Tag: thriller

#BookReview The Recovery of Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel @MichaelJBooks

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The Recovery of Rose GoldAbout the Book

Rose Gold Watts believed she was sick for eighteen years. She thought she needed the feeding tube, the surgeries, the wheelchair…

Turns out her mum, Patty, is a really good liar.

After five years in prison Patty Watts is finally free. All she wants is to put old grievances behind her, reconcile with her daughter and care for her new infant grandson. When Rose Gold agrees to have Patty move in, it seems their relationship is truly on the mend.

But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty won’t rest until she has her daughter back under her thumb. Which is a smidge inconvenient because Rose Gold wants to be free of Patty. Forever.

Only one Watts will get what she wants. Will it be Patty or Rose Gold. Mother, or daughter?

Format: Hardcover (352 pages)       Publisher: Michael Joseph
Publication date: 5th March 2020  Genre: Contemporary fiction, thriller

Purchase links*
Amazon.co.uk | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Recovery of Rose Gold on Goodreads

My Review

I first became aware of this book whilst browsing the programme for last year’s Henley Literary Festival. The Recovery of Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel (along with the yet to be published Conviction by Hope Adams) was one of the 2020 debuts featured at the Michael Joseph Proof Party held aboard the river cruiser, Hibernia. You can read my review of the event here. Hearing Stephanie talk about her book made me keen to read it. I’m only sorry it’s taken me so long to do so.

Told from the alternating points of view of Patty Watts and her daughter, Rose Gold, the reader is witness to a chilling, sometimes unnerving, but always enthralling battle of wills. Both women have plans to which they allude in ominous fashion. Lines such as, “A rookie doesn’t challenge a master” or “Wattses are nothing if not meticulous”. It’s difficult to warm to either character but, as more and more information is revealed, it’s also difficult to forget they are both damaged and vulnerable individuals.

There’s a saying there are two sides to every story but are either of the stories the reader is hearing the truth? I suspect that, like me, readers may find their sympathies shifting back and forth between Patty and Rose Gold at different points in the book. I particularly liked the voice the author creates for Patty with her caustic asides about her neighbours and the neighbourhood (the perhaps appropriately named Deadwick). I chuckled at her observations on the town’s ‘Christmaspalooza’. “Two little boys hop off Santa’s lap after their parents take four million pictures. What happened to one and done? They’re not going in National Geographic, for Pete’s sake.”

From time to time, the author plays with readers’ expectations of the genre. For example, commenting about a particular character that in any other story they would turn out to be a serial killer.

20200306_121947At one point Rose Gold reflects, “People didn’t get excited by stories of forgiveness. They wanted bridges to burn. They wanted dramas that made their own lives seem normal.” If you want drama, a chilling insight into obsessive behaviour and a story with plenty of twists and turns, then The Recovery of Rose Gold is the book for you.

I received an uncorrected (signed) proof copy courtesy of Michael Joseph.

In three words: Dark, twisty, compelling

Try something similar: Real Life by Adeline Dieudonne

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bio-grid-2_FINAL_kindlephoto-496953907About the Author

Stephanie Wrobel grew up in Chicago but has lived in the UK for three years with her husband and dog, Moose Barkwinkle. She has an MFA from Emerson College and has had short fiction published in Bellevue Literary Review. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a creative copywriter at various advertising agencies. (Bio/photo credit: author website)

Connect with Stephanie
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#BlogTour #Extract Robert Ludlum’s™ The Treadstone Resurrection by Joshua Hood @HoZ_Books

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The Treadstone Resurrection Blog Tour

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Treadstone Resurrection by Joshua Hood, the first book in an explosive new series inspired by Robert Ludlum’s Bourne universe. To give you a flavour of the book, I have a fabulous excerpt from one of the early chapters below. Thanks to Anna at Midas PR for inviting me to take part in the tour.

Hood_Treadstone ResurrectionAbout the Book

Treadstone made Jason Bourne an unstoppable force, but he’s not the only one.

Working as a cabinet-maker in rural Oregon, Adam thinks he has left Treadstone – the CIA Black Ops programme – in the past, until he receives a mysterious email from a former colleague, and soon after is attacked by an unknown hit team at his job site.

Operation Treadstone has nearly ruined Adam Hayes. The top-secret CIA Black Ops programme trained him to be a nearly invincible assassin, but it also cost him his family and any chance at a normal life, which is why he was determined to get out. Everything changes when he receives a mysterious email from a former colleague, and soon after is attacked by an unknown hit team at his job site rural Oregon.

Adam must regain the skills that Treadstone taught him – lightning reflexes and a cold conscience – in order to discover who the would-be killers are, and why they have come after him now. Are his pursuers enemies from a long-ago mission? Rival intelligence agents? Or, perhaps, someone inside Treadstone? His search will unearth secrets in the highest levels of government and pull him back into the shadowy world he worked so hard to forget.

Format: Hardcover, ebook, audiobook Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 25th February 2020  Genre: Action, Thriller

Find The Treadstone Resurrection (Treadstone #1) on Goodreads

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

Extract from The Treadstone Resurrection (Treadstone #1) by Joshua Hood

Chapter 1

LA CONNER, WASHINGTON

Adam Hayes was lying in the center of the bed when the nightmare came. The tremor started at the edge of his lips, a ripple that twisted into a feral snarl. He started to sweat, hands tearing at the sheets, eyes pinballing behind closed lids, mind trapped in the horrors of the past.

He waited in the shadows, eyes closed, ears straining for the sound of his approaching prey. Kill them all – that was the order. He was just the instrument – a man conditioned to kill without hesitation. His hand closed around the hilt of the knife at the small of his back. The metal hilt felt cold through the latex gloves. The blade came free with the hiss of steel on leather and Hayes opened his eyes; the sentry’s face was green in the night
vision.

Now, the voice told him, and he struck.

Hayes’s hand snaked under the pillow and his fingers closed around the reassuring steel of the Springfield 9-millimeter EMP. He rolled off the bed and dropped into a crouch, the hardwood cold as a corpse on his bare knees. Muscle memory had taken over, and his hands worked independently of thought. The snap of the pistol onto the target and the flick of the thumb disengaging the safety came unbidden.

It was only when his index finger curled around the trigger, compressing the spring until all it would take was a whisper of pressure for the gun to fire, that Hayes became conscious of the moment.

Then the nightmare evaporated.

Hayes blinked the world back into focus, his eyes falling to the outstretched pistol, sights centered on the shirt hanging on the back of the door. Jesus Christ.

He let go of the trigger and snicked the safety into place. The realization that he’d come within a hairsbreadth of sending a 9-millimeter hollow-point through the door made him sick to his stomach.

It was 5:05 in the morning and the nightmares were getting worse.

When he trusted his legs to hold him, Hayes grunted to his feet, placed the pistol on the bedside table, and padded across the hardwood to the bathroom. He palmed the wall switch and the overhead lights flashed to life, revealing the mass of scars that crisscrossed his bare torso like lines on a topographic map.

He stopped at the sink, plucked the orange pill bottle from the open medicine cabinet, and twisted the cap free. He shook a dose into his hand. The oblong pill in his callused palm reminded him of the last appointment with the shrink in Tacoma.

“What about the nightmares?” she asked, over the scratch of her pen across the paper.
“Haven’t had one in months.”
“Adam, you are making wonderful progress,” she said, tearing the sheet from the prescription pad, “but.”
There’s always a but.
“But there will be setbacks.”
Setbacks.

He felt the anger stir in his gut, like a wolf waking in its den. Three nightmares in one week wasn’t a setback; it was a fucking meltdown. He was pissed. Mad that he’d listened to her – let himself believe that he’d made progress.

That he could be normal.

“No,” he said aloud. “That’s not who I am anymore.”

He took a breath, placed the pill in his mouth, and gently closed the door. He took a drink of water from the sink, and when Hayes looked up, his eyes alighted on the sheet of construction paper taped to the glass. The stick-figure family holding hands beneath a lemon-yellow sun.

Hayes brushed his finger over the “I love my Daddy” scrawled in crayon, a sad smile stretching across his face.

In the shower, he twisted the cold-water knob all the way to the left and ducked under the showerhead. The water came out of the pipe ice-cold and hit his flesh with the sting of a bullwhip. His mind recoiled, muscles tensed like hawsers beneath his skin, forcing the air from his lungs, but Hayes stood fast and waited for the question that had greeted him every morning for the past eighteen months.

How did I get here?

About the Authors

Robert Ludlum (1927 – 2001) was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 225 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into 32 languages in 50 countries. Among his best-sellers were The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), The Osterman Weekend (1972), The Matarese Circle (1979). He is most famous for the Jason Bourne series – The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990). The series was adapted for TV in 1988, for a film featuring Matt Damon in the lead role in 2002, and for a brand-new TV production from the writer behind Heroes and Chicago Hope in January 2020.

Joshua HoodJoshua Hood is the author of Warning Order and Clear by Fire. He graduated from the University of Memphis before joining the military and spending five years in the 82nd Airborne Division. He was a team leader in the 3-504 Parachute Infantry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, conducting combat operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. From 2007 to 2008, Hood served as a squad leader with the 1-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Afghanistan for which he was decorated for valour in Operation Furious Pursuit. On his return to civilian life he became a sniper team leader on a full time SWAT team in Memphis, where he was awarded the lifesaving medal. Currently he works as the Director of Veteran Outreach for the American Warrior Initiative.

Connect with Joshua
Website | Twitter | Goodreads