Quick Book Reviews Blog

  Short Summary James Patterson and Mark Sullivan have become an inseparable duo in the realm of thrillers a while ago, most notably with the Private series. One of the more prominent works is the fifth book, Private Berlin , and it follows the investigation into a slaughterhouse which holds many dark secrets from the East German days, a slaughterhouse where one of Private's agents is found murdered.

  Short Summary Richard Osman has a real knack for plotting unusual story lines in his Thursday Murder Club Mystery series, and in the third book, titled The Bullet That Missed , things don't get much more unusual than this. The club sees a decade-old cold case risen from its slumber, leading them on an investigation involving a local news legend and a murder without a body, all while being stalked and hunted by a mysterious foe.

  Short Summary Richard Osman has created a unique and endearing cast of sleuthing septuagenarians when he published the first installment of A Thursday Murder Club Mystery series, and in the second book, The Man Who Died Twice , he pits them against some real danger.  An old acquaintance of one of the club's members rears his head, and asks for their help in clearing his name for the theft he didn't commit of a diamond collection. When the first body hits the floor, it becomes obvious the killer will stop at nothing to get what's his, having no qualms with murdering the four pensioners hot on his tail.

  Short Summary Richard Osman has taken a fair bit of time dabble in fiction as an author, and his first effort gave us The Thursday Murder Club , the first entry in A Thursday Murder Club Mystery series. It introduces us to four friends in their seventies living in a peaceful retirement village who regularly meet together to discuss unsolved crimes. When a local developer is found dead under mysterious circumstances, the four friends become embroiled in their very first live case.

  Ronald H. Balson has dragged Liam Taggart through a number of sordid cases, but none hit as close to home as the one he is faced with in The Trust . In this fourth novel of the Liam Taggart and Catherine Lockhart series, the private investigator returns to his childhood home upon his uncle's passing, only to learn the man predicted his own murder and decreed in his last will to postpone the distribution of the inheritance until the killer is found.

Jacqueline Winspear will hopefully never run out of mysteries for Maisie Dobbs to solve, and in the fifth book of the series, titled An Incomplete Revenge , she sends her out into a not-so-quaint countryside. Tasked by her friend to investigate matters around a land purchase in a village in Kent, Maisie finds upon her arrival something strange and sinister at work, with mysterious fires and thefts popping up with alarming regularity.

Looking back on our entire history as a whole, I think it's safe to say artists have often had it pretty rough, and not only in terms of their ability to make money. Time and time again across continents, artists have drawn the ire of the poor and wealthy alike for the expression of their ideas and observations, often a little too close to the truth for comfort.

Jacqueline Winspear will likely never run out of adventures to send her beloved Maisie Dobbs on, and in Pardonable Lies she sends her to solve a mystery pulling her back into the First World War. A deathbed plea leads Maisie on the search of a pilot, Ralph Lawton, whose disappearance and supposed death in the war never convinced his mother. As she digs through the ruins of the past, she unearths dangers and answers in equal measure.

Julia Dahl has managed something many authors only dream, establishing her very own successful series with the Rebekah Roberts novels. For the third time around, Rebekah comes back in a novel titled Conviction , revolving around murders which took place during the Crown Heights riots of 1991 and the summer of 1992. At the time an open-and-shut case, twenty-two years later Rebekah receives a letter prompting her to dig into a deep past where the wrong man might have been convicted.

Jacqueline Winspear created with the Maisie Dobbs series a goose which still lays golden eggs to this very day. In the second novel of the series, titled Birds of a Feather , Maisie is hired during the Spring of 1930 to locate a runaway heiress. What at first promises to be a walk in the park turns into a grim massacre as three of old friends of the heiress are found murdered. With there obviously being some connection between the two events, Maisie sets out on a path bound to take her into the everlasting tragedy of the First World War.

Jacqueline Winspear probably didn't know she would start writing the series which defines her today with her first Maisie Dobbs novel, but it's a path which has certainly given life to many interesting stories. In this debut published back in 2014, we are introduced to the eponymous private investigator as she returns to her hometown in 1929, taking on two cases. The first one revolves around a suspiciously complex infidelity, and second one around a closed WWI veterans' retreat.

T E Kinsey has taken us on many adventures re-exploring the quaint and murder-prone British countryside in his Lady Hardcastle Mystery series, and in the latest novel, Death Beside the Seaside , he tries to give his characters a break they were long overdue for. Needless to say, wherever Lady Hardcastle and her trusty maid Flo go, death seems to follow, and this time around they have to investigate the disappearance of their fellow hotel guests, topped off by a grisly murder, marking only the start of the ghastly affair.

T E Kinsey hopefully still has miles to go for his Lady Hardcastle Mystery Series, having taken many of us back to a simpler time when sleuthing was honourable work. In the fifth book in the series, titled The Burning Issue of the Day , we follow Lady Hardcastle as she takes on the case of a suffragette accused of having started a fire which ended up killing a journalist. Despite the case against her client being strong, Lady Hardcastle's experience tells her there is more than meets the eye here.

Gretchen Berg has announced her arrival on the literary scene in style with the publication of her first novel, The Operator . In it, we follow the story of Vivian Dalton, a switchboard operator in a small Ohio town. One day, she overhears a rumour from a mysterious voice which might send her word to splinters. With time working against her, she begins digging her way to the truth behind the rumour, regardless of how much pain it could cause.

T E Kinsey has been doing a remarkable job at creating a new household name among sleuths with Lady Hardcastle. In A Picture of Murder , the fourth book in the series, we follow the Lady and her trusty maid Flo as they investigate a string of murdered actors during a grand Halloween celebration in the small village of Littleton Cotterell.

T E Kinsey has given murder mystery fans a whole lot of material to go through in his Lady Hardcastle Mystery Series , with the third book, Death Around the Bend , carrying on the adventures of our beloved protagonist in the same vein. Having been invited to a country estate alongside her trusty maid Florence, Lady Hardcastle witnesses the seemingly accidental death of a race car driver... only to learn soon after he was victim of foul play.

Christian White has turned many heads with his debut novel which instantly became an international bestseller, and he returns to the fore with his second novel, The Wife and the Widow . Taking place on a small island town in the dead winter, the story follows two women on a collision course of discovery, both trying to unravel the secret lives of their husbands and the darkness they concealed.

T E Kinsey has certainly brought back the charm of older murder mysteries with the Lady Hardcastle series, taking us back to a time with a simpler appeal. In the Market for Murder is the second book in the ongoing series, and it follows Lady Hardcastle who, as is tradition, is trying to enjoy a little vacation only to stumble headfirst into a murder. A local farmer turns up dead in the pub, and as Lady Hardcastle delves deeper into it with her trusty maid Florence, a world of utter strangeness opens up to them.

Few authors have had the success T E Kinsey did with his first novel, A Quiet Life in the Country , the first entry in the Lady Hardcastle Mystery series. Presenting us with the Lady herself, an eccentric widow accompanied by her maid and confidante in 1908 England, the story follows a murder investigation in the countryside, one the police are very close to bungling up. Thankfully, Lady Hardcastle is on the case, and few things, if any, escape her vigilant eye.

Lara Prescott Tells a Story of Illegal Literature Lara Prescott seems to have an underappreciated knack for bringing to life the lesser-known historical curiosities, at least if her first published novel, The Secrets We Kept , is anything to go by. In it, we are presented with a retelling of how the CIA smuggled Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR to distribute it abroad. More specifically, we follow the two secretaries tasked with the job, as well as a love story for the centuries revolving around Pasternak and his muse Olga Ivinskaya .