Tag: thriller

Blog Tour/Review: A Mother’s Sacrifice by Gemma Metcalfe

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I’m delighted to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for A Mother’s Sacrifice, Gemma Metcalfe’s latest gripping thriller.  You can read my review below.

A Mother's Sacrifice GiveawayPlus, for readers in the United Kingdom, there’s a giveaway with a chance to win a lip gloss set and some A Mother’s Sacrifice chocolates!  To enter click here.

But don’t hang about as entries must be received by 8th April 2018.

A Mother's SacrificeAbout the Book

God ensured she crossed my path. And that is why I chose her.

The day Louisa and James bring their newborn son home from the hospital marks a new beginning for all of them. To hold their child in their arms, makes all the stress and trauma of fertility treatment worth it. Little Cory is theirs and theirs alone. Or so they think… After her mother’s suicide when she was a child, Louisa’s life took an even darker turn. But meeting James changed everything. She can trust him to protect her, and to never leave her. Even if deep down, she worries that she has never told him the full truth about her past, or the truth about their baby. But someone knows all her secrets – and that person is watching and waiting, with a twisted game that will try to take everything Louisa holds dear.

Format: ebook (300 pp.)              Publisher: HQ Digital
Published: 9th March 2018          Genre:  Psychological Thriller, Suspense

Purchase Links*
Publisher ǀ Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find A Mother’s Sacrifice on Goodreads

My Review

I don’t read a lot of psychological thrillers so when I do I’m always taken aback by the pace and sheer ingenuity of the narrative their authors achieve.  A Mother’s Sacrifice is no exception.

‘It really does feel like a fairy tale; the beautiful nursery, the doting husband, the scrumptious little newborn who snores softly in my arms.’

That ‘Happily Ever After’ feeling doesn’t last long though.  Within a couple of sentences, Louisa is experiencing anxiety and self-doubt. Living inside the poor tortured mind of Louisa is at times an uncomfortable experience but this reader’s sympathy was always with her as the traumatic events in her past are revealed.  But is what Louisa is telling us the truth, fantasy, delusion or false memory? Louisa’s joy at finally becoming a mother and her unconditional love for little Cory means the reader is disposed to be on her side as her unknown tormentor preys on her fragile mental state, made more fragile by the normal strains of new motherhood.

The author is adept at dropping in little nuggets of information – are they important clues, clever distractions or just mischievous red herrings? (Answer: maybe, yes and very likely.) As events unfold the reader will suspect just about everyone, and I mean everyone – the passer-by, the postman, the Man in the Moon, the Speaking Clock…  The author had me in such a spin I swear she could almost have convinced me that I was behind it all.  However, alongside the breathless narrative, the book touches on some serious themes including the anguish of infertility, the emotional scars of grief and the question of who we are and where we come from.

A Mother’s Sacrifice is a white knuckle, head-spinning, mile-a-minute, dizzying rollercoaster of a read.  At times, it became a little too frenetic for me and, as the twists come so thick and fast, perhaps the mechanics of the plot take priority over the characterisation.  Because the reader is made to suspect almost all the characters at some point, it does mean thinking the worst of everyone.  Louisa’s husband, James, comes off worst when in truth he should probably be getting as much of the reader’s understanding as Louisa.  Even small kindnesses which are actually just that end up being interrogated for possible ulterior motives.

Fans of twisty, suspenseful, psychological thrillers will not be disappointed by A Mother’s Sacrifice.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley, publishers HQ Digital and Neverland Book Tours  in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Twisty, suspenseful, fast-paced

Try something similar…Her Perfect Life by Sam Hepburn (click here to read my review)

Gemma MetcalfeAbout the Author

Gemma Metcalfe is a Manchester born author who now lives in sunny Tenerife with her husband Danny and two crazy rescue dogs Dora and Diego. By day, Gemma can be found working as a Primary school teacher, but as the sun sets, she ditches the glitter and glue and becomes a writer of psychological thrillers. An established drama queen, she admits to having a rather warped imagination, and loves writing original plots with shocking twists. The plot for her debut novel Trust Me is loosely based on her experiences as a call centre operative, where she was never quite sure who would answer the phone…

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Book Review: Friends and Traitors (Inspector Troy #8) by John Lawton

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Friends and TraitorsAbout the Book

It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on ‘the Grand Tour’ for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Sienna, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam.

After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years – Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: ‘I want to come home.’ Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to de-brief Burgess – but the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, and after that, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect.

As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who returns to haunt him.

Format: ebook, hardcover (343 pp.) Publisher: Grove Press
Published in UK: 5th April 2018        Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime, Thriller

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

Find Friends and Traitors on Goodreads

My Review

I seem to be making a habit recently of coming in at an advanced stage of a series. As a case in point, Friends and Traitors is book eight in John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series.  (However, it’s not quite as bad as a book I’m shortly to read – Prussian Blue by the late lamented Philip Kerr – which is number twelve in his Bernie Gunther series.)

As a sign of how far we are into the series, Inspector Troy is now a Chief Superintendent in charge of the Murder Squad.   However, the author is kind to readers like myself who haven’t read previous books in the series, because the first part of Friends and Traitors takes us back to when Troy was a young man and to his first meeting with Guy Burgess at a family dinner party.  Over the next few years, Troy has a number of memorable encounters with Burgess, one of which will prove to be crucial to events later in the book.

The Guy Burgess of Friends and Traitors is the louche, sexually promiscuous, heavy drinking risk-taker that I remember from Alan Bennett’s television play, An Englishman Abroad (with the inimitable Alan Bates playing Burgess).  However, he’s also terrifically entertaining. ‘It occurred to Troy that Burgess was the kind of bloke who’d never leave a party until physically thrown out.’ The author gives Burgess some great lines: ‘Two things an Englishman should never go abroad without – Jane Austen and a badger-hair shaving brush.’   There is also a brilliant section after Burgess’ defection where he lists at length all the things he misses about England, including ‘the bloke in the pub in Holborn who could fart the national anthem’, Mantovani, his flannelette stripy pyjamas and ‘jellied eels and a bit of rough’. (There’s a lot more.)

Talking of risk takers, Troy is a bit of one himself.  Clever, well-read and resourceful, he nevertheless gets himself into some scrapes, many of them involving women.  And every so often in Friends and Traitors, the author drops in a nugget of sometimes quite surprising information about Troy’s past.     Troy’s family contain some characters as well, especially his sisters who also have a chequered history when it comes to relationships (with men and booze).

The book did feel a little fragmented at times as if a number of different stories had been melded together.  For instance, there is section in which Troy joins members of his family on a ‘Grand Tour’ of European capitals whose main purpose seems to be to place Troy in Vienna at a pivotal moment.  And the murder of the agent mentioned in the book description and Troy’s subsequent investigation of it doesn’t happen until around half way through the book.

However, I really enjoyed Friends and Traitors and the fragments of information about Troy’s previous exploits have made me keen to read earlier books in the series.  Who knows, I might even break with habit and start from the beginning!  As a fan of espionage stories, including John le Carré, I found the sections of the book about Guy Burgess really fascinating.   I recommend reading the author’s Afterword which includes details of his research and key sources.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers Grove Press in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Suspenseful, mystery, intriguing

Try something similar…Tightrope by Simon Mawer (click here to read my review)

John LawtonAbout the Author

John Lawton is a producer/director in television who has spent much of his time interpreting the USA to the English, and occasionally vice versa. He has worked with Gore Vidal, Neil Simon, Scott Turow, Noam Chomsky, Fay Weldon, Harold Pinter and Kathy Acker. He thinks he may well be the only TV director ever to be named in a Parliamentary Bill in the British House of Lords as an offender against taste and balance. He has also been denounced from the pulpit in Mississippi as a `Communist,’ but thinks that less remarkable.

He spent most of the 90s in New York – among other things attending the writers’ sessions at The Actors’ Studio under Norman Mailer – and has visited or worked in more than half the 50 states. Since 2000 he has lived in the high, wet hills of Derbyshire England, with frequent excursions into the high, dry hills of Arizona and Italy.

He is the author of 1963, a social and political history of the Kennedy-Macmillan years, eight thrillers in the Troy series and a stand-alone novel, Sweet Sunday.  In 1995 the first Troy novel, Black Out, won the WH Smith Fresh Talent Award. In 2006 Columbia Pictures bought the fourth Troy novel Riptide. In 2007 A Little White Death was a New York Times notable.

In 2008 he was one of only half a dozen living English writers to be named in the London Daily Telegraph‘s `50 Crime Writers to Read before You Die.’ He has also edited the poetry of DH Lawrence and the stories of Joseph Conrad. He is devoted to the work of Franz Schubert, Cormac McCarthy, Art Tatum and Barbara Gowdy.

Connect with John

Website  ǀ  Goodreads