#crimethriller

Book Review: The Intended Victim by Alexandra Ivy

Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 15, 2020
2 min

Book Review: The Intended Victim by Alexandra Ivy

Although it’s fourth in a series, I hadn’t read any of the others and felt this worked OK as a standalone. Hero Ash is a former police detective now teaching criminal law, brought back to Chicago in a big hurry when the body of his ex-girlfriend is found slain. Only it’s not Remi, but a girl who looks just like her. Uncannily, artificially unlike her, and the case has all the hallmarks of The Butcher, the serial killer who killed Remi’s father and caused Ash to retire from hi

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Book Review: First Cut by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 12, 2020
2 min

Book Review: First Cut by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

Written by a husband and wife team, First Cut is a fictional story of a medical examiner starting a career in a new city (San Francisco) and finding herself in at the deep end, with underworld figures determined to see that what she’s found is never used to bring them to justice. Dr. Jessie Teska is a fascinating and very realistic and relatable character, with her working-class Polish-Boston background, her massive student debts to pay off and her not-terrific taste in men.

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Caitlyn Lynch

Dec 21, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Relentless by Shawn Wilson

When homicide detective Brian “Brick” Kavanagh is assigned to the case of a young woman found floating in the Tidal Pool in Washington, D.C., the last thing he expects is a second murder to suddenly create an immediate and personal tie between himself and the victim. Hamstrung by a senior officer more interested in optics than actually solving crimes, Brick isn’t about to let this one slip through the cracks. The premise was interesting, and with victims from Guatemala and IC

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Book Review: I Dare You by Sam Carrington

Caitlyn Lynch

Dec 1, 2019
2 min

Book Review: I Dare You by Sam Carrington

Thirty years ago, a little girl went missing from a quiet Devon village, and nobody’s life was ever quite the same again. Now, the past has come calling and Anna must go back to Mapledon to find out the truth about what really happened to her friend. She’s not the only one who wants some answers about the past, though, and every question asked seems only to raise more, none of which anybody wants to answer. Told in dual timelines between the events of 1989 and the present tim

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Caitlyn Lynch

Oct 11, 2019
1 min

Book Review: I See You by Mary Burton

When the burned skeleton of a young woman is found in a locked trunk, the only hopes for identification rest with FBI Special Agent Zoe Spencer’s ability to reconstruct faces by sculpture. Finding out the victim was a high-profile missing person sets off a chain of events which culminate in the death of the victim’s sister, and Spencer must work out who is killing young women before any more die, in partnership (both personal and professional) with homicide detective William

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Book Review: The Fourth Victim by John Mead

Caitlyn Lynch

Oct 10, 2019
2 min

Book Review: The Fourth Victim by John Mead

While The Fourth Victim has a genuinely intriguing premise and the author has obviously done their research into both the realities of police work in present-day London and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), it’s very hard to read because the grammar is just glaringly awful. There are fundamental errors in the writing such as the failure to capitalize proper nouns (Asian, Muslim and Christian) and, having finished the book, I still don’t know who the protagonist of it was.

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Book Review: The Lies We Tell by Debra Webb

Caitlyn Lynch

Sep 23, 2019
2 min

Book Review: The Lies We Tell by Debra Webb

I’m gonna start off this review by saying that I haaaaate cliffhangers with a burning passion. And if that’s you too, then you should absolutely not read this book until the series is complete, because otherwise you’ll be very annoyed and frustrated. There’s an obvious overriding series arc with a ‘big bad’ who doesn’t even make an appearance in this book, but is constantly on the mind of (and manipulating from afar) the characters we’re following. There’s a character who is

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Book Review: Daddy's Girls by Sarah Flint

Caitlyn Lynch

Sep 8, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Daddy's Girls by Sarah Flint

Though this is actually the fifth in the series, I didn’t know that when I started reading and had no idea until I looked at Amazon to get the link for the review. It stands perfectly well alone. Trigger warnings for elder abuse (including murder), rape, sexual assault and drug use should be advised before you consider whether to read this book. There are actually several cases running in parallel in this police procedural set among Greater London’s southern boroughs. The aut

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Book Review: The Corpse Played Dead by Georgina Clarke

Caitlyn Lynch

Aug 24, 2019
2 min

Book Review: The Corpse Played Dead by Georgina Clarke

Before I even start reviewing this book, I just want to comment on how utterly stunning the cover for it is. It was one of the rare cases where I looked at the cover and just had to read the book. And I must say, the book really does live up to that fantastic cover, because it’s an excellent and genuinely different read, with a sex worker heroine helping Bow Street investigators solve crimes in the Georgian era. While the date isn’t stated, two real historical figures who app

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Book Review: Hide and Seek by Mary Burton

Caitlyn Lynch

Jun 20, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Hide and Seek by Mary Burton

I’m completely bemused that none of the other reviews I’ve looked at for this book seem to have picked up on the absolutely ENORMOUS plot hole I noticed. In fact, I was so bemused by it I went back and read the sections concerned several times, and then went googling to check I was correct in what I thought was the case. DNA taken in criminal cases (such as rapes) is run, in the US, against a database called CODIS, maintained by the FBI at a national level (NDIS) since 1998 i

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Book Review: City of Fear by Larry Enmon

Caitlyn Lynch

Jun 16, 2019
2 min

Book Review: City of Fear by Larry Enmon

When a gang war breaks out in Dallas detectives Frank Pierce and Rob Solis are on the case, but right from the start, things don’t add up. The first victim appears to have been scared to death, a voodoo doll left at the scene the only clue, and a military-trained sniper is taking down gang leaders left and right in a very atypical modus operandi for gang-related killings. There’s some great stuff here, particularly in the extremely realistic feel all the police scenes have, f

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Book Review: The Dark Bones by Loreth Anne White

Caitlyn Lynch

May 26, 2019
2 min

Book Review: The Dark Bones by Loreth Anne White

As a writer myself, and an insatiable reader since the age of four, there are some authors whose prose and storytelling abilities just always makes me feel so hideously inadequate. If I live to be 200, I’ll never be able to draw the descriptive narrative pictures Loreth Anne White does so apparently effortlessly, never be able to take you into the icy wastes of rural western Canada and make you feel the bitter wind knifing through your clothes as you ride along in her charact

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Book Review: Secrets Never Die by Melinda Leigh

Caitlyn Lynch

Mar 20, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Secrets Never Die by Melinda Leigh

Criminal defence attorney Morgan Dane and her fiance PI Lance Kruger return in Secrets Never Die, a story that begins with a sixteen-year-old boy walking in on his stepfather’s murder and then having to run for his life. The why of the murder and the where is the boy occupy Morgan and Lance throughout the story as they follow leads which seem to make no sense until long-buried secrets are dragged into the light. There are some nice slices of family life woven in, with appeara

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Book Review: Keep Her Close by M.J. Ford

Caitlyn Lynch

Mar 14, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Keep Her Close by M.J. Ford

Because my TBR is list always wildly out of control, it’s pretty uncommon for me to discover a new author and immediately go looking for more books they’ve written. I think Loreth Anne White was the last one - and now M.J. Ford is another. Fortunately this is only the second book in the series about D.S. Josie Masters, so I’ve only got one more to go back and read! With girls going missing from Oxford’s prestigious university colleges, Jo has to figure out the connection betw

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Book Review: The Playing Card Killer by Russell James

Caitlyn Lynch

Feb 19, 2019
2 min

Book Review: The Playing Card Killer by Russell James

The bond between twins is a fascinating thing, and not all aspects of it can be explained by science. In this gripping thriller, Russell James explores what happens when a pair of twins start out disadvantaged - by a mother who drank and took drugs while they were in the womb - and are then adopted separately. One of them, Brian, is the protagonist of the book and unaware that he ever had a twin. When he developed severe anxiety as a child, his adoptive parents took him to ge

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Caitlyn Lynch

Feb 8, 2019
2 min

Book Review: Remember Me by D.E. White

Fifteen years ago, eight teenagers went into the woods outside their small Welsh village to drink, take a few pills and have a good time. Seven came out, carrying a terrible secret. Fast forward to today and Ava Cole is living a good life; a detective with the LAPD, she returns to Aberdyth when she gets the news that her ex-husband is dying. But it seems the past is coming back to haunt her, beginning with a series of terrifying texts and building up to a chilling climax. I w

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Book Review: River Bodies by Karen Katchur

Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 21, 2019
2 min

Book Review: River Bodies by Karen Katchur

The Delaware River is almost a character itself in this novel from Karen Katchur, with Katchur’s beautiful prose bringing the scenic area on the river’s banks to life as she explores characters in a small Pennsylvania town dominated by a biker gang. Anyone who’s watched Sons Of Anarchy can probably guess which direction the plot is headed in, but it’s how it gets there which is really interesting, viewed through the eyes of veterinarian Becca Kingsley, who left her small home

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Book Review: Her Pretty Bones by Carla Kovach

Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 19, 2019
1 min

Book Review: Her Pretty Bones by Carla Kovach

Her Pretty Bones is the third in the DI Gina Harte series, and begins with an emaciated young woman falling from the back of a moving van. Too badly injured to live, she is only able to utter two words to the witness who finds her. “Save her” and with those two words, Gina knows that a clock is ticking on another young woman's life. Domestic slavery is a subject that's not explored much in fiction, with a lot of human slavery stories focusing on the sexual aspects of such cri

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Book Review: In The Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White

Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 12, 2019
2 min

Book Review: In The Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White

Loreth Anne White may just be my favorite writer of crime thrillers at the moment. Her Angie Pallorino series is quite rightly one of Amazon’s best-sellers, but before Angie, there was Mountie cop Tana Larsson. Twin Rivers, population 320, is the kind of town where secrets go to die. In the Barrens, a vast Canadian wilderness bordering the Arctic Circle, Tana Larsson doesn’t mind the cold or the endless winter nights. She’s got a secret of her own to keep. The mauling deaths

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Caitlyn Lynch

Jan 10, 2019
1 min

Book Review: Fatal by Jacqui Rose

I should probably start this review off with an Oops: I thought this was a crime thriller. As in, the kind of story where the police or other law enforcement hunt down the ‘bad guys’ and hopefully all the ‘good guys’ live happily ever after. Instead, it turned out to be what I’d call ‘gangster fic’ where there are literally no good guys. Everyone’s involved in organized crime one way or another, and though there are definite sides, with the Russo crime family apparently glory

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