📚Murder In The Swimsuit World. Fiona Reviews Death By Pins And Needles by Susie Black For Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT #BookTwitter

Today’s team review is from Fiona.

Fiona blogs here https://fionaforsythauthor.co.uk/blog/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Fiona has been reading Death By Pins And Needles by Susie Black.

There’s a lot about the swimsuit world I didn’t know, and now I know never to get involved. Too many murders…

The setup for the Holly Swimsuit series is a close-knit set of people all operating out of one building, all members of the same profession, which is an ideal murder mystery scenario. I found that there were many people to get my head around at the start. I also felt that as a Brit I didn’t get many of the in-jokes and cultural references, but this didn’t really matter. 

Holly has her gang of girlfriends, who all let her bounce ideas around and do some of the donkey work for her. They are way more efficient than the police at this, so I hope LAPD’s finest were taking note. Holly is the most gung-ho amateur sleuth I can remember reading, and her inability to let go leads her into some serious danger. There are times when her obstinacy is irritating, as is her refusal to let the police do their thing – but then, the police move a snail’s pace and Holly doesn’t have much patience! The police are depicted realistically, hampered by procedure and lack of funds. At one point a piece of evidence cannot be retrieved from the body for several days because the coroner has to send off for a special pair of tweezers, and this rings as all too likely. No wonder Holly has to step in. 

Holly’s technique is unsubtle: having drawn up a list of suspects she visits each of them in turn and badgers them until they throw her out. It doesn’t get her very far, but she’s nothing if not a trier. Her insistence on putting the Iranian refugee at the top of her list for no good reason that I could see – apart from a tenuous argument that he would be more likely to be familiar with a typewriter because he comes from another country – was a little uncomfortable. Fortunately the suspect himself pointed this out to her and she was honest enough to back down.

Occasionally the wise-cracking is overwritten, and I feel that the editing process was not sufficiently tight to benefit the author. Typos happen to the best of us, but the “discreet/discrete” problem should be picked up as should the repetitions. Compare the lawyer described as “diminutive octogenarian criminal defense attorney extraordinaire” with a neighbour “prickly, independent octogenarian sailor extraordinaire”. A tendency to change tense in the middle of the sentence also jarred with me: “The Boat Doctor couldn’t say how long my poor girl will be out of commission, let alone if saving her is possible.” If they don’t interrupt the reader’s flow, these things don’t particularly matter, but these did interrupt the flow for me.

This story has energy and pace, but for me, is let down by by poor editing and a hero I didn’t really warm to.

Book description

The last thing Mermaid Swimwear sales exec Holly Schlivnik expected to find when she opened the closet door was nasty competitor Lissa Charney’s battered corpse nailed to the wall. When Holly’s colleague is wrongly arrested for Lissa’s murder, the wise-cracking, irreverent amateur sleuth sticks her nose everywhere it doesn’t belong to sniff out the real killer. Nothing turns out the way she thinks it will as Holly matches wits with a heartless killer hellbent on revenge.

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📚’The whole narrative is superbly shaped and paced’. @for_fi Reviews #PsychologicalDrama An End To Etcetera by @rbconklin1 for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT #BookTwitter

Today’s team review is from Fiona

Fiona blogs here https://fionaforsythauthor.co.uk/blog/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Fiona has been reading An End To Etcetera by B. Robert Conklin

Selena is pregnant, in the middle of a divorce, doesn’t know who the father of her child is, and is a psychologist to troubled adolescents. She has the job of assessing the very troubled Leal with a view to his continuance in school, and at first, this seems like high stakes in the context of life in the town of Ovid. (As a classicist currently writing a series about the Roman poet, you can imagine how happy I was just to be reading about a town called Ovid!)

But “An End to Etcetera” is so much more than an examination of small-town life. As we follow Selena’s increasing concern over Leal, layers of Ovid are peeled away and examined coolly and dispassionately – and it takes the whole book before we are convinced that we know what is real and what is the product of Leal’s story-telling mind. In the end, there are no angels or devils, but many flawed people, beautifully- portrayed and presented to the reader without judgement.

The whole narrative is superbly shaped and paced, a slow burn, but with a sense of disquiet that is built up skillfully. The quality of the writing is wonderful, spare, considered and clear. If this book doesn’t get a sled load of awards and become a Book Club hit, then life is unfair!

5 stars.

Book description

An End to Etcetera is a mystery/suspense novel for the adult literary market about an obsessive-compulsive psychologist who tries to uncover the truth behind her adolescent client’s confession to drowning an autistic boy left in his care. With no evidence to support Leal Porter’s allegation, the school has referred him to Selena Harris for counseling. Selena is going through troubles of her own: she’s separated from a husband who has ditched her for another woman, she’s pregnant after a one-night rebound with a former lover, and she’s moved back to her small hometown in Illinois to take care of her father who has suffered a debilitating stroke. Now she faces the toughest challenge of her career. Although she believes the alleged victim is the product of Leal’s overactive imagination and need for attention, she harbors one major doubt: What if she’s wrong? The novel would appeal to adult readers who enjoy solving psychological puzzles. Working alongside the psychologist, in the role of a detective.

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📚’Pacy, quirky, and highly enjoyable.’ Fiona reviews Victorian #Mystery Murder & Mischief by Carol Hedges @riotgrandma72 for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Fiona.

Find out more about Fiona here https://fionaforsythauthor.co.uk/blog/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Fiona has been reading Murder & Mischief by Carol Hedges.

This beautifully-written Victorian murder mystery is full of surprises and wit, while never neglecting the seedy side of the era and the plight of the masses. There are many nods to Dickens, Conan Doyle and the like, always fun to spot, but the author adds her own touches: the consulting detective is a woman, the affable urchins do not cloy, the villains are villainous without being caricatures. The author keeps a hold on her wide cast of characters with a clever use – again inspired by Dickens? – of memorable names, such the wonderful Armand Malpractis, and short, well-introduced scenes.

The scenery is stunningly well described but never overpowers. The research is worn lightly, just as historical novelists are always told – so easy to say, so difficult to achieve!

But the driving pace of the action, laced with humor and occasionally true pathos, is what keeps you reading, along with the sheer enjoyment of finely-honed and perfectly-balanced sentences.

Book description

It is January, a time of year when not much crime usually happens. But when Inspector Greig is unexpectedly summoned to the opulent Hampstead residence of Mr. James William Malin Barrowclough, a rich businessman, he embarks upon one of the strangest and most bizarre investigations that he has ever been involved in.

Why has Barrowclough been targeted? What is inside the mysterious parcels that keep arriving at Hill House, and why won’t he cooperate with the police? The case will take the Scotland Yard detectives on a journey out of London and into the victim’s past, to uncover the secrets and lies that haunt his present.

Murder & Mischief is the tenth novel in the series, and in the great tradition of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it entices the reader once again along the teeming streets and dimly gas lit thoroughfares of Victorian London, where rich and poor, friend and foe alike mix and mingle.

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🕵🏻‍♀️’For Anyone Who Likes A Good #Mystery’ Fiona reviews Inhuman Acts by @BrookeLFrench1 for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Fiona.

Find out more about Fiona here https://fionaforsythauthor.co.uk/blog/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Fiona has been reading Inhuman Acts by Brooke L. French.

Inhuman Acts by Brooke L. French

I’ve seen arguments over what the word “competent” means in a book review and let me make it clear that in my world it is a compliment. In this book, the plotting, pace and sense of disaster are all more than competent, they work together to result in a read-in-one-go thriller with a hugely attractive hero and an intriguing thread of environmental questioning running through it. The signs are that it is the first in a series and I am very glad of it!

Lettuce Duquesne has friends, and a job she loves, but she also has the tragedy of her sister’s death hanging over her. She is an intelligent and likeable main character, and cleverly, the author lets you see her through other people’s eyes as you are making up your mind about her. And other people like her.
When a case of rabies transmission arises in Chattanooga, Letty sees the potential for a disaster and though she is unable to persuade everyone of the seriousness of the situation,  she handles their skepticism as a scientist should, by collecting and testing the data. She teams up with Andrew, a cop on enforced leave, and Pete a local vet, to track down what could be the worst outbreak of rabies in the USA for decades.

French handles the science extremely well, managing that crucial balance between scientific jargon and readability. She doesn’t hype the fear of the disease any more than the plot demands, so we don’t get overblown panic and doom, but we do feel the tension as Letty discovers more about what is happening in Chattanooga. I found this approach made the book credible and a page-turner. Oh and I didn’t see the end coming until way past I should! French treats her readers fairly in the “working out of the puzzle” part of the book.

Characters are human, realistic and fallible, and I particularly liked the Andrew/Mary dynamic where every serious cop conversation took place against the background of shuttling the kids around or making banana pudding.

A book for anyone who likes a good mystery, intelligently told.

Book description

A deadly, incurable disease creeps silent through Chattanooga. And its victims aren’t random.

When inexplicable human rabies cases appear in Tennessee, disease ecologist Letty Duquesne jumps at the chance to trace the virus back to its source. But the closer Letty gets to finding the outbreak’s origin, the further someone will go to stop her.

With an unwanted promotion threatening to take Letty far from the fieldwork she loves, this outbreak feels like her last chance to make a difference. It’s not something she can ignore, especially now. The spillover of zoonotic diseases to the human population is on the rise and violent animal attacks-like the one that killed her sister-are becoming all too common.

Something in nature has gone very wrong.

Local authorities would rather she go home, but Letty can track a source animal like no one else. With the help of disgraced detective Andrew Marsh, Letty follows the virus’s epidemiological trail. But her every move is watched. And the source animal is closer than she thinks.

Inhuman Acts is a pulse-pounding thriller. Gripping and intricately paced, Brooke L. French’s debut novel will keep you on the edge of your seat.

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📚’Here is a man who takes risks almost as a matter of course’. Fiona reviews Tudor #Histfic Raleigh by @tonyriches for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Fiona.

Find out more about her here https://fionaforsythauthor.co.uk/blog/

Rosie’s Book Review Team

Fiona has been reading Raleigh by Tony Riches.

Raleigh: Tudor Adventurer by Tony Riches

It is particularly important that, as well as telling a good story, an historical novel makes the reader feel comfortable with the era being covered: informative enough to be interesting, entertaining enough to make one want to find out more. It is so easy for a book to turn into an information dump.

Fortunately, within a few pages, I knew I was in expert hands, and settled down to enjoy “Raleigh”, marvelling at the life of a true adventurer. I loved that fact that Riches sets the opening scenes in the London of the theatre, introducing the romantic poetry-writing side of Raleigh which runs through the novel. The reader is reminded of the many facets of a true Elizabethan, the intelligence and fascination with learning, as well as the thirst for war and adventure which is nowadays so alien.

And this is what I take away from this book, that a man like Raleigh was so full of schemes, so outward-looking that he never seems to stay still. I had not been aware of his own many voyages nor of his exploits in Ireland, and it gave me a much better understanding of his willingness to risk his wealth in setting up a colony in Virginia. Here is a man who takes risks almost as a matter of course, for whom the horizon is always thousands of miles in front of him, and nevertheless makes straight for it whenever he can.

Raleigh is narrator in this book, and a straightforward one, though he lets more slip than maybe he realises: notably, his personal relationships, despite the protestations of love for his wife and sons, clearly take second place to his restless spirit. When he is younger, his loyalty to his Queen and his need for her favour seem to be a result of this restlessness and it is an older and wiser Raleigh who, at the end of the book, grieves for his royal mistress and cannot trust her successor.

On reaching the end I did expect that Riches would be continuing Raleigh’s story with the exploits under James 1, surely as fascinating as anything in his earlier life. But this book is the third in a trilogy of Elizabethan characters, and the author’s note indicates that he is heading in another direction. I am hoping there may be a time when Raleigh is called for duty once more.

Book description

Tudor adventurer, courtier, explorer and poet, Sir Walter Raleigh has been called the last true Elizabethan.

He didn’t dance or joust, didn’t come from a noble family, or marry into one. So how did an impoverished law student become a favourite of the queen, and Captain of the Guard?

The story which began with the Tudor trilogy follows Walter Raleigh from his first days at the Elizabethan Court to the end of the Tudor dynasty.

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