. It’s so full of red herrings and twists (more than in Dead Secret) that I swung from believing it could be this person to that, or thinking it can’t possibly be that person, or I do hope it’s not that one. It was one of the people I thought maybe it’s that one, but I quickly dismissed that idea.

Both books are full of believable and individual characters, plus there is the ongoing story of Lacey, her boss Mark Joesbury and psychiatrist Evi Oliver. I’d love to read the next book in the series soon – A Dark and Twisted Tide.

I first read Sharon Bolton’s books when she was writing under the name SJ Bolton, and I wondered why the name change.  The answer is here in this post on her blog . It’s long, so I’ll summarise – ‘SJ Bolton’ was the name her publishers suggested in 2006 in the manner of PD James and JK Rowling and she went along with it, the thinking being that men don’t buy books by a woman author. But she doesn’t have a middle name and chose ‘J’, confusing for people who knew her personally , and then more SJs appeared on the book shelves and she felt lost in the crowd. There was also the issue around the name ‘Sharon’, a name that can conjure up images of Pauline Quirke slouching around Chigwell in a shell suit. So  she now writes as Sharon Bolton and I for one am glad she does – it’s less anonymous as well as being a much more memorable name.

As well as being perfect for the RIP challenge, Dead Scared is a book I’ve owned for a while and so qualifies for the Mount To Be Read Challenge.

Adding to the TBR Shelves

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

A few days ago I rearranged my bookshelves – and now I’ve got to make space for a few more books, because I went to Barter Books in Alnwick on Tuesday and came home with more books to add to the TBR shelves.

Dead Scared pile I really enjoy going to Barter Books, wandering around the shelves and browsing. But I also take with me lists of books I want to look at including a list of the Agatha Christie books I haven’t read and don’t already own. There is always a good selection of books, the stock regularly changes, so there are always ‘new’ books to look at. (Barter Books is, as its name indicates, a sort of exchange of used books; you take some in and choose others in exchange. You can, of course, just buy the books if you haven’t any credit.)

I’m very pleased with this little pile of books because I’ve been on the look out for some of them for quite a while, although one of them is a book (Talking to the Dead) that I only read about on Tuesday morning on Alex’s blog Thinking in Fragments. They are (from top to bottom):

  • The Floating Admiral – this wasn’t on my list of books to look for, but it was filed with the Agatha Christie books (I always look there first) and I thought it looks good. It’s a collaboration by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and ten other crime writers from the Detection Club, with a prologue by G K Chesterton. It was originally published in 1931 and this new edition published in 1911 has an introduction by Simon Brett.
  • The Mysterious Mr Quin by Agatha Christie, featuring Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Quin, the man ‘who appears from nowhere‘ and ‘unravels mysteries that seem incapable of solution’. It is one of the early Christie books, first published in 1930. This edition is one of the Penguin Crime fiction books in green and white reprinted in 1961 for 2/6. This fills a gap in my reading of her earliest books.
  • The Mousetrap and Selected Plays by Agatha Christie. There are three other plays in this collection – And Then There Were None, Appointment with Death and The Hollow, adapted by Agatha Christie from her novels, which, with the exception of Appointment with Death, I have read, so it’ll be interesting to see how they differ from the originals.
  • The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam. This is the only non crime fiction book in the pile, by the author of Old Filth, which I loved. It’s described on the front cover as ‘Brilliant, wickedly comic … masterly and hugely enjoyable‘. It’s about a do-gooder and promises to be a refreshing change from the crime fiction.
  • Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham – the book recommended by Alex. It’s the first in the Fiona Griffiths series, a crime thriller in which police woman Fiona Griffiths investigates the death of a woman and her six-year old daughter. It is described on the back cover as ‘a stunner with precision plotting, an unusual setting, and a deeply complex protagonist … breathtaking.’
  • Dead Scared by S J Bolton. I like S J Bolton’s books and I’ve been looking out for this one, the second in her Lacey Flint series ever since I read the first book, Now You See Me. This is another crime thriller featuring a police woman, this one investigating a spate of suicides – all female university students.