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Vale of Tears - David Mark

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We've arrived at book three-of-three in David Mark’s Sal Delaney series and there is one issue that surely every reader is eagerly looking to see resolved in Vale of Tears . Not will Wulf Hagman finally have his name cleared and his reputation restored in the realm of public opinion; not will Sal patch things up with her former lover who is still recovering from injury but maybe not recovered from his fling with Magda Quinn; not will we find out where Sal's twin brother Jarod has disappeared to and why; not even what is the story and his connection with Dagmara, who appears to be back to her old tricks as trailed at the end of book two ( Don't Say a Word ). Well, we expect answers to all those questions obviously, but paramount for me at least is will Magda Quinn get her comeuppance? So there are a few things to tie up, and obviously the concluding episode in a trilogy is not a good place to start reading the series - so reading a review of it makes even less sense - but an...
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La Nena - Carmen Mola

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Having read the first two Inspectora Elena Blanco novels by Carmen Mola, I knew to expect to be prepared for some dark scenes of horrific crime, but the authors (Mola a pseudonym used by a collaborative team of three male authors - Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero) still manage to shock with the extreme violence and twisted actions that take place early in the first few chapters of La Nena ('The Kid'). Without wanting to get too deeply into it, the prologue ends with a horrific scene involving a newly married woman entering a family that raise pigs to discover that some of the family members appear to be closely related to the animals, but it doesn't take long into the novel proper for another even more shocking event to surpass it. And it's a very surprising one at that. That's because the victim is someone readers of the series will already know. Chesca is one of Elena Blanco’s specialist murder investigation BAC team (Brigada de Análysis de Caso...
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The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives - Elizabeth Arnott

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It's a great title for a thriller, but The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives promises more than it delivers. The impact on families of convicted killers is something not often considered and for which there is little in the way of help or support. Certainly not in the 1960s, which is the setting of Elizabeth Arnott's novel. How do you survive being the wife of a convicted serial killer? Beverley Lightfoot, wife of serial killer Henry James Lightfoot, who murdered seven women in the Bay Area of California between 1957 and 1963, feels a certain amount of guilt for not questioning her husband's suspicious behaviours. She takes little comfort from a small group of other women with similar experiences, and relating her experience in public events doesn't really seem to be enough. Her friend Margot, whose husband was a prominent politician and also a serial killer however tells her " We can't keep bad people from doing bad things ". Or can they? Beverley, Ma...
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À la vue de tous - Alex Sol

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First published in 2023 at around 650 pages long Alex Sol's À la vue de tous ('In Plain Sight') is the first book in the author's Les enquêtes d'Elise Duromain et Lucas Lievens series, which she has somehow managed to follow up in quick succession with three further investigations. You get the impression that Sol must be able to write as quickly as you can read her books, and they are certainly designed to be read at a pace. Thankfully, at least on this first opening book in the series, it's clear that there has been no compromise in the quality of the writing. À la vue de tous certainly has you gripped from the intriguing opening incident. Laura has gone to the police with a report that her pregnant sister Marie has simply vanished between two stations on the Paris metro. It might not sound worrying, but it's surprising how many people wander off everyday and sometimes turn up again soon later, so the police understandably don't take the matter too se...
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Il suffit parfois d’un cri… - Ludovic Deblois

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Ludovic Deblois, to judge by his previous novel Inversion - a frighteningly realistic portrayal of technological innovation and advances when placed in the hands of corrupt powers - doesn't have a particularly rosy outlook on the future. His latest novel Il suffit parfois d’un cri… (which you could maybe translate not literally as 'A Cry in the Wilderness' or 'A Voice in the Wild'?) is again set in the immediate future and, inspired by animal life and our relationship with nature, you would have to say it does not appear to be any more optimistic about our future. And you would have to conclude that it might be for a good reason. Concerned about the climate and mankind's lack of willingness to confront serious ecological and environmental issues, the author's lates novel again forces us to think seriously about some important matters that, having seen how quickly things have changed in the last few years, might not be that far away from becoming  reality. ...
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The Library of Traumatic Memory - Neil Jordan

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Neil Jordan's novels often (always?) feature figures dealing with trauma, loss, the past, each struggling with a disconnect in their lives. He has explored this through a number of variations including metaphorical or literal ghosts. In his latest novel, Jordan writing in the realm of futuristic science fiction for the first time, he deals with a speculative scientific approach where memories and trauma can be genetically altered, but the past and the future are linked in other ways that aren't so easily erased. Written in Jordan's familiar, evocative literary style, his latest novel is enriched by his extension into new realms. The novel is divided into two parts. In part one, the story takes in two timelines, one in the past in 1886, the other 200 years in the future in 2086, both periods lined by two figures from the Cartwright family. They are linked, Jordan style, by innumerable connections, by family evidently, but also by landscape, buildings and memory that is imbue...
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Quite Ugly One Evening - Chris Brookmyre

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Jack Parlabane, as anyone who has previously come across Chris Brookmyre’s most loved character (and something of an alter-ego, I suspect), has always been something of a cynic. Which is why we love him. First introduced in 1996 in Quite Ugly One Morning , Parlabane has aged along with the sporadic publication of the series and now, 30 years after being introduced to him, you'll find that happily he hasn't mellowed with age. Well, not that much anyway. He's just become an old embittered cynical journalist unable to fathom the latest trends of the modern age of social media influencers, to say nothing of his thoughts about how a certain US president has shown just how much further into the depths politics has sunk than he could ever have imagined even back in those heady post-Thatcherite years. That said, while the world is in a sad state now, Parlabane is not one to look back fondly on (relatively) more innocent times, but a combination of occurrences, including going it al...
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