Thursday 17 March 2016

BOOK REVIEW - Murder Ring by Leigh Russell - Crime Thriller



TITLE - Murder Ring

AUTHOR - Leigh Russell


GENRE - Crime/Mystery

FORMATS - Kindle Version - Click here
                      Pre-Order Paperback version - Click here


SYNOPSIS

The dead body of unassuming David Lester, returning home after a night out, is discovered in a dark side-street and DI Geraldine Steel is plunged into another murder investigation. The clues mount up along with the suspects, but with the death of another man in explicable circumstances, the case becomes increasingly complex. As Geraldine investigates the seemingly unrelated crimes, she makes a shocking discovery about her birth Mother. 


MY REVIEW

Well once again, Leigh Russell did not disappoint.  I have been a fan of her books ever since she released Cut Short. There is nothing like a good police procedural, and this book was just that. 

The story starts with David Lester, on his way home after a works night out. He is murdered and left in a side street near to the pub. DI Geraldine Steel heads up the case as usual and sets about trying to piece together what happened. Just when she thinks she has her suspect, another murder takes place. 

I like how the book shows the developing relationships between the staff at the station, after they suffered a recent loss of one of their own. Although this is a continuing series with Geraldine Steel as the main character, you will be fine reading this book as a standalone. I do recommend though that you try all her other books too, and read them in order if you can. 

There were so many suspects in the book that it kept you changing your mind on who actually committed the crimes. Was there one killer or two. Who knows? You only actually find out within the last 10 pages which is what I like about a book. I don't like discovering who it was early on. 

The other thing I love about Leigh Russell's books are the short chapters in each book. To me, and each reader is different, I love them because I can follow each character easier, without reading long laborious chapters, and then forgetting who the character is and where they fit in, when you finally meet them five chapters later. 

Her research into the police procedures has obviously been done well, and I am always very critical in this area. 

Again, a great story, and well worth a read. Leigh Russell has now become one of my favourite authors in Police Procedurals. 



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailed as 'a brilliant talent' by Jeffery Deaver and 'a deeply human voice' by Peter James, Leigh Russell writes the internationally bestselling Geraldine Steel series of psychological crime thrillers.

As well as receiving rave reviews on numerous renowned sites like Crime TimeCrimesquad and Eurocrime, her books have attracted glowing reviews in journals as diverse as The TimesThe New York Journal of Books and Star Magazine, to name just a few. 

CUT SHORT was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel. The series reached Number 1 on kindle for female sleuths, Top 50 Bestsellers List on kindle, Top 50 Bestsellers Chart for WH Smith's Travel, Top Reads list on Eurocrime, Best Fiction Books of 2012 Chart in the Miami Examiner, and Best Crime Fiction Books in a poll on Crime Time. Geraldine Steel is a Great Crime Sleuth on Lovereading.

As well as continuing the bestselling Geraldine Steel series, Leigh has written a spin off series featuring Geraldine's popular colleague Ian Peterson. The first of these was published in 2013.

Catch up with Leigh on her WebsiteGeraldine Steel Facebook PageYouTube page

SHOWCASE - The Dead Dog Day by Jackie Kabler - Thrilling Crime Debut


TITLE - The Dead Dog Day

AUTHOR - Jackie Kabler

Thrilling crime debut from top TV broadcaster Jackie Kabler

The Dead Dog Day is the debut novel from successful broadcaster and former GMTV reporter Jackie Kabler published on 22nd October 2015.

It follows the story of breakfast TV journalist Cora Baxter, and a race against time to stop a killer from striking again.

“Jackie has real insider knowledge and it shows. A proper page-turning thriller. I couldn't put it down.” Lorraine Kelly

When your Monday morning begins with a dead dog at 4 a.m. and a dead boss by ten, you know it’s going to be one of those days. And breakfast TV reporter Cora Baxter has already had the weekend from hell, after the man she was planning a fabulous future with unceremoniously dumped her.

Now Cora’s much-hated boss has been murdered, and Cora is assigned to cover the story for the breakfast show – but as the murder enquiry continues, the trail of suspects leads frighteningly close to home. Why is Cora’s arch-rival, glamorous, bitchy newsreader Alice Lomas, so devastated by their boss’s death? What dark secret is one of her camera crew hiding? And why has her now-ex-boyfriend vanished? The race to stop the killer striking again is on...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


This Novel is the first book in a new series, and she draws on her experiences of the
glamorous world of television, as well as her long-standing love for crime fiction. A popular broadcaster turned author, Jackie is now a presenter on QVC, and as well as a decade on GMTV, has also worked for BBC News, ITV News and Setanta Sports News.

“A twenty-year career in news during which I covered hundreds of major crime stories has given me a wealth of material to draw on for my novels. Aside from the actual murders, everything else that happens in this book actually happened to me as a breakfast TV reporter - with minor details changed to protect identities, of course...", says Jackie Kabler.

You can buy the book via Amazon UK by clicking here.

Follow Jackie on Twitter

Like Jackie on Facebook

BOOK REVIEW TO COME AT A LATER DATE

Friday 11 March 2016

SHOWCASE - Eyeshine by Cy Wyss - Cozy Mystery - Including Giveaway!

Eyeshine by Cy Wyss

Eyeshine

by Cy Wyss

on Tour March 1-31, 2016

PJ Taylor is a reporter with a difference. Each night she turns into a black tabby cat from sundown to sunup. In this first adventure, follow PJ as she chases thieves, drug dealers, and even a murderer. Will PJ solve the mysterious drowning death of cantankerous old coot Chip Greene? Or will a local special needs boy end up taking the blame? Be prepared for twists and turns along the way as PJ applies all her feline senses to this diabolical situation.

Book Details:

Genre: Cozy Mystery Published by: Nighttime Dog Press, LLC Publication Date: November 2015 Number of Pages: 200 ASIN: B017WD3WWU Purchase Links: Amazon Goodreads

Read an excerpt:

People called Brooke Annabeth Taylor “PJ,” which stood not for pajamas but for Peeping Jane. She’d been a photographer and reporter for as long as the town could remember—at least since grade school—and her reportage was known for the most candid and impossible photos, like Peter Parker’s but from nearer the ground. Her job was made more difficult by her moniker because once people found out what it was, they shied away and wouldn’t tell her the secrets that are a reporter’s stock-in-trade. As she got older, it got harder and harder to convince anyone to give her a story. Now, at thirty, she was no longer “kitten cute” and able to wile her way easily into subjects’ confidence. Still, she managed to find a way.
With her penetrating amber eyes and easy smile, people found her disarming. She loved her relationship as a freelance reporter with the town’s paper, and all the vagaries that life entails, such as being a night owl and an absolute bulldog for the truth. If she could have chosen her own moniker, it would have likely combined these: Owl Dog. It was particularly inappropriate, however, because she turned not into a bird or canine every night, but into a cat.
She had been a black tabby from sundown to sunup since shortly after puberty. She often wondered why other people didn’t morph into alternate beings for the dark hours, but was admonished very early on by a loving mother to never, never, ever speak a word of it to anyone. PJ liked to think that was because her mother had a similar power and had suffered, but it could have been due solely to the woman’s intelligence and sense of practicality.
PJ’s father had died when she was ten. The man was a scientist, an absent-minded chemist, and PJ was of two minds about his awareness. On the one hand, his cleverness meant surely he wouldn’t have been fooled by a mere wife, no matter how adept at deception; on the other hand, his absentmindedness meant sometimes he forgot to wear shoes. So it wasn’t a stretch to think he might have no inkling about the bizarreness of his wife or daughter.
At sixteen, with PJ in limbo between childhood and womanhood, her mother suffered a tragic and debilitating stroke that took her life within months. PJ then moved in with her much older brother and his family. By then, she had become as adept as her mother at hiding her talent, in spite of the fact her brother was an FBI agent by that time, at twenty-nine, and extraordinarily difficult to deceive. It helped that after he witnessed firsthand the transformation from girl to cat, he immediately went into a long-lasting shock that consisted of utter denial. Instead of considering how her unique power could assist him in his life of crime fighting, he grounded her for a month and kept her largely confined to her room, especially after sundown.
PJ forgave Robert for locking her up, only because of her natural optimism and sense of personal grandeur. Honestly, grudges were beneath her, as were most things mere mono-modal humans did. She focused on her schoolwork and got all A’s that semester. Much later she discovered her brother had to take a polygraph test every year he was employed with the all-knowing government agency. PJ realized Robert had so thoroughly put the image of his sister becoming a black tabby cat out of his mind that he had convinced himself it wasn’t even a hallucination—it simply hadn’t existed at all. There’s no need to lie if you’re a true believer, and that was the most effective path for a forced deceiver. So PJ kept her secret, and Robert kept his job.
Fourteen years later, PJ was irrevocably known as Peeping Jane and Robert had traveled the country and come back in his forties to set up a one-man field office in Mayhap, Indiana. One day, PJ was out with her best friends Clara Goodwind and Vicky Donnerweise at the Mayhap Spring Festival when the sun dipped low on the horizon, threatening to bring the stars closer and the day to an end.
“PJ, why do you always leave just when things are getting interesting?” Clara said.
She was a buxom woman with big hazel eyes and bright red hair. Her wardrobe favored items with cats in evidence or implied by pithy sayings, such as “Meow Happens,” which her pink tube top currently sported. The woman was Taft County’s prime cat rescuer, with a warren of dedicated chicken-wire pens covering her backyard and a full-time feeding schedule. When she wasn’t volunteering at the county’s humane shelter, she was ensconced in a network of gossips centered at the Mayhap Memorial Library. Clara was an assistant librarian but party to all the good stories the town could provide. PJ found her an invaluable source. If it happened, or was going to happen, Clara knew about it and would talk.
Vicky stood with arms akimbo and watched PJ inhale an elephant ear. She was a striking woman with hair even blacker than PJ’s and blue eyes where PJ’s were yellow. Vicky was tall and muscular, like a man, but lither and hourglass-shaped inside the bulky kit she wore for law enforcement. She was one of Taft County’s deputies, second in their force only to Sheriff Curtis Denning, whom she happened to be married to.
“Land’s sake, PJ, how do you eat like that? You know I’m active all day, but I can’t eat three of those things without being ten pounds fatter tomorrow. Do you just stay up all night on the treadmill or what?”
A loud cry of enjoyment crescendoed from the fairway before PJ could answer, which was just as well since her mouth was filled with fried dough and she wouldn’t have gotten more than a grunt or two out. She didn’t have the heart to enlighten her friend. Every night, indeed, she ran the treadmill of being feline. She wandered miles in the summertime, searched every nook and cranny of the county, chased rodents and vermin, and napped only fitfully and with one eye open under the shifting moon.
She popped the last of the ear into her mouth and said, “It’s genetics. Some people are luckier than others.”
Vicky and Clara groaned.
Clara adjusted her pink-rimmed glasses and slurped her sno-cone. “At least I managed to keep myself to just one Devil Dog. And sno-cones have no calories after noon—everyone knows that.” Clara was constantly watching her figure, which didn’t seem to keep her from growing more buxom by the year. At the rate she was going, she would be a round octogenarian with a radiant smile in fifty years. PJ thought things could be worse.
“So you two coming two weeks from today or what?” Vicky said.
She was having a cookout, a common occurrence in the warmer months, and the Taylors and Goodwinds were regular fixtures. Everyone knew the cookouts were as much a bid to stuff the people of Taft County with reasons why the Denning clan should hold on to the sheriff-hood for the indefinite future, but everyone came anyway. Vicky’s ribs were legendary, and Curtis’s beer was as tasty and free flowing as anyone’s ever was. Today was Saturday, and two weeks from today was going to be the first big Donnerweise-Denning BBQ of the season.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” PJ said. “At least until sunset.”
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Because you turn into a pumpkin at sunset, right? We’ll never get to see nighttime you. Isn’t Doc Fred helping you with that?”
Doctor Fred Norton was Mayhap’s most celebrated, and only, psychiatrist. Apparently he was a third cousin twice removed to the iconic Oprah Winfrey and had once listened to her problems with aplomb, inspiring her to go on and listen eternally to others. He was given a brief mention in a book of hers, which was now out-of-print. For Mayhap, that was all it took to secure one’s place in the annals of town history. He even had a special shelf in the library to display his pamphlets on the pluses of positive putation, despite the brochures containing more than their fair share of buzz non-words.
PJ’s cover story for disappearing every evening, no matter the weather or event, was a rare and debilitating overreaction to darkness. Everyone thought she ran home to sit in a bright room under full-spectrum lights so she could make it through the dark hours with her psyche intact, her odd and entrenched phobia notwithstanding. Doc Fred made a perfect corroborator. His acute sense of professional delicacy meant he could never confirm nor deny PJ’s hints that he was treating her without success for her illness. Perhaps he had spent the last decades sketching her case study, which would no doubt be picked up by the professional societies should it ever come to a positive conclusion.
“Sorry,” PJ said to Vicky, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
“Oh, right. Shrink’s privilege and all that.”
“Well, get going,” Clara said. “I don’t want to have to carry around any pumpkins your size after dark, if you turn into one.”
“Alrighty. Toodles, people.”

Author Bio:

Cy WyssI live and write in the Indianapolis area. After earning a PhD in Computer Science in 2002 and teaching and researching for seven years, I’ve returned to the childhood dream of becoming an author. I better do it now because I won’t get a third life. Behind me, I have a ton of academic experience and have written about twenty extremely boring papers on query languages and such, for example this one in the ACM Transactions on Databases. (That’s a mouthful.) Now, I write in the mystery/thriller/suspense genres and sometimes science fiction. I know for some people databases would be the more beloved of the options, but for me, I finally realized that my heart wasn’t in it. So I took up a second life, as a self-published fiction author. Online, I do the Writer Cy cartoon series about the (mis)adventures of researching, writing, and self-publishing in today’s shifting climate. I also love to design and create my own covers using GIMP.

Catch Up: author's website author's twitter author's facebook

Eyeshine Tour Participants:

Visit others on the tour! In addition to the great reviews & features you could win your own copy of Eyeshine!

Don't Miss Your Chance to WIN:

This is a rafflecopter giveaway hosted by Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours for Cy Wyss. There will be 1 winner of 1 $10 Amazon.com US Gift card. The giveaway begins on March 1st and runs through April 1st, 2016. a Rafflecopter giveaway

Get More Great Reads at Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours

 

Tuesday 1 March 2016

GUEST BLOG POST by Grace Macdonald, Author of The Ruby Ring

The Ruby Ring by Grace Macdonald


A spellbinding timeslip story of two young women, each with a secret. A ring unites them, a century divides them. An international bestseller, set in a seaside town in Devon in Victorian times and the present day.

After a whirlwind romance, Laura Marchmont marries the charming Charles Haywood. Leaving her old life behind, she struggles to fit into Charles’s world, and to be accepted by his young daughters from his first marriage. Laura also hides a terrible secret from her new husband, which casts a shadow over her life. Then, she discovers the story of a young girl who lived more than a century before. Laura is compelled to uncover the fate of Mary Rose.

1886. When Mary Rose Marchmont’s widowed father remarries it signals the end of her childhood. A series of tragic events leads Mary Rose to be accused of a shocking crime, after which her life will never be the same again.

A moving family story of history, romance and secrets.

Grace Macdonald is a pen name of the hugely popular romantic fiction author Sophie King. 



WHY MOVING TO A NEW PLACE BOOSTED MY WRITING IDEAS by GRACE MACDONALD     

Seven years ago, my second husband and I moved out of London to the south west. It was a huge step for me as I had always lived within spitting distance of a tube station. I’ll never forget driving down the motorway, thinking ‘what are we doing?’ In fact, we had a deal that if, after five years, one of us hated it, we would move.
In fact, we loved it from day one.

I’d always wanted to live by the sea. My childhood summer holidays were spent in my Godmother’s cottage in the Isle of Wight. I wrote poetry in those days (something I’ve recently taken up again) and I clearly remember taking inspiration from the woody landslip below her cottage; the downs above, studded with gorse bushes; and the golden sands with little inlets.

We don’t have a great deal of sand on our beach unless the tide is out. But it’s a glorious place to be. I can breathe properly for the first time in my life. The scenery is stunning. And I run every morning along the front with our dog.

I also write differently.

Almost from the first time I sat down at my computer in our new house, I found that the sea crept into every story. It had become so much a part of my new life that it also stepped into my plot. My heroines walk on the beach as I do. They swim in the sea like me. And they get lost in the hills as I have.

You don’t need to move somewhere different. You could just visit it. Another writer once said to me years ago, that if I got an invitation to go somewhere different, I should take it – even if it was just another town down the road. ‘It gives you a new world to write about,’ she told me.

Very true. Twice a month, my husband and I go out for day trips, partly to explore our new part of the world. And partly for my plot. I also buy postcards when I’m in a new place and stick them on the walls of my study.

One of my children worked in Vietnam for three years. I visited her twice and then found that one of my heroines ended up there. It’s no coincidence that The Ruby Ring is set on the coast and that the heroine’s house is above some old lime quarries. It’s one of my favourite daily walks.

Nor do you don’t need to spend too much money to go to another place. A bus or train ride to somewhere you haven’t been to before can be just as effective for inspiration. Sometimes the actual journey is more interesting than the destination. We went on a £3 tram ride a few months ago through a nature reserve. To be honest, I didn’t really care for the marshes around us. But I loved the tram and its quaint furnishings. That too found its way into a book.

So book your tickets now! If you plan your journey carefully, you’ll end up with a great trip from page one through to the final paragraph. Bon voyage!

Get your copy here

REVIEW TO FOLLOW AT A LATER DATE.