As a little girl I loved silent movies – oh, the edge of the seat excitement when the dastardly villain tied the  platinum blonde heroine to the rail track and gleefully ran off as the puffing Billy engine advanced inexorably.

Would the beautiful blonde perish?

Or would the hero save her in the nick of time?

As a bloodthirsty nine-year-old I never really understood the fatal, bloody implications of the what if…which, perhaps, made the opening chapter of Rachel Amphlett’s new crime thriller Will to Live, the Continue reading →

Timing is everything.

Martin McGuiness, Northern Ireland’s controversial former deputy first minister, died after a short illness on the same day I finished Roger A Price’s new crime thriller Vengeance, which, coincidentally, features a former IRA commander-turned-politician.

And, as I write this review, the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge is the subject of every news bulletin.

Price couldn’t have made his novel more topical if he’d tried. Continue reading →

Meet Sheryl Browne, whose psychological thrillers After She’s Gone and Sins of the Father, books one and two in the DI Matthew Adams series, are out now.

Find out about the holiday that never was, why there’s room on her sofa for George Clooney and why he can expect to be tempted with cupcakes.

My name: Sheryl Browne.

My family: consists of my son, partner and a selection of odd dogs (I foster disabled dogs and invariably end up keeping most of them).

I was born in… Birmingham, UK, but moved around Continue reading →

It’s a tribute to the authenticity that James L. Weaver brings to his reformed mob enforcer Jake Caldwell in his new thriller Ares Road that I’ve just spent ten minutes deliberating whether I’d want to live with his hard man with a heart of gold.

Common sense suggests men like Jake are TROUBLE.

It’s a tough call, though, because Jake, like his alter ego Jack Reacher in the Lee Child books, is a good guy with a chequered history, who is trying to re-invent himself.

But, Jake, unlike Reacher, is not afraid of commitment and, having re-discovered his former Continue reading →

Happy to be hosting today’s blog tour stop for fellow Lakewater Press author James L. Weaver, with Ares Road, the second book in his hard-hitting, character-driven Jake Caldwell series.

The series opener Poor Boy Road was one of the best new crime thrillers of 2016.

An IAN Thriller of the Year finalist, it introduced reformed mob enforcer Jake, an endearingly attractive hard guy with a heart of gold.

Now Jake is trying to go straight – but his first job as a private investigator doesn’t go quite as planned…

See our review here.

Meet the author: James L. Weaver, the marathon man who wants to be a survivor.

Meet  James L. Weaver, whose new novel Ares Road (published by Lakewater Press), follows the adventures of former mob enforcer Jake Caldwell.

Jake made his debut in Poor Boy Road, one of the best crime thrillers of 2016, which was named as a finalist in the IAN thriller of the Year competition.

Find out fun facts about Kansas City, why James believes in equal opportunities for potatoes and why he fears revealing his guilty secret will lead to a retraction of his Man Card.

My name: James L. Weaver. I was named after my dad’s best friend from his hometown who was killed in Vietnam.

This spring I took a business trip to DC and found him on the Vietnam Memorial wall.

My family: My immediately family consists of my wife of almost 20 years and my two
teenage kids, one of whom is scoping out colleges and making me feel really old.

Oh, and I can’t forget Dixon, our 8-month old festively plump beagle. Continue reading →

There may be more indigestible dishes than potato peel pie.

But, offhand, it’s hard to think what they might be.

And, it is, perhaps, telling that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows doesn’t actually include a pie recipe.

But it doesn’t need one: this is a gourmet book about an extraordinary group of people surviving – just about – the German Occupation of the Channel Islands.

The story opens in 1946 – author Juliet Ashton, who Continue reading →

Fantasy writers don’t always get the respect they deserve.

While other authors have to think about research, and plotting, and characterisation – not to mention the little business of actually writing their magnus opus – the fantasy guys also have to create a whole new universe, complete with rules and regulations and customs and a back-story to match.

A massive undertaking, requiring ingenuity and enormous attention to detail.

So hats off to JC Norman, author of the third novel in the Sphere’s Divide saga, Tragedies of Emotion, for imagining a fantastical, complex Continue reading →