Sandman – Morgan Hannah MacDonald

Book starts well, some dude is surfing Trestles – this should be right up my street – being a surfer. Then “surfing  is his religion”, he is “at his church” …oh oh surf clichés, maybe not so good…but it quickly recovers and turns into an excellent serial killer yarn. There is the rough tough cop with..wait for it, wait for it..a sad back story, i.e. a dead wife and an alcohol problems. Seriously is there a literary cop in the world who is just normal, nice wife, couple of kids and piles. No thought not.

Anyway, this turns into a really good serial killer book, there is a girl, maybe the one to turn this cops life around, she just happens to be fit of course. And the serial killer is after her. The story rolls along at a great pace and comes to a good climax.. actually the climax bit sums up the end very well!!

So in summary, many of the usual serial killer angles, but a really good book. Would read more in this series.

5/5

Never Buried - Edie Clare

Bit of a girlie book this one – soft core murder mystery maybe. Two sisters are sharing a house through one of their pregnancies when they find a body in the garden.. – not just any old body, this one was..wait for it…”Never Buried”.. So they start to try and track down where the body has come from, who it belongs to and why it has “get out of my house” written on it.

Then more stuff happens to try and persuade the girls to move out but of course they resist, even when their female but rather manly police lady friend tries to persuade them otherwise. The book meanders on, shit happens to them, they resist and on and on all the way to the unravelling of an old unsolved murder and ultimately to a climatic finish.

Read it, finished it, was ok, bit girly for me really.

2/5

Tangled Web - Ken Mclure

Book opens with a disabled baby going missing in a small Welsh village and the parents promptly getting done for the murder. The good news is that the local doctor, who is Scottish (and has a back story!!!! woohoo) thinks they are innocent and sets out to prove the case.

Naturally it being a fictional book no one agrees with him and he soon gets cast out for siding with the evil child killers. At the same time another story comes to light about a baby's body going missing and our clever doctor puts the two stories together and fights for the truth and justice - along the way falling for a vary tasty doctor who is attached to his investigation team.

This book is essentially a story of a very dodgy IVF clinic and some evil people with some very nasty plans, all excellently delivered in another quality British thriller.

Hopefully more of McClures work will turn up on the free list. I'll be buying more of his work once my 89 free book masterpiece is complete.

5/5

Trauma - Ken McClure

Another day, another freebie - this time set in Edinburgh it features a priest and a young female doctor (they fancy each other...) unravelling the dissapearence of a young child's body, dug up from the graveyard. Lots of death follows and plenty of sinister goings on, with a hint of witchcraft. I liked this one, a good classic murder story getting solved not by the police - why do these people never talk to the police when it is clear they should be talking to the police...
Liked it so much I started another of McClures books straight after - ohh another child's body has gone missing in this one - must be McClure's fave story line.

Only minus point was the ending which I thought was a bit lame.

4/5

Spitting Devil - Brian Freeman

Awesome story, a wife thinks her husband is a serial killer, there is no other explanation or is there dur dur dur? The relationship is dodgy to say the least and their young son is affected by this with the side effect being that he is convinced he has monsters after him - maybe he has. This is a great book, and is actually quite scary for a few pages, the hairs on the back of your neck go up when the son delivers the book's coup de grace - which leads to its only one huge problem, it is way way too short. The policeman for whom this book is billed as being part of his series, well he hardly figures - only half a book, would have been 5/5 but nope only...

3/5

Flee - J.A Konrath

This books takes off at million miles an hour. Simple story, highly trainined female government assasin whose cover is blown and they are all out to get her. She has to escape the killers, save the world and be a general double hard bastard all the time. The opening sequence when she needs to escape her own flat is excellent, as are the rather familier girls that keep trying to kill her. Randon sex scene in the middle of the book, so don't read it out loud to your gran.
Fun dumbed down holiday read slightly ruined by her annoying sense of smell and the cazy save the world side to the story but otherwise a good yarn.

4/5

A Cold Day for Murder (Kate Shugak #1) - Dana Stabenow

Hoped this was going be good after the other one I read about the Mounty but found it a bit shit. The male characters of which there seemed to be way too many all seemed to fancy the lead role - who was already damaged goods - a lead charactor who is damaged goods - fancy that.

Anyway, it is set in some Alaskan national park and a ranger has gone missing and then the guy sent to find him has gone missing, so the damaged goods girl goes in to find them. There was loads of crap about them all being Native Americans and dull details about the politics of the park including some very predictable characters - an intelligent but know it all matriach - blah blah. I only really finished it because I liked the main character’s dog and it was quite well set.

2/5