Book Addicts Anonymous

Well, this one hasn't disappointed at all.  I love S J Bolton's books she knows just how to build up the tension and keep her readers guessing.
Now you see me is a crime thriller, and very well crafted.  The central character is Lacey Flint who finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation when a woman dies in her arms after being murdered in a particularly horrific way.  As the story progresses you find yourself mentally shouting at her to "not do that", but let's be honest, a thriller wouldn't be a thriller if everyone did the sensible thing all the time.
It appears that there is a copycat killer loose on the streets of London, and they aren't copying any old murderer, they are copying one of the most notorious, Jack the Ripper.
The book kept me hooked from beginning to end, a brilliant book.

I read through this book a few weeks ago. I think it took me three days to read.
If you've read any of Minette Walters' books, you'll know that she's a very good author, writing about crime, usually with a psychological twist. This is not from the detective's viewpoint, the main character being a Reuters correspondent., she is in contact with the police, but the novel is not a police led one.
This novel left me wondering, but that is not a bad thing in this case.
For a link to the author's website click here

When I first picked this book up I thought it was going to be a boring, courtroom drama, but after a few pages the plot runs off at an unseen tangent, or so it seems. Soon the new tangent becomes knitted into the main plo, and the whole novel bcomes very involved and eggs the reader on to rad "Just to the end of this section".
The characters have depth, with some of their back-stories being revealed, this is not Fairstein's first book about Alexandra Cooper, so I am presuming that if I had read the previous one's Alex would have been an even more rounded character. Saying that, I don't think it is necessary to have read the others as Fairstein lets the reader know enough information about the main characters for the reader to be sympathetic to them.
The "what if" that she has followed could be explored further, but in a more menacing way, and probably will be or has been by another author. Being a "simple" Brit, I had no idea that New York has no fresh water on the island.
I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and would read others of Fairstein's.

http://www.lindafairstein.com/ More information can be found at the link, if you click on novels there is a link to the first chapter.
I haven't explored the website very far, but it looks quite interesting.

This novel of Elizabeth George's is set in London, presumably in the "present", because of several incidents that happen , and the central themes of the novel.
The story itself is very good, but I have top say the dialogue left me cold. Usually when you read a book, and you get to dialogue, it is easier than long descriptive passages to take in. BUT not in this case, the main characters are Cockney/Jamaican origin, and George had chosen to write all the dialogue in Cockney/Jamaican slang. This makes it very hard to read, and at one point I considered not bothering finishing the book. The other thing that irked me somewhat is the length of the book, and the build up to the finale, obvious from the title.
So, I would have enjoyed it more it it was a) shorter and b) written in plain English with a note as to how each character spoke when they were introduced.
This is not a book for the fainthearted reader , due to those points.
However, I did finally enjoy it.
For more information follow this link;

http://www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com/books/what_came_before_shot.htm

In the acknowledgements at the end of the book George does excuse any inaccuracies of London geography, due to her not living in the UK.

First, I must apologise to Old Bean, as this book is on her TBR list, what she didn't know was t'was also on mine!
I started this when I posted last, and haven't been able to put it down....so much so that I left other stuff just so that I could get on with reading.
This novel is a crime/detective novel, but Karin Slaughter has put so many twists into the plot that it takes a while to figure out exactly "whodunnit", that is not a criticism, as so many crime novels are so obvious, they get boring to read. In fact if this one is available as a talking book, I would get it for my partner who is dyslexic, and does love a good crime programme on TV. I think this would equal most CSI episodes.
I won't spoil the plot of this brilliant novel here.
If you want to know more, visit
http://www.karinslaughter.com/triptych.html
for the bumph, which I must say completely undersells the novel.

It's ages since I read a book by Harlan Coben, but I do like a good crime/detective novel. Promise Me did not disappoint. From the first to last page I was hooked, pots went unwashed, dogs let out into the yard, (joking!) so I could read. I did find myself sitting up in bed reading "just one more page" before I went to sleep. I love trying to second guess the "detective" and try to predict who the perpetrator is/was, and trying to predict the twists, but the ones in Promise Me were very subtle, and may not even be picked up on a second, or maybe third reading. Unless you sat there and started all over again, but the only time you would ever do that would be if you were studying the book as part of degree level education.
The bumph about the book is on Harlan Coben's website, link below. The only thing I should say is for lovers of Myron Bolitar, it's his return novel. If you read it, hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

http://www.harlancoben.com/static/novels/pm.htm

Another book about vampires, but this one has shape-shifters, werewolves/panthers and fairies in it. (And.... No, the fairies are not Cicely Mary Baker types, they have quite an attitude.)

The book opens with Sookie, the main character, dropping of her brother in a village where werepanthers live for the first full-moon after his "conversion".
The man she leaves her brother with gets shot. Sookie finds this out the next day in her workplace. The book is liberally sprinkled with "supernatural" beings, some openly recognised by the authorities, others still hiding their existence.
One thing I will say, this book is supposedly a romance......if it is, the person who classed it as romance has a very strange idea of what is romantic.
I'll share the bumph with you.

This book gripped me right from the start.
The chapters are short and to the point, broken up into different character's viewpoints, although at first it is not 100% clear who the narrator is of each piece, it soon establishes who is narrating which part. Actually the only part I didn't know who was narrating was Rainie's narration, in the early stages, and once you know a little more about her, it becomes obvious why the author has done this. The language throughout is very accessible, the tension is built up very cleverly. I must admit, I did suss "whodunnit" before the end of the book, although I didn't know why. I think there is a very telling part in the story when the reader could pick up the "whodunnit", but it would be easy to miss. (I suppose I'm used to Patricia Cornwell scattering subtle clues as to the identity of the perpetrator of the crime, although in this novel, only one person ends up dead, I'll not give away who or why, you need to read the acknowledgements at the end of the novel, and visit the author's own website. I must say I like the idea.)
Now the bumph!

When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back?

For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it's the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver's seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Connner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.

Did one of the ghosts from her troubled past finally catch up with Rainie? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they'd been working - a particularly vicious double homicide, or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he's been afraid to ask.

One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the alias of a killer from eighty years ago, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn't get what he wants, Rainie could be gone for good.

Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it's still not enough. As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life who may be forever . . . gone.


To visit the author's website http://www.lisagardner.com/

Compared to her other books, this is quite a thin book.
But in true Cornwell fashion it keeps you engaged, from start to finish.

A Massachusetts state investigator is aclled home from the National Forsensic Academy in Tennessee. His boss, an attractive but hard-charging woman, is running for governor, and as a showcase plans to use a new crime initiative called At Risk - motto: 'Any crime, any time.' She's looking for a way to employ cutting - edge DNA technology, and thinks she's found it in a twenty-year-old murder - in Tennessee. If her officer solves the case, they'll look pretty good, right?

Her investigator is not so sure, but before he can open his mouth a shoking piece of violence intervenes, an act that shakes up not only their lives but the lives of everyone around them.....

I really enjoyed this book, and as a stand alone novel it is good, but a little complex. If Cornwell is starting a new character, it's a brilliant introduction, as she gives the main character some good connections that could prove interesting in future books.

[Type in green, blurb from back of book.]

This book seemed to me amazingly slow to start, which disappointed me as the bumph on the cover reads so well.
But, the more I got into the book, the more I was hooked. The way the book is written mirrors the narrative of the story. It is really quite clever. There is an aray of characters, seeminly with little in common, all thrown together.
Any way, a bit of the bumph, but no more.

For investigative journalist Jack Parblane, these are worrying times: it's been alomst three years since anyone tried to kill him and he fears he's losing his touch. But then comes an assignment in the Scottish coutryside that will more than make up for lost time...

Ultimate Motivational Leisure offers the latest in corporate outward bound courses, but if nothing else he gets a free weekend of shooting at PR people with a paintball gun.

Except the longer the weekend goes on, the weider things start to get. Firt somone steals the SIM cards from everybody's mobile phones. Then, when the group accidentally strays on to army land, the army starts firing back - and not with cans of Dulux. Suddenly no one can tell what's real and what isn't, wheter this is part of the game, or if everybody is fighting for their lives....

And I will not spoil the story, except I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and in the end found the book very difficult to put down.

(Text in orange is from the back of my copy.)

I recently learned this is the book which introduces at least two characters who have gone on to be featured in Patterson's teen series Maximum Ride. I am going to read those as well.