New Reviews: Brooks, Bruce, Collett, Cutts, Holt, Mackenzie, Persson, Sampson, Webster

This week's set of reviews, added to Euro Crime today, is a mixture of new reviews and a catch-up of those posted directly on the blog in the last two weeks, so you may have read some of them before if you're a regular :).

Terry Halligan reviews Kevin Brooks' Wrapped in White, the third in the PI John Craine series;

Michelle Peckham reviews Alison Bruce's The Silence, the fourth in the Cambridge-set DC Gary Goodhew series, now out in paperback;

Terry also reviews Chris Collett's Blood and Stone which sees the return of Birmingham DI Tom Mariner, after a four year gap, this time he's on holiday in Wales;

Geoff Jones reviews Lisa Cutts' debut, Never Forget which introduces DC Nina Foster;

Susan White reviews Jonathan Holt's The Abomination set in Venice and the first in a trilogy;

Laura Root reviews Jassy Mackenzie's Pale Horses, the fourth in the PI Jade de Jong series set in South Africa;

Amanda Gillies reviews Leif GW Persson's Another Time, Another Life, tr. Paul Norlen calling it "a perfect read for the summer";

Mark Bailey reviews Kevin Sampson's The Killing Pool, set in Liverpool;

Lynn Harvey reviews Jason Webster's The Anarchist Detective the third in the Max Camara series set in Valencia;

and I've just completed a crime month on my blog for teenage/ya fiction, including a review of Caroline Lawrence's The Case of the Good-Looking Corpse. A summary post can be found here.


Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here along with releases by year.

Review: Never Forget by Lisa Cutts

Never Forget by Lisa Cutts, July 2013, 416 pages, Myriad Editions, ISBN: 1908434260

Reviewed by Geoff Jones.
(Read more of Geoff's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

In 1976 five-year-old Nina Foster was rescued by the police. She and her elder sister had been abducted and Stan Maguire was the police officer in charge.

Thirty years later Nina is a detective police constable. Now retired, Stan Maguire, had become her mentor and a second father. Based at a police station on the outskirts of London, Nina is seconded to a murder investigation along with her regular police partner John Wing. The dead woman is known to have worked as a prostitute and has several stab wounds to her body. Nina and Wingsy are given various procedural leads to follow.

Further murders follow and the trail seems to lead to a children's care home in the Birmingham area. A painter and decorator working at the police station is implicated, as well as the son of an odd job man who has been employed at the police station for sometime.

Nina and her colleagues are working long hours to try and process all the information they are receiving and interview many people connected with the deceased. Nina also has the upset that Stan has prostate cancer and has to have an operation.

Nina's world starts to spiral when photos are sent to her showing her at various stages of her life! Who would have taken these?

This is the first in a new series by the author. As you would expect of a serving police woman with both her father and husband having been in the force, her knowledge of police procedure is excellent. She tries to convey the minutia of information that the police have to sift through and follow up. There is a lot going on and quite a few characters to remember.

NEVER FORGET is an impressive debut and I look forward to hearing more about Nina. The author tries also to show how the police cope with the stress of long hours and endless paperwork with humour. She seems to have been impressed so much with the tale of someone arrested for trying to sell stolen meat joints in a pub, smuggled down the front of his jogging trousers, that she mentions this incident several times!

Recommended.

Geoff Jones, July 2013