Tag: advance review copy

#BookReview Hermit by S.R. White @Headlinepg

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Hermit Blog Tour Banner
Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for crime thriller, Hermit by S.R. White. My thanks to Emily at Headline for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my advance review copy. Do check out the post by my tour buddy for today, Mrs Cooke at Mrs Cooke’s Books.

Hermit S.R. WhiteAbout the Book

He vanished for 15 years… She has 12 hours to find out why.

After a puzzling death in the wild bushlands of Australia, detective Dana Russo has just hours to interrogate the prime suspect – a silent, inscrutable man found at the scene of the crime, who disappeared without trace 15 years earlier.

But where has he been? Why won’t he talk? And exactly how dangerous is he? Without conclusive evidence to prove his guilt, Dana faces a desperate race against time to persuade him to speak. But as each interview spirals with fevered intensity, Dana must reckon with her own traumatic past to reveal the shocking truth… 

Format: Hardcover (384 pages)                Publisher: Headline
Publication date: 17th September 2020 Genre: Crime

Find Hermit on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The events in the book take place over a day giving it an almost real-time feel. But it’s not just any old day. For Dana Russo, it’s “the Day”, the anniversary of something the nature of which the reader can only guess at but immediately senses was traumatic.

Much of the book is given over to the interview sessions between Dana and chief suspect for the murder, Nathan Whittler. The reader really gets a sense of being in the interview room alongside them.  It’s claustrophobic and filled with tension. I found myself holding my breath at some points while one of Dana’s questions is posed and considered by Nathan. The accuracy of the description of Nathan as “not their usual kind of suspect” becomes increasingly clear.

What I found particularly fascinating was Dana’s preparation for the interviews: the insight into her thought processes about the line of questioning she should adopt; how and when to disclose information; how to interpret Nathan’s responses and body language. It hadn’t fully occurred to me how much a police interview is akin to a psychological game of chess or poker in which picking up small signs in response to delicate probing is an essential part. In Hermit, the author conveys this element superbly.

Between the intense sessions, Dana has moments of doubt about her ability to interpret the meaning of Nathan’s “flicks, gestures, silences, and absences”.  She fears the fact of it being “the Day” may have an impact on her ability to exercise her professional skills and that a mistake on her part might jeopardize what really matters to her – finding the truth. Sharing some of his introvert instincts gives Dana a degree of empathy for Nathan. “Being Nathan Whittler was clearly not easy and the sudden insight into what it involved jarred her.” But are they too alike and will she perhaps have to reveal too much of herself to get the answers she needs from him?

What the reader learns is that Dana likes – indeed, needs – order. She knows she functions best when she “was allowed to take her time – delve, think, plan.” I loved the relationship between Dana and her colleague, Mike. Their light-hearted banter is a sign of their close working partnership but also that they understand each other well. As Mike reflects at one point, “Between them they made one mighty detective. Individually, they were deeply flawed, but in different areas”. They have a tacit agreement to act as Devil’s advocate when either of them is leading a case: challenging assumptions, suggesting different lines of enquiry.

I also liked Dana’s fellow officers: Bill, her boss; Lucy, the team’s formidable secretary and administrator; Rainer, the eager young detective already displaying the instincts needed to be successful. Mike and Lucy in particular have a keen awareness of Dana’s strengths and vulnerabilities and I really loved how the author showed them supporting her in all sorts of little ways.

Hermit is a book for those who like their crime fiction to be character-driven, detailed and of the slow-burn variety. However, even a slow-burning fuse results in an explosion in the end. And, as much as you’ve been expecting it – preparing for it, even- it can still make you jump when it occurs.

I thought Hermit was terrific and I only hope the author is already working on a follow-up.

In three words: Intense, compelling, immersive

Try something similar: Payback (Charley Mann #1) by R.C. Bridgstock

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S.R. WhiteAbout the Author

S.R. White worked for a UK police force for twelve years, before returning to academic life and taking an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He now lives in Queensland, Australia.



#BookReview V2 by Robert Harris @HutchinsonBooks

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V2 Robert HarrisAbout the Book

“The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second.”

Rudi Graf used to dream of sending a rocket to the moon. Instead, he has helped create the world’s most sophisticated weapon: the V2 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound. In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat in the winter of 1944, Hitler orders ten thousand to be built. Haunted and disillusioned, Graf – who understands the volatile, deadly machine better than anyone – is tasked with firing these lethal ‘vengeance weapons’ at London.

Kay Caton-Walsh is an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and a survivor of a V2 strike. As the rockets devastate London, she joins a unit of WAAFs on a mission to newly liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, Kay and her colleagues will attempt to locate and destroy the launch sites.

But at this stage in the war it’s hard to know who, if anyone, you can trust. As the death toll soars, Graf and Kay fight their grim, invisible war – until one final explosion of violence causes their destinies to collide.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)               Publisher: Hutchinson
Publication date: 17th September 2020 Genre: Historical fiction

Find V2 on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Like his novel Munich which I read recently, V2 is set over the course of just a few days. However, this time it’s 1944 at the height of the German onslaught on London with deadly V2 rockets, the devastating effects of which are vividly described. The book alternates between the stories of two main characters – German engineer, Dr. Rudi Graf, and British WAAF Officer, Kay Caton-Walsh. Despite being on different sides, their lives will intertwine in a number of ways.

The book contains many powerful scenes including the intricate and highly risky process involved in launching the V2 rockets and the resulting scenes of devastation on the streets of London caused by their impact.  Most memorable for me was Graf’s recollection of his visit to witness the construction using slave labour of the vast subterranean factory at Nordhausen where the rockets are to be manufactured. “The stench of it. And the noise of it – the rumble of cement mixers, the ring of pickaxes, the muffled boom of explosions…the clank of railway trucks moving up and down the line… And the sight of it, wherever one looked in the eerie dim yellow light: the moving sea of striped uniforms, an undifferentiated mass unless one made an effort to fix one’s eyes on one of the pale, emaciated figures that were hurrying everywhere.”

The tension builds as an exciting but deadly cat-and-mouse game takes place in which Kay and her colleagues – slide rules and logarithm tables at the ready – race against time to locate the launch sites of the V2 rockets so that bombing raids can be launched by the RAF.

War is never straightforward and Kay, in particular, lets her feelings override her judgment resulting in unintended consequences for others. I found Graf an especially interesting character. He becomes increasingly appalled by the use to which the technology he helped develop is being put and the motivations of those higher up in the command chain. “He felt himself to be like one of the rockets – a human machine, launched on a fixed trajectory, impossible to recall, hurtling to a point that was preordained.” The end of the book sees him faced with a similarly difficult moral choice.

In V2 Robert Harris once again blends historical fact and fiction to produce a fascinating and utterly gripping story. 

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Hutchinson via NetGalley.

In three words: Compelling, authentic, dramatic

Try something similar: Nucleus by Rory Clements

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About the Author

Robert Harris is the author of thirteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy – Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator – Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich and The Second Sleep.

Several of his books have been filmed, including The Ghost, which was directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into forty languages and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.

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