Editing by Elizabeth

May 24, 2010

Deadfall by Shaun Jeffrey

The usual principles of combat seemed useless when fighting an impervious enemy, an enemy that didn’t need sleep and that functioned on the compulsion to kill, and she knew if they were to get out alive she had to adapt. – Amber Redgrave

If someone had told weapons specialist and ex-military member Amber “Big Red” Redgrave that a security assignment gone bad resulting in two deaths was going to be the best part of her day, she’d probably have stayed in bed. Fortunately for readers of author Shaun Jeffrey’s newest book, Deadfall, she didn’t.

Following the ill-fated security assignment that starts Deadfall off with a bang, Amber returns to the office for debriefing by agency owner and ex-SAS man, John Richmond. Though a lucrative and time sensitive matter has arisen, given the morning’s events he doesn’t want Amber involved and insists that she take some time to decompress.

Amber, however, wants to get right back into things, so when she takes a call from the client indicating that they need an additional team member she talks herself onto the mission team… without Richmond’s knowledge. Understandably, he is not pleased to see Amber later that day at the mission rendezvous point. It being too late to replace her, he begrudgingly accepts her presence.

The eight man team is informed that their mission is to rescue the client’s two children, who have been kidnapped. Though the wealthy client is willing to pay the ransom, he’s not convinced the kidnappers will actually release the kids even if he does. Therefore, having learned that the kidnappers are hiding out in a remote, abandoned mining village he wants the team to go in and get the kids back before the 24 hour ransom deadline expires. A classic insertion and rescue mission, right?

Not quite. Instead of finding the kidnappers and missing kids in the village, they find it eerily quiet and seemingly quite empty. That is until hundreds of people start pouring out of the abandoned mine shaft and begin attacking the team. As they try to repel the assault they notice that the people are not slowing down, let alone dying, despite being shot… unless it’s a head shot. Impossible as it seems, the team quickly realizes that they aren’t dealing with living people, but with the undead. And we’re not talking Night of the Living Dead shuffling, slow moving zombies. No, these are the 28 Days Later chase you down speedy kind of zombies, and the resulting fight by the team to stay alive and get back to civilization is a white-knuckled ride with gore aplenty.

But there’s more going on in Deadfall than just a good zombie romp. In addition to having to deal with scores of the undead, there’s the question of exactly who their client really is and why they were set up, as well as the realization that not all the team

May 20, 2010

No Hope For Gomez! by Graham Parke

It was like suddenly getting a glimpse of a giant invisible hand turning the world. You were not supposed to see those kind of things. You were not supposed to notice the machinery at work. – Gomez Porter

Cleverly presented as a series of blog entries, author Graham Parke’s debut novel, No Hope For Gomez!, chronicles the experiences of Gomez Porter. Being rather unsuccessful at running the antiques store he inherited from his parents, primarily because he knows absolutely nothing about antiques, Gomez decides to earn some extra cash by participating in an experimental drug trial.

As part of the trial, Gomez is instructed to keep a detailed blog of his daily activities and experiences, especially anything strange he notices. One thing in particular that Gomez notices, though he doesn’t find it at all strange, is how attracted he is to Dr. Hargrove, the scientist running the drug trial. In fact, he develops a mad crush on her and decides to devote all his time to winning her affection.

Dr. Hargrove, however, is already being stalked by someone so Gomez becomes her stalker’s stalker in order to determine the stalker’s identity and prove himself to Hargrove. Which he does, and an incredibly awkward romance ensues.

Things take a turn for the strange, if not downright disturbing, when one of Gomez’s fellow drug trial participants turns up dead, and shortly thereafter the detective investigating the case goes missing. Dr. Hargrove assures Gomez that the drugs being used in the trial had nothing to do with the death, but when yet another participant dies Gomez believes he has no choice but to go off the grid and investigate for himself in order to get to the bottom of things.

Interspersed throughout Gomez’s romance and investigation are the laugh-out-loud funny interactions he has with his decidedly left-of-center downstairs neighbor, Warren, an aspiring novelist, Hicks, the antiques store’s sole employee, who has a “pathological fear of all things unpunctual” (At one point Gomez becomes so frustrated with Hicks’ bizarre behavior that he puts him up for auction on eBay.), and the parade of oddball customers who frequent the antiques store.

Since it is known that Gomez is participating in an experimental drug trial, the reader is often left to wonder whether what is being relayed in his blog entries is real or the product of some drug-induced hallucination. After all, he can’t possibly have actually heard Warren stir-frying hamsters in an enameled wok… can he? And surely no one really came into his antiques store wearing a three-piece suit accessorized with sandals and a sombrero covered in “I love pasteurized milk!” stickers, right?

No Hope For Gomez! is one of the most delightfully odd books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. It’s part humor, part mystery, part romance and entirely original. It was, in fact, like getting sucked into an alternate reality called Gomezland, and what

May 17, 2010

The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

Someone is going to die. I sat in my car and felt that certainty pump through my veins. I took a minute to distill the violence into a more refined form and tucked it away until I needed it. – Michael Kelly

P.I. Michael Kelly most definitely needs it, as there is all kinds of trouble afoot in Chi-town. Starting with an execution-style murder on an L (elevated train) platform that Kelly witnesses, followed by a second L related shooting across town barely an hour later, The Third Rail quickly pulls the reader into the sense of panic that sweeps through the city of Chicago as it realizes there is a spree killer on the loose.

At first thinking he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, Kelly receives a call from someone claiming to be the shooter who indicates that Kelly’s presence at the scene of the first killing was no coincidence. Though dubious that Kelly is somehow the ultimate target in what appears to be a string of random shootings, the FBI / Chicago PD task force working the case reluctantly brings him into the investigation.

And that’s about as much as can be revealed without spoiling what is a spectacularly well plotted thriller. Suffice it to say that before all is said and done the investigation, which seems to get wrapped up about halfway through, actually downshifts, makes a hard turn and rockets off again in another direction that brings Homeland Security, the Archdiocese of Chicago, and Kelly’s old frenemy the Mayor of Chicago into play.

As with the first two installments of the Kelly series, the city of Chicago itself is a central character. From the L trains to the Irish pubs, from the opulence of the Archdiocese to the ominous semi-derelict buildings of the Cabrini-Green public housing development, from Chicago’s infamous brand of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ politics to everything in between, Harvey effortlessly brings the city to life. Though it’s normally ill-advised to do so, this is one time when you definitely should grab onto The Third Rail.

Michael Harvey is the co-creator and executive producer of the television show Cold Case Files. The Third Rail is the third book in the Michael Kelly series, following The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor. To learn more about Michael, visit his website.

– The Third Rail: Book Trailer –

May 13, 2010

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

Digging had given his life purpose. It was a small, feeble purpose and was unlikely to end in anything more than a gradual tapering off into nothingness. But purpose was something, wasn’t it? – Blacklands

Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb of Somerset, England lives his young life with more purpose than most ever experience in an entire lifetime.

His father long since out of the picture, his mother stuck in a dead end housekeeping job and his Nan (grandmother) still haunted by the disappearance of her son, Billy, eighteen years earlier, Steven and his five-year-old brother exist in a house perpetually filled with tension and despair.

Billy, who was the same age at the time he went missing as Steven is now, is presumed to have been killed by pedophile and serial killer Arnold Avery. Convicted of killing six children, though he never admitted to Billy’s abduction or murder, Avery is serving a life sentence in a nearby prison.

That Billy disappeared at such a young age was tragic enough, but Steven is convinced what has cast such a dark cloud over his family is that Billy’s body was never found. His Nan in particular seems unable to move on, holding a daily vigil at the window as if still expecting Billy to come home even after eighteen years.

Steven believes that if he could just find Billy’s body he would be able to heal his family’s psychological wounds. After all:

“If Nan loved him and Davey, maybe she and Mum would be nicer to each other; and if Nan and Mum were nicer to each other, they would all be happier, and be a normal family, and… well… just everything would be… better.”

Determined to find Billy’s body and bring it home to rest so that he can have a normal family, Steven spends all of his free time digging boy-sized holes in the moor where Avery’s known victims were found, to no avail. Frustrated by his lack of results, he finally has an epiphany: go straight to the source. And so Steven writes a letter to Avery that sets into motion a life-altering chain of events.

Though the cryptic exchanges between Steven and Avery are reminiscent of the Clarice Starling / Hannibal Lecter relationship in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs, through her use of a child protagonist Bauer has crafted a fresh twist on the serial killer crime genre. She has, in fact, managed to seamlessly weave together a psychological suspense novel and a traditional coming-of-age story.

At only 220 pages Blacklands is a quick read, though given the compelling storyline it could have been twice as long and I still don’t think I’d have been able to put it down without finishing in one sitting. Absolutely heartbreaking in his earnestness, painfully realistic in the missteps that he makes, and inspiring in the depth of his

May 10, 2010

The Good Son by Russel D. McLean

“I’ve already shot a man this evening, so what’s the difference now? Like smoking, it gets easier after the first one, right?” – J. McNee

Dundee, Scotland based J. McNee (full first name never given) is not at a good place in his life when we meet him in author Russel D. McLean’s debut novel, The Good Son. Formerly on the Dundee police force, McNee was forced into early retirement following a car crash that killed his fiancée and left him physically disabled and psychologically crippled.

Now working as a private investigator, McNee receives a visit from local farmer James Robertson whose estranged brother, Daniel, was found hanging from a tree on the family’s farm. Though the police have it down as suicide, James is convinced his brother did not kill himself and hires McNee to investigate what Daniel had been up to during the 30 years since James last saw him.

In addition to putting him at odds with his former colleagues on the police force, McNee’s investigation opens up a Pandora’s box of local thugs, London gangsters and a mysterious woman with connections to both, as a visit to London reveals that Daniel had been working for one of that city’s most notorious gangsters, Gordon Egg.

Not pleased with either Daniel’s unexplained disappearance from London, with a substantial sum of Egg’s money, or McNee’s visit inquiring about him, Egg sends two of his thugs to Dundee to get to the bottom of things. And that’s when things go seriously sideways, as Egg’s thugs, Ayer and Liman, cut a bloody path through Dundee in their efforts to retrieve the missing money. →

May 06, 2010

The Kult by Shaun Jeffrey

“People are predictable. That’s what makes them easy to kill.” – The Oracle

Killing people is The Oracle’s business, and business is good in author Shaun Jeffrey’s incredibly dark novel The Kult. The Oracle, you see, doesn’t just kill people; he tortures and mutilates them in horrifying ways, turning them, in his mind, into macabre works of art. Then he takes photographs of his creations, which he sends to the police.

Detective Chief Inspector Prosper Snow is in charge of The Oracle investigation. He’s also a member of the Kult, a small group of friends he’s known since his school days. Initially formed when they were just kids to help each other deal with bullies, the Kult stayed in contact over the years, occasionally calling on each other for assistance with increasingly “grown up” issues.

An email Snow receives from one of the members calling for a meeting leads to the group facing the most grown up issue possible: murder. At the meeting, Snow learns that the wife of one of his friends has been raped and not only does his friend intend to seek revenge, he expects his fellow Kult members to assist. He argues that the timing is perfect for them to kill his wife’s rapist, because if they do so in a sufficiently gruesome manner it will be blamed on The Oracle.

Though he’d always been there for the Kult in the past, Snow can’t agree to such extreme action. That is, not until his supposed friends inform him that if he doesn’t help, including supplying them with the inside information necessary to copy the unique m.o. of The Oracle, they will reveal to his superiors all the previous questionable activities in which Snow has participated. Caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, Snow caves and assists in the killing. And that is when things go from merely screwed up to genuinely life threatening, because following their attempt to frame The Oracle for the murder they commit the Kult members begin getting knocked off themselves.

In The Oracle Jeffrey has conjured up one of the nastiest, most perversely creative serial killers in recent memory, which makes it all the more impressive that Jeffrey did not make his protagonist an über-Detective. Quite the contrary, Snow spends most of the story frustrated, one step behind, and continuously making extremely questionable decisions based on emotion rather than logic… which makes him a believable and sympathetic lead.

The tension and stakes rise to almost stifling levels as Snow races to discover The Oracle’s identity before he finds himself in the crosshairs, setting the stage for a truly disturbing showdown in The Oracle’s decidedly creepy lair. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart, The Kult is a gripping read that’s part horror, part mystery, part police procedural, and completely in-your-face.

Shaun Jeffrey is the author of over 40 published short stories, one collection entitled

May 03, 2010

Rolling Thunder by Chris Grabenstein

“I used to round up shopping carts in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. Then I met Ceepak and life’s been one big roller coaster ride ever since.” – Danny Boyle

Officer Danny Boyle isn’t the only one going for a roller coaster ride in Rolling Thunder, the sixth entry in author Chris Grabenstein’s John Ceepak/Jersey Shore mystery series. Memorial Day weekend in Sea Haven, New Jersey finds Danny and his partner, John Ceepak, working crowd control at the grand opening of the Rolling Thunder roller coaster. “Big Paddy” O’Malley, owner of the Rolling Thunder, his family, and assorted town dignitaries are also on hand to be the first to experience the seaside town’s newest attraction.

They get more than they bargained for when Mrs. O’Malley has a heart attack and dies during the coaster’s initial run. Though the death appears on the surface to be nothing more than an unfortunate tragedy, Ceepak and Danny are bothered by the lack of distress exhibited by several members of the family and begin looking into the workings of the O’Malley clan. As they are doing so another death, this one unquestionably a murder, confirms their suspicion that something is fishy in Sea Haven.

As with all previous entries in this outstanding series, Grabenstein serves up a wonderfully complex mystery for Ceepak and Danny to tackle. Along the way they must deal with a jealous, potentially criminally complicit colleague, prominent members of the community engaging in organized activities of questionable legality, a mayor who wants nothing more than to not upset the tourists, and a family with Shakespearean levels of dysfunction. →

April 29, 2010

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

“All I wanted was some peace. I just wanted to sleep.” – Gerry Fegan

Set in Belfast in the aftermath of Northern Ireland’s Troubles*, The Ghosts of Belfast introduces us to ex-con Gerry Fegan. Treated by the locals as a hero for his activities as a “hard man” during the Troubles, activities that got him sent to prison for twelve years, Fegan just wants to leave his past in the past and live out his life in peace. That, unfortunately, isn’t going to happen.

The guilt of his own conscience weighs heavily enough upon him, but that is not the only burden Fegan has to bear. Shortly before his release from prison Fegan began getting visits. Not from friends or family, but from the ghosts of the twelve people he killed during the Troubles. Sometimes only one or two at a time, other times all twelve at once, when we meet Fegan it has been seven long years since his “followers,” as he calls them, first came calling.

Tormented to the very edge of sanity, Fegan barely manages to do more each day than wander down to the pub, get drunk, go home and pass out, then get up and do it all over again. One night a friend Fegan used to run with before his time in prison comes to visit him in the pub. Now a smooth talking politician, Fegan’s friend, McKenna, was once one of the men Fegan took orders from during the Troubles. Orders that led to deaths, including one of Fegan’s followers, the one he calls “The Boy.” →

April 19, 2010

Shoot To Thrill by P.J. Tracy

“So what we might have is a bunch of amoral whack jobs telling the other amoral whack jobs out there that it’s A-okay to murder, and then they all start believing it for real?” – Detective Gino Rolseth

Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the situation facing Minneapolis Police Detective Gino Rolseth, his partner Leo Magozzi, and the Monkeewrench computer crew in Shoot To Thrill, the fifth entry in P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench series. It’s been four years since the last book in the series was released, and in addition to giving readers a satisfying dose of Harley Davidson, Grace MacBride, Annie Belinski and Roadrunner, aka the Monkeewrench crew, Shoot To Thrill also introduces a strong new character to the mix, FBI Special Agent John Smith.

Smith, whose “life had always been about as ordinary as his name,” is only six months away from mandatory retirement from the FBI after 30 years of service when he suddenly finds himself in charge of an investigation into a series of video clips posted online which appear to depict actual murders. Despite having determined that all the clips originated from the same location, the FBI is unable to trace the videos back to their ultimate source due to extremely sophisticated masking techniques employed by the person or people posting them.

Enter Monkeewrench, which Smith enlists to help trace the origin of the clips, as well as to design a software program that will be able to run an analysis of similar videos posted online to determine if they depict real murders or are staged ‘murders’ posted by copycats seeking their 15 minutes of fame. Detectives Rolseth and Magozzi, veterans of working cases with the Minneapolis-based Monkeewrench crew, find themselves drawn into the Federal investigation when Monkeewrench discovers a video indicating that a local death the detectives recently investigated, one which initially appeared to be an accidental drowning, was in fact a murder connected to the series being investigated by Monkeewrench and the FBI.

That law enforcement personnel would find themselves in the position of investigating a series of murders committed, filmed and posted online purely for the purpose of attention seeking and one-upmanship is a disturbing concept, one which may have even seemed far-fetched not too long ago. But the relatively recent proliferation of online social networking sites has changed both the way people act as individuals, as well as the way they interact with others. Online anonymity gives people ‘keyboard courage’ to spew hatred and intolerance, to give voice to their darkest thoughts, and allows them to find easy acceptance and encouragement from other like-minded people, all without leaving the comfort of their home. It’s almost as if the web, one character in Shoot To Thrill argues, “is normalizing deviant behavior.”

And there is quite a bit of deviant behavior to be investigated in this outing, all done with the usual Monkeewrench flair. The black humor and banter between Rolseth

– The Third Rail: Book Trailer –

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