RoroblusMumReadsReviews/Rants

2* Has too many things going on, and nothing felt entirely believable. I've not read a GM book since his horror heyday, and probably shouldn't have bothered with this. The female lead is supposedly in a happy relationship with a judge, but gets into bed naked with a female subordinate, and doesn't hesitate to make a move on her before belatedly coming to her senses - this is despite just having reassured the judge that if she commits to marrying him, she'll be faithful. Hmm. Then there's the nursing home with the strange vibes and the residents forced to rewrite their wills in favour of the owners, under actual torture. With the aid of a corrupt solicitor. How was this not spotted by the regulators? How were the repeat deaths not considered suspicious? Do Irish authorities not inspect care homes or do DBS checks on employees?  The PIP aspect really, really, really deserves a strong warning of graphic animal cruelty. I had to skip several pages because of this.  The ...

3.5* Good storyline, progress towards Carve-Up's comeuppance, hopefully, but...MAJOR SPOILER.......... ....Andy Maslen copped out. All the Van/Marnie stuff, all the flirting between Kat and Jack was just a big fat nothing. Don't get me wrong, I didn't want either Kat or Van to cheat, but all the bigging up, all the innuendo, all the butterflies, and it was resolved with: THEIR MARRIAGE WAS FINE. MARNIE WAS JUST A HARMLESS, IF DETERMINED, FLIRT - LIKE JACK. SHE FOUND, WITH A SENSE OF RELIEF, THAT SHE DIDN’T EVEN THINK OF HIM THAT WAY NOW THAT HANNAH WANTED TO MAKE A PLAY FOR HIM. So yeah, twee and not-believable avoidance. And yet just pages before, there'd been mention of Van maybe not believing her protests about Jack. Hmm. Titillation for nothing.  The Hannah character stole the show. There's already a massive spoiler in this review, so I won't add another, but she kicked arse. Her neurodivergence worked, and it was great to see Carve-Up humiliated.  The Under...

4* Well executed but loses that 1* for me as the reveal of the actual baddie didn't feel believable, nor did the SOCOs attending the house and not spotting a phone was on charge...won't spoiler here, but yeah, a bit of a big one to swallow.  This is a well-done tale with several characters who could've been the killer/s, and events that felt sufficiently murky from 35 years ago, to make the then-story work well with the reveals in the now. I'm not sure that IRL the male detective - I've forgotten his name - would've been allowed to investigate events, given his connections with cases past and present, so that was a big suspension of disbelief ask of me. I managed it.  The detective work was good, aided by today's technology but British policing doesn't work at the speed that was described here, especially where budgets are concerned, and more so, where permission from local councils and use of GPR come into it.  Still, a decent tale not bogged down by pe...

3.5* Much improved writing and editing.  This follows on from A Body In The Forest, and you do need to read the predecessor so as not to be lost in this tale. Someone at Joffe has been hard at work weeding out all the editing issues and making a smoother read, so this was much easier to get into.  Some of the writing still isn't the clearest, such as why a character was expecting Samantha and didn't query why instead they were meeting Sam, a different person, nor why Sam took food to meet said person. Those bits were never explained.  The tale was in parts sad and in parts, shocking. Poor Sam. Poor Emmi. Poor dad. Poor mum. And some of the crimes were a bit farfetched for rural Wales, but you hsve to go with the flow. The trafficking storyline faded out a bit too conveniently, I suspect because there's no way to really bring that to a satisfactory conclusion where justice is done, but I rolled my eyes and went on. Is this the end of the line for the series? I think it's...

3* Kind of predictable but an OK read. Slightly unpalatable at the end.  This is short and works because of today's culture of everything online. Some of it needed a bit of suspension of disbelief, because organisations don't work that quickly irl, but the theory is doable. What I didn't like is that none of the characters had any personality.  ARC courtesy of NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories, for my reading pleasure.

3.5* The title was too much of a giveaway of the storyline. Decent read but no surprises, except for Natalie. This is a decent read but there were no surprises about it. Names, events, hsppenings, characters, were all a bit clunky and plonked-in, rather than blending in. I figured out who the bad guys were just from the mention of 10 years. And all the body parts that Cam's dad had been collecting for years. The only kind of nice thing about the tale was that life goes on. Natalie was a surprise, and even when her life as a kid was mentioned, I wasn't sure where she was going - prostitution was what jumped to mind. The book ends well. There's life for more than I expected, although with social media, VPNs and the likes, it could've been happier for many more people. ARC courtesy of NetGalley and Storm Publishing, for my reading pleasure.