Death on the Canal comes as I’ve just finished reading the Waterway Girls trilogy by Milly Adams – fabulous. So is Death on the Canal by Anja de Jager also fabulous?
Amsterdam is in the clutches of a bitter winter, and six UK tourists are dead.
I feel I’m in Amsterdam itself as Dutch detective Lotte Meerman is faced with a moral dilemma – does she investigate the murder of a suspected drug dealer, or instead stay silent to ensure that another man, responsible for the drug-related deaths of six tourists in Amsterdam, is convicted?
I was in Amsterdam recently, and I walked the streets with Lotte, summer and winter. All superbly captured, and evocative and the pages kept turning with problems arising, and over lying it all the massive difficulty of whom to trust. A stonking read. Go for it.
Death on the Canal by Anja de Jager. PB. Pub. Constable (who publish good things) £8.99. + ebook.
Golden Prey by John Sandford
Lucas Davenport has a job with the U.S. Marshals Service – an unusual one. He gets to pick his own cases, whatever they are and follow wherever they lead. There was a feel of Ian Rankin’s Rebus about this, because Rebus follows wherever cases lead, and would dearly like to pick ’em as well. And I loved it.
Written with just the right pace, wry humour, action and an absorbing central character. What more to say beyond – buy it, and all Sandford’s other novels. What a fabulous author. I bet he’s an interesting bloke too – after all, John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Camp.
Golden Prey by John Sandford. pb. pub Simon & Schuster. £8.99
One More Lie by Amy Lloyd
A thriller, a chilling one an’ all. Charlotte wants to start afresh. She wants to ditch her past, forget the childhood years in prison, and most of all, Sean. But even with a new identity has anything really changed, most of all, her? After all, there’s comfort in old familiar things, especially if they are the sum of one’s self. So soon she is heading back down towards the darkness. Can she retreat, turn away, turn back, and REALLY change her life. Well, that journey into the darkness requires a catalyst and when that comes along…
This is written with experience and style, which is strange as this is only a second novel. I liked it and though I haven’t experienced obsession I felt Charlotte’s.
One More Lie by Amy Lloyd. hb. + ebook. £12.99 pub. Century.
And lastly:
The Year that Changed Everything by Cathy Kelly.
Women’s fiction to end with. Heart-warming chatty novel which charts three women as they head into a year that could/will change everything for each of them. One is 30, one forty, one fifty and she is celebrating at a party when something heralds change.Reading this is a bit like soaking in a warm bath after battling through the tensions and nail biting of the first three novels. Or if not a bath, then perhaps sipping a great glass of wine after a hectic day…
The Year that Changed Everything by Cathy Kelly pb pub Orion £7.99