Best Book Boyfriends…

Having been a lover of reading from a time of when when i was very young, I have found that my taste in books is changing, maturing if I may say. I love super adult, contemporary, sexy, romance type of books no. And I was sitting by my window just thinking and day dreaming ( as usual 🙂 ) about who my favourite book boyfriends are from the books that I have read maybe in the past year! and so here is a small list of those hunks. 🙂

1. Christian Grey- Fifty Shades Of Grey

2. Gideon Cross- Crossfire trilogy

3. Adrian Mitchell- A touch of Crimson

4. Elijah Reynolds- A Hunger So Wild

5. Gabriel Emerson- Gabriel’s Inferno

6. Travis Maddox- Beautiful Disaster

7.Bennett Ryan- Beautiful Bastard

8. Kellan Kyle- Thoughtless

9. Will Cooper- Slammed

10. Professor Dean West- Arouse

11. Simon Parker- Wallbanger

Do share with me, who are your favorite Book Boyfriends? 🙂

Mr Monster..

AUTHOR: Dan Wells

 

SYNOPSIS:

In I Am Not a Serial Killer, John Wayne Cleaver saved his town from a murderer even more appalling than the serial killers he obsessively studies.

But it turns out even demons have friends, and the disappearance of one has brought another to Clayton County. Soon there are new victims for John to work on at the mortuary and a new mystery to solve. But John has tasted death, and the dark nature he used as a weapon—the terrifying persona he calls “Mr. Monster”—might now be using him.

No one in Clayton is safe unless John can vanquish two nightmarish adversaries: the unknown demon he must hunt and the inner demon he can never escape.

REVIEW:

Mr. Monster is a one-sitting read so gripping and unsettling that you might want to start over again at page one when you’re finished. Wells’s voice is so crisp and engaging that it feels like John is whispering in your ear—which is a bit shiver-inducing at times. I give it a solid A+ for working out the minor narrative kinks from the first book and, instead of keeping it lighter fair, delving down into the most sinister and dark places of the human psyche. Wells goes there. He’s not afraid to take his readers down the logical path that he’s set up, even though it’s not a conventional sort of story.

In this sequel to his brilliant debut, Dan Wells ups the ante with a thriller that is just as gripping and even more intense. He apologizes in advance for the nightmares

A Deniable Dearth..

AUTHOR: Gerald Seymour

REVIEW:

This very tightly written novel opens with a very respectful description of a typical sad funeral procession through Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. Reference is also made to the hundreds of service personnel returning from armed combat in Afghanistan and also Iraq, who have unfortunately lost limbs as the result of road-side bombs. MI6 have identified an engineer employed in Iran who spends all of his time designing and manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which have caused up to 66% of all coalition forces casualties since 2001 to the present day. MI6 detail one of their most senior personnel to take charge of organising a plot to kill the person concerned. Len Gibbons, the MI6 nominee, arranges to contact self-employed contractors as their status can be denied by the SIS should the contractor be captured.

This highly detailed plot is softened by the humanity of the author’s understanding, that regardless of the occupation of the subject there is always a banal background to every person. No matter how humble or exalted they may be. A lot of the focus of the book is spent on the two ‘Watchers’, Badger and Foxy, deep undercover in Iran living for many days in a dugout in very unpleasant weather conditions of extreme heat. Their target is under microphone and binocular night sight surveillance 24 hours a day. As they have come such a long distance overland to their vantage point all their food and water rations are contained in two ruck sacks. They cannot leave any indication that they were ever there, so everything that they eat or drink and all their toilet deposits have to be removed. So we get to hear of one character’s marital difficulties and the other’s interest in wildlife and general loneliness.

On the advance reading copy I used, there is a statement, “You watch, You wait, The hours slide slowly past. You’ve been there a whole day, then two, you lie under a merciless sun, in a mosquito-infested marsh. You can’t move, leave or relax. You’re stuck next to a man you despise. If they find you, you will be left to face torture and death“. The picture this paints so vividly, is of a job that must be done by our armed forces that is very hard and you just have to admire their fortitude and bravery in such adverse conditions.

This multi-faceted story keeps switching from the back-story of the watchers, to their support network in Afghanistan, to MI6 in London and also the American and kindred security connections. We also hear about the back story of the MI6 organiser locally and why his own life has not been so successful. The target, ie the Iranian Engineer who builds the IEDs we learn has a very sick wife who is suffering from a brain tumour that will need an operation soon to remove it or she may die. The date and location of the hospital that the wife of the engineer is going to go to is so crucial and is what the watchers hope to identify. The novel is very powerful and kept me gripped until the final page.

This novel is completely different to all the others that I have read by this very experienced author as they all are written with different themes and characters, which is one of the factors that makes him such an exciting writer. He is also from a journalistic background (fifteen years as an international reporter with ITN) and meticulously researches the background to all his books and it is very reassuring, reading facts and background details in his stories and knowing that they must be authentic because he has such a good reputation. Gerald Seymour has been a full-time writer since 1978. A DENIABLE DEATH is his twenty-eighth novel. This was great storytelling and I hope he writes many more and I hope I get the chance to read them. You just have to read this novel as it is absolutely gripping.

This review was done by 

Terry Halligan

The Pleasure of Reading..

Some people get pleasure from picnics and tours, some from playing games. Others like to discuss various topics and find pleasure in it. But the reading of books provides us with such pleasure as we do not get from any other activity. Great is the pleasure of books.

Literature is said to mirror society. Writers put in their books not only their own ideas and feelings, but also what they observe and find in society. The books of the past reflect the condition of the times in which they were written. By reading books written by great thinkers, we come in contact with their minds. Books enable us to know the best of different countries. So, if we want to keep abreast of the great minds of all ages, we must read books.

When we are alone, books are our best friends. They entertain us in our spare moments. Good novels, books on poetry and short stories, give great enjoyment. At times we become so absorbed in our books that we forget even our important engagements. Loneliness is no trouble for a reader.

If we are in a cheerful mood, our joy is increased by reading. When we are in a depressed and dejected mood, books console and soothe our troubled minds. They provide us with the best advice and guidance in our difficulties. Indeed, books are out best friends as they help us in our need.

Books contain grains of wisdom. They give us sound moral advice. That is why all women around the world love the Fifty Shades of Grey..Where a powerful, sex magnet, bombshell of a man meets and utterly loves and completes his woman( leaving us the readers fanning ourselves from the pure pleasure of him) It is through the reading of books that we learn to love virtue and hate sin. The reading of good books develops and elevates our character.

Now-a-days the world is changing fast. A man cannot remain in roach with the changes in his own country, or in the world, without reading the latest literature. One who wants to be respected in cultured society must keep himself well-informed. Good magazines, newspapers and other books provide us with valuable upto-date information. It gives us great pleasure to feel that our knowledge is upto-date. We get great satisfaction when we feel ourselves to be well-informed and capable of moving in any educated society. Reading of good books is the key to the store-house of pleasure.

It was the English author Bacon who said that reading makes a full man. No one can question the truth of this saying. But we cannot derive full advantage from reading, if our choice is not good. Some books are such that instead of doing any good, they do positive harm to the readers. Such books must be avoided. Cheap books, not in cost but in contents, should not be read, even if they provide some amusement and entertainment. It is the reading of good books alone which bestows upon us the maximum benefit.

Not only is reading utterly delicious, a study has just been published finding that reading for pleasure makes your brain literally grow.

So what are you waiting for?!?! get to the nearest book store and get to reading! 😀

Where Are The Children..

AUTHOR: Mary Higgins Clark

SYNOPSIS:
“Nancy Harmon was a housewife who took her two children, a boy and a girl, to the store to get some things and deciding she would only be in the store a minute, just left them in the car. When she came out of the store, her car was gone and so were the children. They were found days later in the water with plastic around their heads. Nancy was accused of murdering her two children and was eventually acquitted because the main witness came up missing. Nancy moved across the country trying to escape the reporters and prying eyes of the public, and she wanted to start a new life. A new life without her children. She plead her innocence but no one believed her so she just started over.

Nancy had started to get on with her life. She remarried, had two more children and the pain of losing her children was starting to go away when the horror was starting over again. Her children were outside playing one morning and when she went to check on them they were gone. Again. This time she was determined to find who was behind this but that was harder than she thought because everyone believed that she was guilty again. Nancy tries to unravel the secrets and has to face the horrors of her past to find the answers to whose behind this once and for all.”

REVIEW:
When i got this book off the shelf i was a little bit skeptical because i have never read a Mary Higgins book. It did not seem like it would interest me so much, but from the first page i was already captivated by the story. The author does not waste any time and we get straight to it from the very beginning, the characters are complex and have so many things going on with them, especially the main character, Nancy. She seems docile at first, the perfect house wive if you may, albeit with a lot of secrets she has not told her husband or the people around her. The story comes from the point of view of many of the characters, not just the main character and that is something i enjoyed greatly, but i have to say when i was 3 quarters into the book i new who the culprit was already. How ever that still did not make the book boring as it still brought on surprising twists and turns i was not expecting.
Needless to say i finished this book in one day and it was worth it. So get yourself a copy and get to reading it because with will be entranced from the start.

My First Read Of 2013..

Author: Amanda Kyle Williams

Book: The Stranger You Seek

 

Meet Keye Street, the new kid on the crime block. A Chinese-American private investigator with two university degrees, she used to work as a criminal profiler for the FBI before she got fired for her alcoholism. Now she’s in recovery, trying to get her private investigation firm off the ground and working as a part-time bounty hunter to make ends meet. And, just to compound matters, she’s in love with her best friend – a lieutenant in the Atlanta Police Department.

If it sounds like there’s quite a lot going on in Keye’s life then that would be putting it mildly [I might have managed to fit in a very small percentage of her voluminous backstory!]. Weirdly, this was actually one of my only – and biggest – gripes with the novel.  There’s almost too much going on in Keye’s life!

But, as a character-driven piece of crime fiction, it really is an amazingly assured debut. Reading the cover copy and press release I was struck by the setting [Atlanta, Georgia] and the theme [serial killer thriller], and immediately assumed that it was going to be in the vein of Karin Slaughter [not a bad thing. There’s even a quotation from Slaughter on the jacket].

But I wasn’t quite right. For, despite the similarities to Slaughter’s oeuvre, I actually found that reading The Stranger You Seek reminded me of Brett Easton Ellis and Jeff Lindsey’s Dexter series [indeed, there’s even a blood-spatter analyst working for the Atlanta PD in Kyle Williams’s novel!]. There’s something incredibly forceful and individual about Keye’s first-person narrative – something that, for me, was very reminiscent of Dexter’s unique voice.

At certain points, the pure amount of things going on in Keye’s life was a bit overwhelming, but there is also something fresh and different about the book and Kyle Williams’s prose that made me fly through the book at a furious rate [which was very possibly aided by the number of deaths in the book – I’m a sucker for a good serial killer novel!]. And the novel evokes the swelteringly oppressive heat of summertime Atlanta brilliantly, and there is a real feeling of suspense and danger throughout the book.

I do have to admit that I did work out the book’s major twist quite quickly, but I would like to believe that this was due to my incredibly good deductive skills [and having read far too much crime fiction!]. But, even then, it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the novella and in the end I didn’t get the killer quite right [I missed by a fraction, but it was still a miss!].

What will be interesting going forward is to see how Kyle Williams’s next book will shape up. At the moment, Keye Street blazes off the page. But she is surrounded by a constellation of equally intriguing characters, and I am looking forward to seeing how they are developed and fleshed out in future books in the series.

Fallen..

AUTHOR: Karin Slaughter

SYNOPSIS:

There’s no police training stronger than a cop’s instinct. Faith Mitchell’s mother isn’t answering her phone. Her front door is open. There’s a bloodstain above the knob. Her infant daughter is hidden in a shed behind the house. All that the Georgia Bureau of Investigations taught Faith Mitchell goes out the window when she charges into her mother’s house, gun drawn. She sees a man dead in the laundry room. She sees a hostage situation in the bedroom. What she doesn’t see is her mother. . . .

“You know what we’re here for. Hand it over, and we’ll let her go.”

When the hostage situation turns deadly, Faith is left with too many questions, not enough answers. To find her mother, she’ll need the help of her partner, Will Trent, and they’ll both need the help of trauma doctor Sara Linton. But Faith isn’t just a cop anymore—she’s a witness. She’s also a suspect.

The thin blue line hides police corruption, bribery, even murder. Faith will have to go up against the people she respects the most in order to find her mother and bring the truth to light—or bury it forever.

Karin Slaughter’s most exhilarating novel yet is a thrilling journey through the heart and soul, where the personal and the criminal collide, and conflicted loyalties threaten to destroy reputations and ruin lives. It is the work of a master of the thriller at the top of her game, and a whirlwind of unrelenting suspense.

REVIEW: This book is just action packed from the very beginning. Full of secrets waiting to be discovered, suppressed passion, murder, gangs, gun fights, love and terror. It is captivating and i could not keep away from it from the moment i read the first page until the very last.. Karin Slaughter is an amazing writer, makes you enjoy and experience the experiences along with the characters, and on that note the characters are not wildly perfect, they are damaged yet you can see a light with in them. I just loved reading this book and would suggest that you read it. 🙂

Broken..

AUTHOR: Karin Slaughter

SYNOPSIS

When the body of a young woman is discovered deep beneath the icy waters of Lake Grant, a note left under a rock by the shore points to suicide. But within minutes, it becomes clear that this is no suicide. It’s a brutal, cold-blooded murder. All too soon former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton — home for Thanksgiving after a long absence — finds herself unwittingly drawn into the case. The chief suspect is desperate to see her, but when she arrives at the local police station she is met with a horrifying sight — he lies dead in his cell, the words ‘Not me’ scrawled across the walls. Something about his confession doesn’t add up and deeply suspicious of the detective in charge, Lena Adams, Sara immediately calls the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Shortly afterwards, Special Agent Will Trent is brought in from his vacation to investigate. But he is immediately confronted with a wall of silence. Grant County is a close-knit community with loyalties and ties that run deep. And the only person who can tell the truth about what really happened is dead.

REVIEW

In Karin Slaughter’s tenth novel, she combines the characters from her two ongoing detective series, who come together to help solve a series of murders in the small town of Heartsdale, in Grant County, Georgia.( You do not need to have read the previous 2 novels to enjoy and understand this one though)

The mystery of the killings is solved at the end, but that never really seems to be the point of a Slaughter book. Rather, the process of criminal investigation provides a framework for Slaughter to explore the flawed, complex characters who work on the cases.

Slaughter never portrays the human condition in black or white – her ability to create realistic, three-dimensional characters is what makes her work stand out from so many other authors in this genre.

At the end of the book, the characters remain broken, but they’ve moved on to a new day and a new resolve to cope in a world full of bashed dreams.

If you are a reader of suspense novels, pick up Karin Slaughter.

 

 

The Wicked Girls..

Author: Alex Marwood

 

SYNOPSIS

One fateful summer morning in 1986, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time and by the end of the day are charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of sickening attacks on young female tourists in a seaside town when her investigation leads her to interview funfair cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it’s the first time they’ve seen each other since that dark day when they were just children. But with new lives – and families – to protect, will they really be able to keep their wicked secret hidden?

REVIEW

The characters in this book are painfully real; the downtrodden fairground cleaner Amber gives the reader a crushing sense of being trapped in a situation she can’t get out of while at the same time being only too aware of others’ low expectations of her, and hers of herself. The controlling and bullying Vic will remind the reader of that feeling of being in a relationship where you are always on the back foot while Kirsty hides a multitude of insecurities and secrets behind a confident exterior. The supporting characters are no less finely-drawn; fellow cleaners Blessed and Jackie and frustrated house-husband Jim don’t lack for detail and imagination.

he exploitation of the public by the media is explored in such a way that you find yourself subsequently examining your reaction to every story in the newspaper – in the hysteria around both the Whitmouth killings and the reporting of the 1986 murder there are echoes of Chris Jefferies (the wrongly-accused landlord of murder victim Joanna Yeates who was subjected to trial-by-media) and the prurient glee which surfaces every time the Jamie Bulger case pops up in the news. Marwood’s depiction of press intrusion, fact-free journalism being outrageously misleading in its use of innuendo and the baying mob mentality from the public is perfectly executed.

Even though this book was very exciting to me, i doubt i will read another book by this author, plus the ending was not really one of my favorites.. But i do suggest everyone to check out this book,