Edward Wright is not your average crime/thriller author. Most establish a set of characters they feel comfortable with, hold to a specific setting and crank out a new novel every year. Apparently Wright releases a book once every 2 years, and this one dates from December 2010. His research is painstaking and his plot is tight, so what he may sacrifice in profit, he gains in quality.

Shannon is a child of the 60s, literally. Her parents were deeply involved in the student protests against the Vietnam War and all the risks that involved. But since having children, they settled down and even joined the academia they once despised. Shannon, now in her 30s, is still fighting this conservatism, quitting her Ph.D. to establish a cleaning business, and frequently becoming involved in such social rituals as barroom brawls. Just as she is making peace with her parents, their tortured bodies are found in their burning home. With her dying words Shannon’s mother sends her on a mission to ‘warn the others’. And there begins Shannon’s immersion in the remains of the 1960s counter culture.

This book is truly a page turner. There are enough red herrings form a school. The twists and turns and narrow escapes make this one book that is very difficult to put aside. In fact, once Shannon finds her brother, forget everything else for the rest of the day. And the bad guys? They are appropriately mean and ugly.

I particularly like Shannon’s character. She has grown up in a sheltered existence and her naivete is immense, even though she tries hard to be a bad girl. The bad guys use this innocence to their own advantage, again and again. When she learns what has been done, her anger helps give her focus to do what she has to do.

I can’t say much here without spoiling, but I don’t feel the final twist was handled effectively. I for one needed a few extra clues along the way.

CS Sutton

About a year ago I reviewed the first book in this new fantasy series. At the time I commented on how that novel reached a satisfying conclusion while leaving the door open for the sequel. Last July the sequel was released and it has slowly be working its way to the top of my reading list.

Fin and his friends are caught between worlds, or more precisely, between Londons. For part of their lives they are in the modern London we all know and love, but much of their time is spent in the Nowhere London, a place full of magic and stories that live. But now the stories are held by an untrained mind, and the ancient prophecy appears to be coming to life. But this prophecy gives no clue about what to do. It just says ‘prepare for what must be done’. How? For Fin, it seems far more logical to ignore the silly prophecy and simply do what he thinks is right. But can he still trust his friends?

This book is very much the middle volume in a fantasy trilogy. There is just enough action to keep the pages turning, but only just enough. The real purpose of the book is to move all the characters into the right places and give them the right powers for the final battle. It is kind of like the boring parts of a chess game. You know when the chess master is saying ‘mate in 15′ and the poor spectator is watching, looking for some logical plan. At this stage, I have no idea where the story is going. In fact only about half the prophecy makes sense. I just have the gut feeling that Joe and Christopher are still Fin’s friends, in spite of the way things look now.

Of course, I could be wrong. I just hope Silverwood doesn’t keep us waiting too long for the resolution. At this stage there is no publication date given for volume 3.

CS Sutton

We have had all kinds of writing for young adults with supernatural or paranormal themes. Vampire romances are currently the most popular, but other ideas keep surfacing. Hammond has created a team of young people with psychic abilities and placed them in a perfect setting to appeal to young adults accustomed to film violence and horror.

This book opens with one of the most gory scenes I have ever read in books for YAs. The whole train wreck and highwayman raid are absolutely revolting, and therefore guaranteed to please. Imagine, all the thieves and highwaymen set loose on the modern world, and there is nothing humanity can do to stop them. Enter CRYPT, the youth paranormal team. Jud, their top agent, is sent to investigate but even he is helpless to stop to carnage. But with the assistance of Bex, he works out how the attacks began and forms a plan to restore the peace, well maybe.

This is real writing to attract and hold the young adult reader. The action is relentless, and blood, guts and gore flow from every page. There is no dumbing down, no cleaning up, in fact just the opposite. Hammond is writing for an audience he knows well, and he tells a story that will keep them involved. This is a book for those who find reading ‘boring’. Those who would rather watch a film than challenge their own imaginations by building pictures from a printed page.

Hammond also appeals to the strong sense of justice found in young adults. The criminals in this book are not those who maim and slaughter, but rather those who disturbed their rest. And the team manage to bring these real criminals to justice.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, but it will be right for so many reluctant readers. I just hope they never make a movie from the series.

CS Sutton

It seems to be a growing trend that established authors of adult thrillers have a go at writing for young adults. Harlan Coben has recently joined this trend and created Mickey Bolitar, nephew to his long established character Myron Bolitar. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the question is whether Coben can write convincingly for teens or is he just dumbing down and sanitising his adult writing in order to take advantage of the growing YA market.

Mickey is a young man with problems. He witnessed his father’s death in a car crash and his mother’s serious drug habit has her in rehab for the foreseeable future. Forced to live with his Uncle Myron, Mickey faces life in a new school with new friends … and new enemies. Then one day his girlfriend disappears. The strange woman living in the old house seems to be telling him to ‘Save Ashley’. The question is how?

On the surface this is a reasonable thriller. Certainly there are good baddies. And Mickey’s support team are an appropriate bunch of misfits with courage. The actual plot and reveal are reasonable, perhaps even logical. But somehow I felt that Coben was simply dumbing down his normal thriller writing. The book didn’t capture my imagination, or even my interest. And as far as the promised twists and turns, I saw them coming a mile off. This book appeared to me to be a simplification and sanitised crime novel. And as such, it sells kids short.

Kids today don’t need the ‘squeaky clean’ hero, or the telegraphed plot twists. In this first effort, I believe Coben has sold himself and young readers short.

CS Sutton

After decades of successful writing most authors find a convenient formula or familiar characters and simply continue on with ‘the further adventures of…’. Or they may spend years writing each book painstakingly working through every detail and word until the work becomes as difficult to read as it was to write. But not Stephen King. How on earth this man writes at least a book every year and still keeps the ideas fresh and the pages turning I will never know. My one regret is that I found his writing late in my reading career.

Like all the best scifi/fantasy, this book holds at its core a wonderful ‘what if’? What if someone had stopped Oswald and JFK had survived to serve out his term and been re-elected? But King doesn’t just start there. His story starts in 2011 when a typical young man, single with no dependents is sent on a trip back to 1958 with the express purpose of stopping Oswald. Why 1958? Hey that’s where the ‘rabbit hole’ emerges. Jake/George has to blend in, build a life for himself and still be in Dallas in November 1963. But you see, history resists change, so all is not as simple as it may appear.

Appropriately most of this book centres on Jake’s life before Dallas.The reader is quickly lulled into believing this is really a story about a man out of his time, and in many ways it is. But history puts up enough resistance to keep the pages turning. There are firebombed homes, mob henchmen, car crashes and plenty more to keep an adventure reader interested. There is also a story of a teacher who loves his job, a cribbage game that prevents an accident, and even a romance to slow the pace and add depth to Jake’s story.

And when the deed is done? How is the world changed? King has given this a great deal of thought and I personally found his alternative history very believable. Personally I think this new world is the most horrific part of the tale.

I almost started this in November when it arrived, but the poor book has a series of misadventures that meant that I didn’t actually lay my hands back on it until this week. But in many ways I am glad this is the last of my summer reads. It is like chocolate, a satisfying way to finish a meal.

CS Sutton

Regular readers will know that I am a fan of the Aloysius Pendergast series. I really enjoy the ‘X-files’ nature of the early novels. The more recent novels are less supernatural and psychic, but there is still a delicious blend of weirdness mixed in with the crime and detection story. This novel is part of a sequence, something that these authors have done very successfully in the past. This time the Pendergast is drawn into an investigation of his wife’s death, where he discovered in the previous book that all was not as it seemed.

Having discovered that his wife was murdered in Fever Dream Pendergast heads off to trap the man he thinks committed the crime. Before he leaves he asks his friend D’Agosta to look after his NYC property and his ward. After all he was seriously injured at the climax of the last book. But all too quickly Pendergast discovers that all is not as it seems and everything and everyone has a secret.

This is a very convoluted story. It will make little or no sense if you haven’t read the rest of the series. In fact, I actually had just finished the Diogenes sequence from the series when this book arrived, so I will admit that the various storylines have become a little muddled. But then these books were never intended to be literature. Preston and Child are doing very well out of writing books for entertainment. And believe me, if you don’t mind the weird and wonderful, you will be entertained by the whole series.

If you want my suggestion, I suggest that you try to lay your hands on the whole Pendergast series and spend a few days relaxed and reading. You won’t be disappointed.

CS Sutton

It is summer, right? The time to sit back, turn off the brain and read a real page turner. And one of my favourite writers who keeps me turning pages is Andy McDermott. I agree, the plots are thin, anyone but the core characters are paper thin, but nearly every book by McDermott has me up until the wee hours of the morning, wide awake and reading. This one is no different.

Before you go any further, stop and make sure you have read The Sacred Vault and The Empire of Gold. If not, go do it now. It won’t take long and there is no way you will make sense of this plot unless you are already familiar with earth energy and the 3 statues.

Now for the plot summary, well it is kind of the same as all the rest. Eddie and Nina are on the trail of some rare archaeological artefacts. Just as they get their hands on them, a bunch of mercenaries arrive and after a huge fight, take them away. Then Nina using her education and insight and Eddie using his contacts and brawn locate and win back the artefacts only to see them and their legendary source destroyed. Easy summary, because that’s the plot outline for the whole series.

But McDermott has a talent for imaginative interpretations of legend, as well as the ability to write a gripping adventure. He doesn’t let anything resembling a fact get in the way. So relax, chill and enjoy.

CS Sutton

Once upon a time I was a real fan of the Kay Scarpetta series. I had to be the first to read her latest release and then distribute it on to a list of Scarpetta fans that I knew. But something happened. The murders got too weird. It seemed like Cornwell was trying to outdo herself with every story. The serial killers were stranger and stranger and the logic behind the plots began to stretch beyond believable. As a result I haven’t read the last book, and therefore I may have missed some details as I went through the new book.

As is usual for Cornwell, the latest book takes up where the last one finished. Her friend Jack has been killed and Kay only just escaped with her life. But a trip to Georgia and a visit with Jack’s mother promises to provide her with answers that she needs to put everything to rest. However, the trip somehow gets a little more complicated and before long the whole team is working out of a hotel suite in Savannah to solve a string of murders that started nearly 10 years before.

For most of this book I was starting to think that this book was going to return to Cornwell’s old style, where the story focussed on the people rather than ‘extreme’ crime. The various murders appeared straightforward and Scarpetta’s involvement seemed sensible and logical. It wasn’t even too hard to put together a short list of suspects. Then at the end, the story simply got weird again. Why is it necessary to make everything an international terrorism plot? And I’m sorry, but the way the guilty party simply appeared from nowhere was just too convenient.

If asked to review another Scarpetta novel, obviously I will. But if I were forking out hard earned money to buy this, or her next, I for one won’t bother.

CS Sutton

As the title would suggest new Australian crime-fact novel ‘A Pack Of Bloody Animals’ really doesn’t hold back. It goes deep into a war between crims and Police that resulted in one of Australia’s most baffling crimes… the Walsh Street Murders.

Four men, Anthony Farrell, Trevor Pettingill, Victor Pierce and Peter McEvoy were charged with the execution style murders of Constables Damian Eyre and Steven Tynan, however the court case fell apart spectacularly and since then the case has been speculated about a number of times.

Two of Australia’s top crime writers have teamed to together to produce ‘A Pack Of Bloody Animals’. And I have to admit that together John Kerr and Ray Mooney have produced one of the finest crime-fact novels to ever be published in Australia.

‘A Pack Of Bloody Animals’ goes one step further than most crime books. It doesn’t only explore the crim/police war in depth but also consists of interviews (both police and personal) recorded with the suspects shortly after the shootings as well as the words of Wendy Pierce that make riveting reading. And while the thought of reading through interviews may deter some readers it shouldn’t, the book never becomes bogged down and the interviews are set out so well you find yourself wanting to keep on turning pages (like you would in a Grisham novel) as you are determined to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Anyone who reads ‘A Pack Of Blood Animals’ will be educated on a crime war that most Victorians are unaware even went on around them. Personally, I found this to be one of the best crime-fact books I have ever read and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Dave Griffiths

Believe it or not, I have never read a book by Tami Hoag before. I have heard good things about her books, but until her latest arrived for review, I had never actually picked up one to read. I’ll just say that if the rest are half as good as this one, she will definitely get added to my ‘someday when I have time’ pile.

This is not a mystery novel, not in any way. Everybody knows from page one whodunit, the cops, the survivors and even the crim. No this is a psychological thriller on a grand scale. Be warned, it will catch you and hold on until almost the last page. Give yourself time to read this all at once.

Leslie Lawton, 16, disappeared 4 years ago. She left home to attend a softball game, and never returned. Days later her abandoned bicycle was found down an embankment. This crime, more than any other, is tough on a family. Father, Lance, couldn’t cope with the guilt of his final argument with the girl or the suspicions of the cops, and solves his problems by driving off the edge of a very high bridge. The cops know who abducted and murdered her, but without a body or any evidence, nothing can be done. So as her younger daughter is about to turn 16, Lauren accepts the offer of accommodation in another city in an effort to keep this daughter safe. But, it just so happens that the girl’s abductor has moved to the same city.

The story is told from Lauren’s point of view, and Hoag has created a very sympathetic character. The reader is drawn into her anger and frustration and even if we don’t agree with her decisions, we understand them. Who among us could be sure we wouldn’t respond the same way? This is a woman on the brink of disaster and has very few options to pull back from the edge. Contrast this emotional wreck with the steady stability of Tony Mendez. Apparently he is a repeating character and Hoag has a very firm grasp of his story. I hope the gentle teaser at the end is followed up in another book in future.

I must applaud the twists and turns of this plot. Saying much more will risk spoilers, so I can only say, buckle up for a thrilling ride. I was caught unawares so many times it is embarrassing.

CS Sutton