Tag: Blog Touring

Posted in Reading, Reviews

Lives Lost – Britta Bolt

Posted on by J

imageA minute can make all the difference…

Pieter Posthumus is enjoying a quiet drink in his favourite bar when the screaming starts. A minute later, the owner of the guesthouse next door rushes in: one of her tenants has been murdered.

Marloes, the guesthouse owner, is an odd but kind soul. Posthumus cannot believe it when she is arrested – for both her tenant Zig’s murder and another death years before. He knows there are questions unanswered: what is the link between the two cases? Why are people so keen to think Marloes is guilty? And why did Zig paint just one picture every year – a copy of a Dutch master, but with one peculiar twist?

As his investigation progresses, he comes to see that a few minutes can mean all the difference in the world: between saving a life and taking one; between innocence and guilt. And that sometimes asking questions leads to a truth that’s hard to bear.

Absolutely loved it….

Lives Lost is the second part of a trilogy featuring protagonist Pieter Posthumus, but if you haven’t read Book One, Lonely Graves yet, don’t worry.  Lives Lost stands well on its own, there is enough detail in there to make you determined to go back and pick up the first book, without spoiling it for any reader, and  trust me, if this is your first Posthumus novel, not only will you go back, but you’ll be pre-ordering the next book too.

Set on the outskirts of Amsterdam’s red light district, the sense of camaraderie amongst the main characters is fantastic, making the best of their community, and of those who come and go amongst them.  The humanity of the whole setting is one of my favourite things about this series, from Pieter, who loves to cook, Cornelious, the poet and art lover, to Anna the bar owner of generations past and Marloes the mother hen, every character has been depicted brilliantly, to just the right degree that no one feels like they’ve been exaggerated in any way.

Clearly torn between following his instincts and supporting his friends, when Posthumus does begin to investigate the mystery at the heart of Lives Lost he shows himself to have a keen eye for detail, a remarkable mind for making connections and an enlightened view of memory which works well to ensure that you can follow him through his deductions to the, by then, inevitable conclusion.  The whole ‘investigation’ feels natural, perfectly paced, with real doubts and deductive leaps, it never once leaves you feeling like it’s ‘just a story’, and any crime writer worth his salt will tell you that, that’s what makes it worth it….

Posted in Articles, Guest Posts

Britta Bolt, Brown Cafés and Amsterdam.

Posted on by J

Britta+Bolt-detailIt’s been around 18 years since I last wandered the streets of Amsterdam for Koninginnedag (Queen’s Day) but the imagery in Britta Bolt’s Pieter Posthumus novels brings the memories flooding back….

Writing here for LifeOfCri.me, Britta Boehler and Rodney Bolt, the duo behind Britta Bolt talk to us about Amsterdam’s ‘Brown Cafés’

The ‘brown café’ or ‘brown bar’ is an Amsterdam institution. De Dolle Hond, in our Posthumus books, is a fine example. The ‘brown’, people will tell you, is because of tobacco smoke that has for eons stained walls and ceiling. Shift a picture frame in an old establishment and the chocolate-coloured wallpaper appears white beneath it. Some of these bars – like de Dolle Hond – date back to the Golden Age, when the Dutch had a saying: “If a Hollander should be bereft of his pipe of tobacco he could not blissfully enter heaven”. In today’s more healthy world, the dark wall-colouring is more likely to be the result of a coat of paint. But the basic ingredients of a brown café remain: wood-panelling, dark wooden furniture, a burnished bar. Décor is unfussy – though sometimes it’s been around for centuries, so you might be sitting beneath a priceless lamp, beside a time-stained oil painting. Something startlingly modern may join the flotsam and jetsam of past years, but the word ‘designer’ is anathema. There’ll be wooden barrels along one wall, perhaps, old prints, posters for a local theatre, quirky bric-a-brac reflecting one person’s obsession with football, love of Amsterdam, or downright curious taste – for these cafés often belong to the individuals who serve you. Some have been in the same families for generations. All very like De Dolle Hond. Among our real-life favourite brown cafés are De Dokter, which Rodney found closed one evening because the owner was at home putting up Christmas decorations, and De Englese Reet, which, because the eldest sons of each successive generation of the owner’s family are all given the same name, has had a barman called ‘Teun’ for nearly 100 years.

 Published by Mulholland, Lives Lost is available to buy now.  Read the LifeOfCri.me review here….

Posted in Articles, Blog Touring, Guest Posts

Blog Tour: What She Left by T R Richmond

Posted on by J

What She Left is a cleverly constructed fractured timeline novel, that re-builds the life of deceased journalist Alice Salmon, using the digital footprint left by herself and those she knew.  As part of his blog tour, T R Richmond writes for LifeOfCri.me about using multiple character first person narration.

Writing in the first-person offers benefits and challenges to a writer.

It allows you to really get inside the head of a character, exploring their brain’s innermost workings. The downside is you can only ever include what’s in their head. If your character hasn’t thought it, seen it or done it, it’s cheating to include it. 

When I was planning What She Left, I wanted to have my cake and eat it. I wanted to see the world as all my characters did. So I wrote the book from multiple first-person perspectives. 

This has always struck me as the most honest form of narration, because in reality we’re all the first-person narrators of our own lives. 

Our own take on events, our own view of the world and our narrative seems sacrosanct to us, but it runs alongside everyone else’s – at times diverging from theirs, at times converging with theirs. Some facts are inalienable, but we all see things differently – hence disputes over so-called ‘facts’. Hence why life contains so many grey areas. 

Such issues of perspective and reliability are as relevant in journalism as they are in fiction. When it comes to choosing which news to read, listen to or watch, we have to ask ourselves: Whose version of events is the most accurate? We have to ask ourselves: Who can we trust? We have to ask ourselves: are we looking for our existing world view to be reinforced?

The internet has been a game-changer when it comes to the reliability of news. Anyone can share information now and, while this “democratisation” brings benefits such as quickening the dissemination of news and challenging the exclusive cabal of information providers, it also means we’re exposed to heavily subjective material. 

Many journalists are as passionate as ever about objectivity and balance, but as “consumers” of news it’s vital we ask who the narrator is of any particular piece of work. What’s their agenda? Because, however objective a piece purports to be, if you follow it back far enough, it’ll be the brainchild of someone with inherently subjective opinions. The solution, perhaps, is to develop broad tastes when it comes to journalism, as we’re always advised to with fiction. That at least gives us a counterbalance, exposing us to multiple sides of any particular argument. Remember, in journalism as in life, there’s no such thing as an entirely reliable narrator. Hence why fiction written in the first-person can feel so authentic.

T. R. Richmond

 

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Click here to buy

What She Left by T. R. Richmond is published by Michael Joseph on 23rd April, priced £12.99

Meet Professor J Cooke on Tumblr and Alice Salmon on Facebook

Posted in Reading, Reviews

Close To Home – Lisa Jackson

Posted on by J

imageVowing to make a fresh start, Sarah McAdams has come home to renovate the old Victorian mansion where she grew up. Her daughters, Jade and Gracie, aren’t impressed by the rundown property on the shores of Oregon’s wild Columbia River. As soon as they pull up the isolated drive, Sarah too is beset by uneasy memories–of her cold, distant mother, of the half-sister who vanished without a trace, and of a long-ago night when Sarah was found on the widow’s walk, feverish and delirious. 

Ever since the original mistress of the house plunged to her death almost a century ago, there have been rumors that the place is haunted. As a girl, Sarah sensed a presence there, and soon Gracie claims to see a lady in white running up the stairs. Still, Sarah has little time to dwell on ghost stories, between overseeing construction and dealing with the return of a man from her past.

But there’s a new, more urgent menace in the small town. One by one, teenage girls are disappearing. Frantic for her daughters’ safety, Sarah feels her veneer cracking and the house’s walls closing in on her again. Somewhere deep in her memory is the key to a very real and terrifying danger. And only by confronting her worst fears can she stop the nightmare roaring back to life once more. . .

A ghost story, a mystery, suspense and romance – all in one book. Wow – but it works.

Sarah McAdams moves back to her childhood home with her two daughters; a house that she has bad and missing memories about and ran from many years before. The past continues to haunt her and now starts to include her family as she struggles to find all the reasons for her fear.

At the same time, someone is kidnapping girls and Sarah’s eldest daughter is the next target – the daughter who has issues of her own as the past and present intersect. Add Sarah’s first love to the mix and each thread winds together to culminate in the need to confront secrets and lies.

Despite the fact that there are a lot of plot threads and at times it seems a struggle to keep up each part of the differing aspects and give them sufficient attention, as ever, Lisa Jackson offers a suspenseful novel that keeps you interested as the pages pass you by. The addition of the supernatural element gives extra life to the back story and cleverly amalgamates into the present that leads into the shocking climax.

I always enjoy books by Lisa Jackson; she writes suspense beautifully and does not have heroines that scream, cry, fall apart in tough situations or are used purely for corpses and her characterisation includes the frailties and fractures of life without being atypical of this type of book.

Close to Home is a good read and yet again Lisa Jackson delivers a page turner.

 

Review by KL

Posted in Blog Touring, Reading, Reviews

The Dying Place – Luca Veste

Posted on by J

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Once inside…there’s no way out

A fate worse than death…

DI Murphy and DS Rossi discover the body of known troublemaker Dean Hughes, dumped on the steps of St Mary’s Church in West Derby, Liverpool. His body is covered with the unmistakable marks of torture.

As they hunt for the killer, they discover a worrying pattern. Other teenagers, all young delinquents, have been disappearing without a trace.

Who is clearing the streets of Liverpool?

Where are the other missing boys being held?

And can Murphy and Rossi find them before they meet the same fate as Dean?

We all know about them, have seen the stories, listened to the news and watched them gather. Some of us have been on the receiving end of their actions.  The ‘feral youths’, the lost and disenfranchised children society doesn’t have any time for.  We’ve all judged them, silently, passively, perhaps vocally.  But who are we to judge?

The Dying Place is the second outing for Detective Inspector David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi and maintains the dark undertones of Dead Gone with the pair searching for a vigilante cleansing Liverpool’s youth community.  Murphy, still scarred from his run in with a serial killer is walking a fine line trying to keep his marriage together when the first body is found. As the body count increases the tension ratchets up rapidly and when a policeman is shot in the line of duty, Murphy knows he must do all he can to catch this killer before more people die.

What follows is a trail of violence and a shocking final showdown that left me with quite a lump in my throat.  The Dying Place is superbly written and will have you asking moral questions not just of the characters, but of yourself.  It also succeeds in keeping you guessing as to the real identity of the villain before it is revealed and ensures you want to do nothing more than keep turning those pages until the story plays out.

It’s a fantastic follow up to an amazing debut and highly recommended for all crime fiction fans. The Dying Place is Out Now for Kindle, and available in Paperback from December 4th 2014

Posted in Blog Touring, Reading, Reviews

Race To Death – Leigh Russell

Posted on by J

imageWhen a man plummets to his death from a balcony at York races, his wife and brother become suspects in a murder enquiry. Meanwhile Richard is being stalked by a killer issuing death threats. Richard is reluctant to go to the police, for fear his own dark secret will be exposed. Newly promoted Detective Inspector Ian Peterson is investigating the death at the races when a woman’s body is discovered. Shortly after that, Richard is killed. With the body count increasing, the pressure mounts for his team to solve the crimes quickly. But the killer is following the investigation far more keenly than Ian realises and time is running out as the case suddenly gets a lot closer to home…

Race To Death is the second outing as a main lead for DI Ian Peterson, a character that appeared originally in the first three Geraldine Steel books by the same author.  In Race To Death he has recently accepted a promotion from DS to DI which involves moving hundreds of miles from his current home to the city of York.  This move is just one of the things I enjoyed about Race To Death, as a new location and new colleagues means the chance to get to know a whole host of new characters making this a new start for the reader as well as the protagonist.

With a wife already unhappy with the demands of ‘the job’ on his time and as yet unsettled in their new home, under pressure from a boss he is struggling to find common ground with and a murder case leading to nothing but dead ends, DI Peterson has his work cut out.  Out to impress he is determined to do what it takes to find the killer.  Russell has written these new relationships well so it is easy to identify with the characters as they settle into their new routines.

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The plot has more than enough false leads to keep you guessing to the very end. It throws you straight into the action, and the tempo continues at a steady beat throughout ensuring you won’t want to put it down until you know whodunit.

All in all it’s a riveting read and I’m really looking forward to finding out what’s next for DI Peterson.

 

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