First of This Month’s Thrillers: Arkhangel by James Brabazon

Max McLean is an off-the-record assassin employed by a shady branch of the British Government to kill an elderly ex-member of the Provisional IRA terrorist group in Ireland. McLean doesn’t know the reason for his mission but doesn’t question his orders. After a few days of surveillance, he makes his move on the cottage where the target lives, but what occurs next is not what he expected.

He runs from the cottage grasping a one hundred dollar bill on which someone has scrawled the name of his mother’s hometown in Russia – Arkhangel – but he soon discovers that agents from many of the world’s security agencies want that note. Why the bill is so important remains a mystery for a long time, and much of the story is his attempt to work out its significance while trying to avoid the clutches of the agents sent to steal the note. He leaves a bloody trail of bodies across Ireland, Israel, and Russia as he does what he can to stay ahead of his pursuers.

Some of the action scenes feel unrealistic. For example, there’s a James Bond style motorbike chase, when a serendipitously positioned wooden plank allows McLean to jump over a police blockade; and a fortuitous car crash that enables his escape from a vehicle in which he’s captive. However, all the action is definitely exciting and pulls the reader through the story at breakneck speed.

With the help of a friend in Israel’s security forces, a skilful forger, and an autistic Maths student, McLean follows the thread that will lead him to discover the secret of the hundred dollar bill. It transpires that a woman he was madly in love with when they were children and who’s now a brilliant mathematician is somehow involved. To solve the mystery, McLean is dragged back to the woman he had run away from when he first joined the British Special Forces.

McLean’s mission is not what he thought. His assignment at the cottage was not the end-goal, but merely the catalyst that catapults him towards the true objective. The book opens with a very unusual prologue that’s effectively an extremely clever and beautifully written standalone short story. It’s only after reading the thriller that it becomes clear that the prologue demonstrates the method McLean’s boss uses to push him in the intended direction.

With the exception of a small lull in the middle, where McLean is trying to figure out what is happening, the action is almost continuous and frantic. Arkhangel is a page-turning thriller that’s full of fights, shoot-outs, and dramatic chases. Provided the reader is happy to ignore the tale’s occasional lapses in feasibility, it’s definitely a very exciting and intriguing read that’s to be recommended.

This Month’s Second Thriller: If You Didn’t Kill Her by Annie Taylor

Chelsea is released from prison, where she was serving a sentence for the murder of her best friend, Izzy, while they were together at university. But Chelsea didn’t do it and now wants to find out who did. There’s Jamie, the personal tutor on whom Izzy had a crush – Chelsea believes it developed into a relationship and is certain he was responsible for her death. But when Chelsea’s digging into the events around her friend’s final days results in her receiving warnings to stop investigating, she starts to wonder if someone else might be involved.

There’s Izzy’s stepbrother for another, who was always antagonistic towards Izzy, especially as they never agree on issues relating to the family’s mega-profitable business (he and Izzy both have seats on the board). Then there’s Hannah, who seemed always to dote on Izzy. Only Ayesha, Chelsea’s other university friend seems to be totally in the clear. Izzy’s mum also appears to be hiding something. And what about Joe, Chelsea’s ex-boyfriend? Does he know more than he’s telling?

Alternate chapters switch between Chelsea’s present day investigation and the time before her imprisonment. Interestingly, the chapters aren’t numbered, just headed with a date. The scenes from the past paint a picture of university life for Chelsea, Izzy, and their other friends (which seem mainly to be centred round visits to pubs and clubs and drinking too much). Those scenes show the relationships and tensions between the friends as their lives slowly head to the fateful night of Izzy’s death. It’s only in the final chapter that we learn the truth behind what happened.

The characters are all wonderfully portrayed, each with their own voice. You can hear their teenage voices as they chat in their university digs, and can perfectly see the way they roll their eyes. It’s possibly the resulting connection with the characters more than anything else that keeps the reader invested in what happens.

Unfortunately for those of us who like a bit of action in what we read, there is none in this thriller, with the exception of a little over one side near the conclusion. Despite that, though, I couldn’t help but be glued to the pages because of the way I’d come to know the characters and therefore needed to uncover the puzzle of which of them was responsible and why Izzy’s death happened.

So, if it’s very character-driven thrillers that you enjoy reading and don’t mind the absence of action, Annie Taylor’s If You Didn’t Kill Her is likely to suit you very nicely.

This Month’s Third Thrillers: Hour of the Assassin by Matthew Quirk

Ex-assassin Nick Averose earns a new living by testing the security of the rich and famous, trying to get close enough that he could assassinate them without getting caught. At the start of this thriller, he’s contracted to see how well the retired CIA head is protected. One evening, he successfully penetrates the security and stands in the house right behind his target before presenting his “you are dead” card. After a brief discussion, Averose prepares to slink away, but is attacked as he leaves the room. Averose survives the ensuing fight but discovers that the ex-head of the CIA is now dead with a knife in his back. Worse, Averose recognises the weapon as his own!

Averose manages to escape the building and grounds after several fights, but soon discovers that his troubles are far from over. Back at his office, he finds that the signed paperwork that proved he was entitled to be in the room where the murder took place is missing from his safe. Worse, faked evidence is now all around him that suggests he was stalking the dead man for personal reasons. Furthermore, the company that had supposedly hired Averose deny knowing the woman who had visited his office to sign the contract. She seems to have totally vanished and it looks as if she never existed: even the CCTV footage that would have proved she visited doesn’t show her. He has been expertly framed for the assassination.

Now on the run while trying to discover who is behind what is happening, Averose slowly pieces together the reason for what took place. He discovers a connection between him and the retired head of the CIA that Averose didn’t realise – it’s the reason someone wants them both silenced. As he teases the puzzle apart to find why that connection is putting his life at risk, he uncovers political ambitions and a secret that would destroy one man’s candidacy for president.

Averose’s enemy is an expert at manipulation and cunning, and Averose soon learns he can trust no one. He barely survives as he digs into the secret, but starts to formulate a way out of his dilemma.

Hour of the Assassin is a good read with no lulls. The climax is well written, realistic, and full of tense action, bringing the story to its successful, explosive conclusion. For some reason, though, I never really felt sympathy for any of the characters. They were fleshed out well enough, but I didn’t particularly care what happened to them, so felt no emotional attachment to the story. However, the plot and the way the action unfolded made up for that, resulting in a very exciting, page-turning thriller.

From a Writer’s Desk

My protagonist is walking the streets of China this week. I visited Shenzhen some time ago and I’m using notes from that visit together with the Chinese equivalent of Google Streetview to make it as realistic as possible. My protagonist has just collected a gun from a Chinese contact and is on his way to a factory. But they seem to be expecting him. The pencil is poised to see exactly what happens next. Although the plan is in place that defines the outcome of the scene, I don’t know exactly what action will occur until it’s written, so I’m excited to start writing that scene.

News from the Book World: Can't Read, Won't Read

Some distressing and alarming statistics have come out recently: a YouGuv survey revealed that 40% of UK adults have not read or listened to a book in the last year! That's so sad. They're missing out on so much! Even worse, a survey by the Kindred Squared charity found that 56% of parents don't think they need to introduce their children to books before they're old enough for school! Surely, that’s going to have such a knock-on effect in education.

How much does the "puff" on a cover make you want to buy the book? As an example, that’s things like a quote from Author A on the front of Author B's book that says it’s "a really exciting story". Simon & Shuster US have decided they'll no longer strongarm their authors into providing such quotes. Their new CEO felt it was too much a case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". We’d love to know your view on that. Do such quotes help you decide what to buy? When we look at some of them after we’ve finished reading the book, we wonder if the reviewer has ever actually read it themselves!

Techie Snips: a Metal Heart

Anyone fancy having a metal heart? A company called BiVacor recently created a titanium one that was successfully implanted as a temporary heart for several months while the patient waited for a living transplant. Doctors now think it may even be suitable as a long term replacement. We can't help thinking of the Wizard of Oz.

The World of Crime: Real Life Assassins

Real life can sometimes be just like scenes from a fast action thriller. In France this month, an ex-Mafia boss was shot dead after a high-speed chase along a Grenoble motorway. The assassin’s car was later found burnt out to eliminate any DNA. Police say the assassins used a military grade weapon such as a Kalashnikov.

Peak at a Blog: How Walking Boosts Creativity

Did you realise that walking boosts creativity? As well as anecdotal evidence, there are scientific studies that demonstrate it. So, everyone who does creative work needs to get walking. This month's blog digs into this fascinating discovery.

Just jog over to iancoatesthrillers.wordpressto find out more.

Freebies & Competitions

There’s much debate whether or not Dan Brown’s thrillers are well written. Now, you have the possibility of finding out for yourself courtesy of Penguin Books. They’re offering the chance to get a full set of his paperbacks. Just search for “penguin dan-brown-paperback-competition” before April 11th to get into their draw.

If you prefer Robert Gold’s thrillers, The Crime Vault (part of LittleBrown) is offering the chance of getting a bundle of his books. You’ll need to visit their Facebook page and like, share, or comment their post before April 17th. Weirdly, their post is dated November 24th, but their website says the competition runs from mid-March to mid-April 2025. Perhaps they didn’t get enough people viewing their posts, so this is their way of trying to get more views. While you’re there, you could also like their post about Mark Bellingham’s crime thrillers (their post dated Jan 7 2025) to try to get those as well.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Whistle Blower by Tess Gerritsen

Victor Holland is running for his life after a friend / colleague is murdered for having a conscience. They both worked at Wintek Biological Centre, where research that Holland’s colleague was undertaking was being used to develop a smallpox-based weapon, which is illegal. He was about to blow the whistle on the company and had collected evidence, but the company’s project is funded by groups in high authority, and they wanted him silenced. But he had also given Victor a copy of the evidence. Now, they’re after him, too.

The book opens with Victor stumbling through woods with a gunshot wound and an assassin close behind. When he staggers onto a road, he is knocked down by a car driven by Cathy Weaver. Thinking she’s responsible for his injuries, she helps him into her car and takes him to hospital. His half-conscious mutterings about being followed and that she needs to speed up sound like those of a paranoid maniac. Once Victor is safely in the hospital’s emergency room, she leaves, giving her name and the contact address of a friend she is about to stay with in case the police need to talk to her.

Later finding her friend shot dead, Cathy doesn’t initially realise it’s related to Victor Holland, but when he subsequently makes contact with her, he convinces her that her life is now also at risk. Together, they go on the run, unable to trust anyone, even the authorities. It becomes evident they cannot hide for ever, so they try to find a way to make Wintek’s project public. But Wintek has already recovered the case of papers that Holland had been carrying, so how are they going to find the incontrovertible proof they need?

Whistleblower is a tense and exciting thriller and one of the best I’ve read in a long time. The novel is beautifully written, and I felt I was there with them for every scene. The way their plans are continually thwarted at the last second is masterful writing. Everything is totally believable, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough into the night as I kept up with the pair, desperate to know what would happen next.

This Month’s Second Thriller: The Collector by Daniel Silva

A billionaire is murdered and a valuable artwork stolen from his safe. Gabriel Allon, ex-Israeli agent, now art restorer, is asked to try to find the missing painting. It turns out to be one by Vermeer that was stolen decades before and presumed lost forever. Allon uses his many art-world contacts to locate the thief who took it from the billionaire, but it soon becomes evident that she (Ingrid Johansen) was not the murderer. Something far more serious than a stolen painting is going on.

Allon saves Johansen from an attempt on her life, and the pair team up to find who was behind the attack. Soon, it’s evident that Russian agents are involved, and chapters become interlaced with scenes following high ranking Russian officials, and the reader learns of their plans, activities that involved the murdered billionaire.

Much more is at stake than a Vermeer painting: a plan to give Russia a rapid victory in its war against Ukraine is involved, with potential worldwide consequences. As the book races to its exciting conclusion, Johansen becomes the focus of the story as she attempts to photograph a highly secret Russian dossier that lays out their plans. The final climax on the Russian-Finnish border is exciting and full of action as she and Allon try to flee Russia.

I would describe The Collector as a slow burn thriller. The early chapters are free of action but build the characters for us and slowly draw us into what’s happening. It’s a good read that reminds me of the style of Peter May. Very much recommended, provided you don’t want lots of adrenaline-fuelled action from page one.

This Month’s Third Thrillers:Rogue by Mark Sullivan

Rogue is a brilliant page-turning thriller that I found impossible to put down. Robert Monarch – expert thief who works for the CIA – it under instructions to break into an industrial unit where he’s told Al-Qaeda hold their records. He and his team must steal one particular computer hard drive, but what Monarch encounters makes him abandon the mission and decide he’s had enough of his job. Instead, he decides to put his skills to use elsewhere.

He grew up in the slums of Buenos Aires but was rescued by a nun who dedicates her life to helping children from the slums find a way out of poverty. Now, he wants to repay her big time. However, his former boss – the cunning and manipulative Jack Slattery – wants him to steal something, and has a plan to force him back into service.

While Monarch is in San Moritz with his upper-class girlfriend, he intervenes when an attempt is made to assassinate a guest at the hotel where he’s staying. It transpires that the man he saves is a Russian gangster. When Monarch introduces himself afterwards as a security consultant, the Russian immediately offers a generous fee for him to advise on the security of his mansion, which he wants better protected against any future would-be assassins. However, things get out of hand when the Russian learns Monarch’s background and tries to employ him to steal a component for a nuclear reactor that his biggest competitor wants to buy. When Monarch refuses, the Russian adopts more drastic measures, and Monarch is forced to go ahead.

He calls in a team-mate from his last CIA job to help, and learns that all bar one of the team that helped him break into the warehouse were dismissed shortly afterwards. Sensing some sort of cover-up, Monarch tries to get to the truth of what was actually in the warehouse that they’d been told to burgle (it didn’t contain the Al-Qaeda records they’d been told). The action continues apace as they uncover conspiracies and greed in high places, while simultaneously trying to find a way to get out of the Russian’s clutches.

But Slattery’s plan is as devious as it is clever, and Monarch soon realises that his old boss is manipulating events to get what he wants.

Rogue has many twists and turns and a lot of great action sequences. I desperately wanted to know what was going to happen to Monarch and how he was going to resolve the difficult situations he finds himself in. It’s a great story that’s beautifully written and has a very satisfying conclusion.

From a Writer’s Desk

Wow! It’s been a hectic couple of months. Ian’s latest thriller, Backlash, was released mid-December, so a lot of his time has gone helping his publisher with promotional work. No time for writing the next thriller in January! The workload from that should fall away as we enter February, so the pencil will come out again then. In the end, it was a bit of a last minute dash at the publisher, with the ARCs (advanced reader copies) not available until only days before the release. As a result, reviews have been a bit slower to appear than would have been liked, but they’re starting to arrive now. One we particularly like is one reviewer who said, “the pace was so fast, it was hard to breath”. Perhaps we’ll use that on advertising somewhere.

News from the Book World

It’s sad to see that WHSmith is looking to pull out of the British High Street. It’s a pity that another book outlet is going to disappear, but it seems to make financial sense for them. They’ll focus on their shops in airports and railway stations, which have traditionally done well.

It’s not only in the UK that this kind of thing is happening. In the US, Costco recently announced it would not be stocking books all year round in the majority of its stores, citing how much labour time it takes to stack books on the shelves. Here’s the twist, though: their book sections will magically reappear at holiday times!

Of course, January is also when we get to see The Bookseller’s shortlist for the “weirdest title of the year” award. Not surprisingly, they come from non-fiction titles, many from university presses! Titles like "The Great Wall of China: You Won’t Believe This, But It’s in China" and "How to Dungeon Master Parenting" are strong contenders in our minds

Techie Snips

There’s been a lot about robots in the news recently. The one that struck our eye this month was news of a new speed record for a robotic dog: ten seconds to run a hundred metres. Its design was inspired by studying panthers and kangaroo rats.

There have also been some interesting advances in the use of hydrogen to power boats: a demonstrator was produced recently that’s very efficient at using solar power to extract hydrogen from the water, which it then uses to power its motors. Are we going to end up with boats that don’t need to carry a fuel source?

Peak at a Blog

Have you ever wondered what sorts of “rules” cover artists work to when creating book covers? How does a good front cover make you click on it online or pick up the book in a shop to learn more? This month's blog looks at some of the subliminal messages that front cover images give, and how they affect your view of the book.

Hop along to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress to have a read.

Freebies & Competitions

If you enjoy historic fiction, you might like to enter the National Book Tokens draw for a copy of Emma Donoghue’s thriller The Paris Express. Entries close on Feb 6th.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Traitor by Ava Glass

Emma Makepiece works for a small MI6 team that specialises in investigating Russian threats. Their current focus is on a group of three men suspected of arranging to sell chemical weapons to a third-world country. Two of them are Russian, one an oligarch, but the third member is currently unidentified. The team is investigating, but when one of the MI6 agents is killed by a nerve agent, it’s clear the Russians have learnt they are being watched.

t’s decided that the weakest link in the trio is the oligarch Andrei Volkov, and the team therefore decide to concentrate on him. Volkov spends much of his time on his superyacht, and Emma is sent undercover as a member of the yacht’s housekeeping team. Her mission is to find evidence of Volkov’s link to an arms dealer suspected of being involved in the sale, and, if possible, to identify the trio’s third man.

Although the oligarch’s bodyguard, Carl Grogan, is instantly suspicious of Emma’s presence, he is unable to find any cracks in her cover story. Her time on board is very tense, but she successfully finds information that proves the oligarch’s connection to the arms dealer. However, before she can get away with it from the yacht, Grogan grabs her, saying he has received information that she is an MI6 agent. How has he found out? Only a tiny circle of intelligence agents knew of the mission, so is there a traitor in their team?

Emma manages to escape and overhears Volkov discussing a meeting planned in Barcelona. She watches the venue and gets close enough to glimpse the trio’s mysterious third man and hear a snatch of his speech. Although it’s not enough to identify him, she does detect a British accent. He disappears without her seeing him again, and Grogan captures her; Grogan and Volkov escort her away by car.

During the journey, Volkov takes them to a nightclub owned by one of his close friends, where he insists he will interrogate Emma alone, refusing to let Grogan join them. Once Emma and Volkov are ensconced inside, the Russian confesses that he is scared of the men he is involved with and believes they plan to kill him. He begs her to arrange MI6’s help, in return for which, he will tell them about the trio’s activities and will testify against them. Emma believes him and contacts her handler. A plan is quickly put into place: Volkov must get to French soil, where they will be able to whisk him away safely. However, when Volkov and Emma try to leave the nightclub by a rear exit to avoid Grogan, they are grabbed at gunpoint and escorted back to the yacht, where Emma is imprisoned.

Boat chases, fights, and action sequences follow, before Emma is eventually safely back in London. Volkov reaches France on his yacht but when he fails to contact Emma, the MI6 team need to formulate a new plan to find Volkov. Emma is no longer allowed to work on that side of the case because Grogan will recognise her. Instead, she joins an investigation into unmasking the traitor who leaked the information about her being on the yacht.

She decides the best way to get to the traitor is via the arms dealer. In a daring attempt to get close to him, Emma befriends his young mistress. Through her, Emma gets an invitation to a lavish party that the arms dealer is using as cover to talk to the third man of the group, an unexpected bonus that leads to an exciting and satisfying conclusion.

Ava Glass’ thriller is very tense with plenty of action. Emma is a great protagonist, someone the reader can quickly rally behind. It’s a great story that’s beautifully told and full of diverse characters who come alive on the page. You feel you are there with Emma as she fights to stay alive while uncovering the third man of the trio and the traitor in her team.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Battle Sight Zero by Gerald Seymour

This rather unusual thriller has limited action and no plot twists but grips you by its powerful sense of atmosphere and brilliantly portrayed characters. A Manchester-based terror group wants a supply of automatic rifles and are testing a new route for smuggling them from Libya to England. It will be just a single Kalashnikov first to check the effectiveness of the transportation method and the smugglers being used. Presumably to save cost, they select a very old weapon, scratched and dirty for the test run. A drugs dealer in the rough tower blocks just outside Marseille agrees to help, agreeing to collect the gun from a boat and hand it to a woman who will meet him in Marseille. She is one of the main characters – Zeinab – a Muslim student who has been radicalised by her two cousins. She is young and pretty and, once out of her Muslim dress, cannot look less like a jihadist. She is ideal for smuggling the weapon on its final leg of the route through the Channel Tunnel into England.

At the start of the story, she is becoming very friendly with a young lorry driver, Andy Knight. It is clear that he is soon devoted to her and will do anything she asks. Zeinab and her cousins hatch the plan – she will persuade him to go to France with her on a short holiday, during which she will collect the weapon and hide it in his car. They will look like the perfect young couple in love and on their return from holiday. No-one will suspect what they carry or search their vehicle.

As the story develops, we slowly realise that Andy Knight is not what he seems. Bit by bit, we learn it isn’t his real name and that he has a secret past. The story’s straightforward linear plot follows him and Zeinab as they make their journey and she collects the weapon. More of his background is slowly revealed, and we feel the danger that he is in. At the collection in Marseille, things rapidly go wrong and events spiral out of Zeinab’s control.

One clever part of the thriller is its structure. All the way through, the story of the smuggling is interspersed with events in the life of the Kalashnikov that is being carried. We see it being made and witness key events in its life – those who have owned it, used it, and died with it, and how it was passed from owner to owner across the years before ending up in Zeinab’s hands.

You really get to know the characters and get inside their heads, which is what gives this thriller its attraction. Some readers may find its very chopped style of writing a little difficult to get used to, especially as it extends to some of the dialogue. However, the strength of the story’s characters and the power with which the localities are described makes up for this and results in an interesting and intriguing read.

This Month’s Third Thriller: Coming to Find You by Jane Corry

Coming to Find You is a domestic psychological thriller. Although it has no action to speak of, a powerful need to know more about what is happening to the characters (and why) rapidly draws the reader into the pages. Nancy’s over-possessive and violent step-brother has killed his father and her mother. He is imprisoned for the crime, and Nancy, desperate to escape the journalists who now hound her for “your side of the story”, flees London to an old house her mother had inherited on the Devon coast, Tall Chimneys, a former bed-and-breakfast.

It’s rapidly apparent that there’s something more to the murders than was described at the trial. As we go through the story, this secret is slowly revealed in little snippets of what happened on the day of their deaths and the event that caused it.

But it’s far from the only secret.

In parallel with Nancy’s story, we follow the life of Elizabeth, her grandmother, who ran the bed-and-breakfast during the war, taking in two evacuee girls and their teacher. Their story is beautifully interwoven with Nancy’s modern-day troubles to highlight interesting parallels between the actions of the two women. Elizabeth, too, has secrets she wants to keep hidden, especially after events spiral out of control when she rescues a young German airman.

All the way through, we realise that everyone has secrets they don’t want to share, things about which they feel guilty and which always sit heavily on their consciences. These are slowly revealed as the two parallel stories unfold, and add to the excitement and page-turning nature of the thriller.

The author has used her research into life during war to make the events in Elizabeth’s life interesting and realistic and give us a deftly painted picture of what life was like then. All the scenes totally come to life on the page, as do the characters. Their individual stories are so powerful that the reader is forced to read on. Even though I don’t usually enjoy stories with so little action, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, sitting up later to get to the end to see how the characters’ problems would be resolved. It’s a very satisfying read.

From a Writer’s Desk

Ian’s publishers have confirmed the publication date for his exciting new crime thriller, Backlash. Keep an eye out for it on December 17th this year. Just in time for Christmas! The knock-on effect is that nothing more has happened on the work-in-progress assassin thriller. That’s been put to one side to help get ready for promoting the new book. There was great excitement when the covers were reviewed for the e-book and paperback versions. It’s always a great moment for authors when they see the artwork. This one’s great: it’s really eye-catching, and we can’t wait to share it with you. Blurbs and elevator pitches and tag-lines are all being bandied about right now.

An early version of a landing page for the new thriller went live on Ian’s website a few days ago. You can have a sneak preview by going to iancoatesthrillers.co.uk and clicking on “The Thrillers”. There’s a link there to the new page. It’ll give you an early view of what the book is about.

News from the Book World

We were saddened this month when we received news from the National Literacy Trust that the number of children (aged 8 to 18) who read for pleasure has dropped again to only one in three! It made our hearts sink to realise how many children are missing out on what can be a lifelong benefit. This is the lowest number they’ve ever recorded. What do you think are the reasons, and are there any solutions? We’d love to hear your reviews.

Also this month, the Collins Dictionary team released their Word of the Year 2024: “brat”. It means “a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”, and was inspired by Charli XCX’s album of the same name. What alternative word would you nominate for the 2024 award? Please hit reply to let us known.

Techie Snips: Rats Sniff for Contraband

If we were in April rather than November, we would have put this news item down as an April fool. We still struggle to believe it. According to the Science News magazine, giant rats have successfully been trained to sniff out illegal goods being smuggled through African ports. They can find things like elephant tusks, rhino horns, and blackwood hidden in the containers. Wow! Really? Great Thrillers Club is gob smacked, but it seems to be true.

Peak at a Blog: Expletives and Profanities

Thrillers need to be realistic, but does that mean the characters must litter their sentences with expletives? This month’s blog tries to answer that question and considers what a couple of best selling thriller writers think about it.

Hop along to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

Freebies & Competitions

To mark the release of the latest Jack Reacher novel, Deadgoodbooks has a number of competitions running (all ending Nov 22nd, so get your skates on quick!). You could receive coffee for a year, a coffee maker, or an of-road driving experience.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Dead Rich by GM Shaw

Dead Rich is an absolute page turner that I couldn’t put down. Musician Kai has no idea that his new girlfriend, Zina, is the daughter of a Russian billionaire. She’s an art student studying in London, bright, strong-willed, and witty. When Zina’s mother demands she joins a family holiday sailing round The Caribbean, Zina reluctantly agrees but persuades Kai to join her. Suddenly confronted by so much ostentatious wealth, he feels totally out of place. He’s also disturbed by the very high level of security and the obvious tension in Zina’s father and the security personnel.

Erin, the sullen First Mate, is the other main character. She’s a highly skilled sailor for whom life at sea is everything. Erin is more down-to-earth than her employers and is the only person on board to whom Kai feels any affinity.

One night, the yacht is attacked. Amidst machine gun fire, Zina and her parents lock themselves in the boat’s panic room, taking Kai with them. Someone hammers on the door, begging to be let in, but Zina’s father refuses to deviate from the security protocol and won’t allow the door to be opened. Eventually, the shooting stops and they hear a boat leaving. They think it’s all over and that they’ve survived but soon realise something even worse is in store for them.

While effectively imprisoned together, Zina’s father is forced to explain what is happening: he and some business associates wanted to see a different Russia and had been discussing how to bring about a change in their country’s leadership. Their musings had become known, and it’s never good to be an opponent of the Russian government. His business partner has been murdered, and he knows he’s next on the list.

Erin escaped the attack and meets up with Kai when he eventually gets out of the panic room. But they were witnesses to the attack, and an assassin is now on their tail to silence them.

Dead Rich is an extremely tense and exciting thriller with a good plot and characters who come alive on the page. They are all magnificently portrayed, alive, and individual, each with their own clear personalities. It is definitely a great read

This Month’s Second Thriller: Spy Games by Adam Brookes

This very realistic spy thriller comes from the pen of a former BBC China correspondent. He uses his experience to weave a story about the consequences of in-fighting in the higher echelons of the Chinese leadership.

Reporter Phillip Mangan was a low-level British spy operating in China until something went badly wrong. In disgrace, he now works as a reporter in Ethiopia, but a mysterious Chinese man who calls himself “Rocky” makes contact. He hints at knowing Mangan’s background and explains he has information that he wants Mangan to pass to the relevant authorities. Eventually, Mangan contacts Trish Patterson, his former handler from MI6 and gives her the news.

Meetings of departmental heads are convened, but there is scepticism about the veracity of what Mangan is being told, and questions are raised about Mangan’s judgment. However, Rocky hands over the whereabouts of a wanted Malaysian terrorist, information he has stolen from confidential Chinese military files. MI6 passes the intelligence to the Americans, who launch a sudden and successful drone strike. Rocky has proved that he has access to useful information, but what he wants in return is unclear. Why is he doing this? Can his motives be trusted?

It’s agreed to re-activate Mangan as an agent and to get him to act as Rocky’s handler. Mangan flies to London, where he’s given additional training and a cover story before being sent to Taiwan, where it is felt he and Rocky can meet safely without the Chinese authorities noticing. A flow of useful information about the Chinese military starts to flow back to London. However, it’s not long before Mangan is convinced he is being watched. Patterson wants to bring him back to safety, but those around her in the security services insist he stays in place. Suddenly, local Taiwanese authorities close in. Now, the excitement and pace of the story accelerate. Rocky has physical assets to hand over – a memory stick and a sample of a new material being used in a fighter jet – but the handover is compromised and goes badly wrong. The package does eventually get back to MI6, where its value is quickly recognised. But questions still abound over Rocky’s motives.

Mangan was injured during his escape from the handover, but one of Rocky’s associates helps him to get away. Rocky and Mangan stay together and are smuggled out of Taiwan to what Rocky believes is a secure location close to the Chinese border. However, Mangan finds himself Rocky’s prisoner, and Rocky makes him send a demand to MI6: in exchange for Mangan’s release, Rocky wants some information that only London can provide. Now, the readers see his true motives. But how will the British security services react to that demand?

The pace ratchets up. Patterson is sent there with two SAS soldiers in an attempt to exfiltrate Mangan. But everything is not what is seemed, and people around her in MI6 are simultaneously issuing different instructions to other operatives. The result is a tense and very realistic ending.

Spy Games can best be described as a slow-burn thriller, which goes hand-in-hand with its realism – this is no James Bond story – but the final chapters pick up the pace considerably to bring us to the thriller’s exciting conclusion.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine

Imagine your spouse was a serial killer but you never knew. What if they used the locked garage attached to your house to dismember their victims, but you were totally unaware?

When a drunken driver crashes his car into Gina and Mel Royal’s garage, the broken wall reveals the horrors inside. Gina returns home with her children to find police tape sealing off her house and herself under arrest. After all, how could she possibly not be involved? Gina is charged as her husband’s accomplice. At their trial, her husband is sentenced to life imprisonment, but she is exonerated. That doesn’t stop the internet trolls and self-appointed vigilantes, though, who don’t believe she is innocent. They’re baying for her blood.

Gina is forced to adopt new identities for herself and her children and move house multiple times. Finally, though, it seems as if she has found somewhere to settle, and the trolls are giving up trying to find her – she now lives with her children in an old house on the banks of the remote Stillhouse Lake.

But then a body is fished from the water. It seems to carry all the hallmarks of her husband’s killings, yet he is incarcerated on Death Row. A neighbour claims she saw someone looking like Gina going out in a boat at the time the body was dumped, and Gina is questioned by the police, who quickly discover her true identity. Perhaps she was never innocent in the first place and is now continuing to kill. She is released due to insufficient evidence, but when a second body turns up, things get progressively worse.

Her husband is managing to reach out from prison to ruin her life. He has somehow recruited an accomplice near Stillhouse Lake, but who is it? Who can Gina really trust in this small community? Nearly as bad, someone has leaked her new address online, and the trolls have noticed.

The book is best described as a well-written psychological thriller. In particular, Gina’s children are brilliantly portrayed. Their mannerisms, their voices, and how they react to what’s happening are all so realistic that they live on the page. At times, I wanted to shake the children to try to make them realise the seriousness of the situation they’re in and why their mum is insisting on certain behaviours.

There are no significant action sequences until the final sixty pages, but when they start, they really get going. Until that point, it’s the tension that keeps readers “on the edge of their seats”. I quickly felt emotionally involved, outraged at how the trolls make Gina’s life a misery, and how she is unfairly treated by those around her. It’s virtually impossible to put the book down in either the psychological-thriller section or its fast-paced action ending.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Kill List by Frederik Forsyth

Several apparently random murders of high-profile men and women have occurred around the world, but a link between them becomes apparent when police compare the murderers' internet histories. They reveal that they were all adamant watchers of online sermons preached by a previously unknown radical Islamic fanatic. In his broadcasts, he urges viewers to kill local high-profile Westerners. The cleric, whom the authorities codename “The Preacher”, doesn’t teach in a mosque, and the IP address used for his broadcasts are cleverly hidden.

A small US team is given the task of finding and eliminating The Preacher, and their best operative – known throughout the story as “The Tracker” – takes the assignment. Through clever detective work and help from an autistic computer whiz kid, The Tracker finally identifies the location from which the broadcasts are coming – a warehouse in Somalia. He heads there, but The Preacher never goes to the transmission site himself, instead sending recordings there for an associate to upload. With more clever investigative work, The Tracker finally identifies The Preacher’s true identity.

With the assistance of an Israeli undercover agent already embedded deep into that area of Somalia, The Tracker succeeds in finding The Preacher and following him when he makes a journey across country. A drone strike is forbidden, so The Tracker must go there in person with a small team of elite troops to deal with The Preacher once and for all.

In typical Forsyth style, almost every section is crammed with facts, history, and related information. Although these digressions from the plot are interesting, some readers may feel they slow the pace too much. In many instances, however, they provide the background to the areas of the world where the action occurs, which is highly informative and helps to build a picture of the location and how its inhabitants behave.

Provided you don’t find these information-bombs too disruptive, you’ll find this is undoubtedly a well-written thriller that transports you to each place and makes you feel the tension. It’s highly realistic and (as always with Forsyth’s writing) very informative about the book’s locations, in this instance Pakistan and Somalia.

From a Writer’s Desk

I finished another round of edits on Backlash recently, and it looks like the editor is happy with the latest draft. The publisher should be getting into full-swing now, although I guess holiday season has slowed things down. They’re aiming at a November launch. Type-setting is their next step, in parallel with the cover art. I’m really excited to see what they come up with for the cover. They asked if I had any suggestions some time ago, and I sent screenshots of a few covers of recent thrillers that had elements of what was in my mind. A woman running away through a forest was what I wondered about, but who knows if that’s what we’ll end up with. We’ll have to be careful it doesn’t give the wrong impression, though: the woman is the book’s hero rather than victim.

The editor also raised a question about the title, which surprised me because another publisher who was interested in taking the thriller reckoned that the title “would almost sell the book by itself”. What’s your view? Is Backlash a good title? Would it get you to click on it to find out more about the book, or to pick it up in a bookshop to read the back cover? I’d really appreciate your views – please hit reply and let me know.

News from the Book World

A first edition of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale sold at auction recently for a huge sum. The seller had picked it up for almost nothing at a car boot sale, not because of what it was, but because she thought the cover was really pretty!

A lovely story came out of Rome this week: a thief broke into an apartment there but was distracted by a book he found and started to read it. It waylaid him so much that he ended up getting caught. When the author heard, he’s reported as having said he wanted to contact the thief to send him a copy of the book because the man hadn’t managed to get to the end!

Techie Snips: Listening for Fingerprints

Did you think using your fingerprint to secure your phone was safe? Thank again! A technology termed “Printlistener” has been developed that can recreate your fingerprint by studying the noise is makes as you swipe it across the screen. The software uses the phone’s microphone to detect the tiny scrapes made by the ridges of your fingerprint and can recreate the fingerprint from the sound. If you want to know more, a nice article about it is still available online on The Independent newspaper’s website.

The World of Crime

Did you know you can hire an ex-Mossad spy? An agency know has Shibumi Strategy has recently set up an office in London to rent out their services. Want a hand with a bit of surveillance? If you can afford them, you know who to call.

Peak at a Blog: What's Cryptocurrency All About?

In thrillers, we increasingly see people using cryptocurrency as a means of anonymously transferring large amounts of money. In my current work-in-progress novel, the protagonist uses it to buy the services of a fixer. But what is cryptocurrency and how does it work? This month’s blog provides a brief (and simplified) look at cryptocurrency to explain the basics

Hop along to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

Freebies & Competitions

Do you fancy a copy of Harry Giller’s new thriller, Knows No Bounds? Visit the Female First e-magazine online and click on their Competitions tab. Entries are open until mid-September.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Tracer by Jason Dean

Tracer is the first in Jason Dean’s Korso series and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s beautifully written, is packed with action, has characters that come alive on the page, a unique protagonist, and a plot that follows a logical progression.

Korso is referred to as a “salvage expert”, someone who tracks down lost items. His clients are often criminals who have had property stolen and want it recovered but for various reasons, don’t want to involve the authorities. Korso has built a reputation for discretion and a high success rate.

In Tracer, Korso is blackmailed into hunting for a large shipment of extremely expensive caviar that went missing while being flown to its destination. The plane disappeared from radar during the flight but wreckage was never found, despite extensive searches. What Korso isn’t told, but which he soon works out, is that one of the cans doesn’t contain what it says on the label; it’s because of this one particular item that its owner wants the shipment recovered. The tension is racked up because Korso is given a time limit to recover the goods: failure will result in his true identity being made public, which Korso cannot afford because there’s a powerful man out there who wants him dead.

Korso sets out on the assumption that the plane was hijacked and starts investigating the pilots and their relatives. He comes across an old newspaper report of a theft from a cargo plane in Brazil: one of the men arrested for the crime, Dan Kujan, is the boy friend of a sister of one of the pilots from the missing plane. Kajun was recently released from prison and Korso tracks him down, only to discover a corpse. The mobile phone they find, though, provides contact details for the girlfriend. They eventually find her, and she tells them how she overheard Kajun discussing plans with two Americans. She knows one of their names, and Korso finds it in the dead man’s mobile contacts. Giving the number to an investigative firm, he gets the American’s address.

And so the trail starts, eventually leading them to a lock-up where they hope to find the missing cargo. There is nothing there but they are immediately contacted by a mysterious caller who witnessed them breaking in. He offers to sell them the stolen goods but the proposal to meet is a trap, and they are nearly killed in an exciting and well-written action section.

The trail eventually takes them to a thrilling finale in the Guyanese jungle, where it’s not only the men behind the robbery who create the danger for Korso.

Tracer is a satisfying and exciting read: it’s Korso’s experience and intelligence that allow him to track down the stolen items in a believable and logical progression from clue to clue, and his skills at fighting save their lives many times throughout. One interesting point is that there is no “bad language” in the book – it could be classified as a “clean read” – and this is done successfully with no impact on the story’s realism.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Cold Black by Alex Shaw

Trouble is brewing in Saudi Arabia, and key members of the royal family are being threatened and attacked. In Riyadh, a bomb explodes in the grounds of Prince Al Kabir’s home, destroying many of his valuable prized possessions. Later, members of a visiting foreign trade group are kidnapped; they are going to be executed unless all Americans are driven from Saudi lands.

However, the events are not what they seem: this is more than local unrest. The story quickly introduces us to the directors of the Russian KGB, the Ukrainian Secret Service, and the Belarusian KGB. There is concern in Russia that their country is losing their dominance as the world’s leading oil supplier. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is increasing its oil sales and becoming a serious competitor. The director of the Russian KGB has a plan to change that position, and the three men are behind the insurrections in Saudi: if that country appears unstable, America will reduce its reliance on them for oil, thereby restoring Russia’s market dominance.

A clandestine recording of a meeting in which the head of the Russian KGB talks about this plan is leaked to MI5, but no-one can identify the second man in the recording. Aidan Snow is sent undercover to Saudi Arabia to try to uncover what is happening and to locate the hostages. The security services manage to track a courier who delivers the terrorists’ demands to the newspaper, following him to a meeting point in the desert. Aidan Snow and six SAS operatives are dropped nearby to observe what is happening. They rescue the hostages but, to their horror, it becomes evident that two are imprisoned elsewhere. The main climax now comes in the form of a race-against-time attempt to find them deep in the desert before their captors learn the others have been rescued. Aidan Snow finds himself alone, exhausted, and dangerously dehydrated.

In the tradition of good spy stories, another conspiracy is also happening behind the scenes in which one of the three spy masters seeks to achieve his own personal goal. It’s only in the final climax that people’s true motivations are uncovered.

Cold Black is an exciting and intelligent thriller that will be enjoyed by fans of Stephen Leather. I occasionally struggled to remember who was who because quite a few characters with similar foreign names come and go throughout the scenes, but the overall story was very enjoyable with good tension and action.

This Month's Bonus Thriller: The Ninth Directive by Adam Hall

I was excited to see that Ostara republished some of Adam Hall’s Quiller thrillers. I enjoyed many of them in the seventies, and was interested to see how well they withstood the test of time. To my surprise, I found that The Ninth Directive still feels fast-paced, showing how far Adam Hall (one of Elleston Trevor’s pennames) was ahead of his time. The staccato style of writing with short, rapid sentences feels modern, and the only point at which the thriller shows its age is when he explains what a laser is, facts that everyone understands these days.

Quiller – a British agent – is a somewhat acidic, strong-willed character whom the reader loves and gets behind; there is a slight reminiscence of Phil Marlow in him. Quiller is sent to Bangkok to prevent an assassination: one of the English royal family is due to visit the country, but the intelligence service has picked up rumours that an attempt will be made on their life during the trip. When it’s discovered that a well known international assassin has crossed into the territory, it appears he has been hired for the job. Quiller’s instructions are to find him, work out his plan, and to be there to kill him the moment he’s about to take the shot. The British government can’t be seen to kill him in cold blood, but it’s okay to stop him when it’s the only way to protect the VIP.

Quiller works out how the assassination is planned to take place, following clues picked up from watching the assassin and the small team he has put together. But all is now what is seems. There is a different plan underway, and Quiller doesn’t immediately recognise what’s happening. The story accelerates to a final exciting conclusion, when Quiller must use all his wits to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Don’t be put off when Amazon reports the book only has 172 pages. Ostara has chosen a font size similar to the original (i.e. much smaller than is typical today) and uses large pages with minimal white space, achieving nearly sixty percent more words per page than a typical modern publication.

The Ninth Directive is an exciting thriller that hasn’t shown its age. It’s perhaps not the best of the Quiller stories, but, nonetheless, makes a good introduction to this likeable, intriguing, and interesting main character.

From a Writer’s Desk

Wow! What a hectic few months. My next thriller, Backlash, finally seems to be getting through my publisher’s system, and I was excited to receive the second round of edits recently. It always surprises me how many words are subtly different between the UK and America. With the need for one edition to work on both sides of the Atlantic, my editor pointed out several places where a phrase I used might not be understood. Would you know what was meant when someone says, “I’ll come with you, so you don’t do a bunk”? I was asked to either explain the word or change it to something else.

At the same time as working through those latest edits, I’ve also been working with another editor on a different thriller. It did get confusing once or twice when hopping between the two books, finding myself conflating the two plots and confusing a character in one book with someone similar in the other. It’s particularly difficult because I finished writing Backlash several years ago, so it’s not as fresh in my mind. Detailed spreadsheets written at the time of plot breakdowns and character descriptions are such a useful reference!

News from the Book World: Door-to-Door Books

We were staggered recently to learn about the history of Avon, the cosmetics company. Did you know it all started with books? David H. McConnell sold books from door-to-door in New York. Realising that most of the people who answered to the door to him were women, he started to help his sales patter by also offering them free samples of perfume. Soon finding that the perfumes seemed more popular than his books, he founded the California Perfume Company in 1886 and started manufacturing five floral fragrances full-time. Just over fifty years later, it was rebranded as Avon, and “Avon calling” started to ring through the country. Shame about the books, though.

(Thanks to The Hustle for their recent article on the subject.)

Techie Snips: Robotic Petrol Attendant

Robots, robots, everywhere. At least in some countries. We’ve heard of robotic receptionists at Japanese hotels in the past, but how about using a robot to fill your car with fuel? The United Arab Emirates is doing just that, with the aim of reducing spillages and saving time, as well as removing the need for their employees to spend time outside in the scorching UAE heat. An app on your phone allows you to tell a robotic arm how much fuel you require. Using artificial intelligence, the robot identifies the type of vehicle so that it knows how to access the fuel tank, and then uses cameras and other sensors to fuel the car to the precise amount requested. No more aiming to spend £50.00 exactly, only to find you didn’t quite get it right, and you’re being asked for £50.01!

Peak at a Blog: The Pace of Thrillers

Are thrillers these days faster-paced than they used to be? This month's blog takes a quick look at why this has changed. You can read it here: iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com

Freebies & Competitions

National Book Tokens are celebrating this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival by offering you a chance to get your hands on a large book token. Just think how many thrillers you could add to your TBR pile with that! To enter, drop in to their website before the end of July and click the tab at the top of the page.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: The Watchman by Robert Crais

Spoilt rich girl Larkin Barkley crashes into another vehicle while out racing her sports car through the streets in the early hours of the morning. The occupants are not seriously injured, and one of the passengers hurries away from the scene on foot without saying anything. Larkin goes to help the others, but they drive off. Astonished, Larkin notes the car’s registration number and reports the incident. Shortly after, she is visited by two agents from the Department of Justice, who are very interested in her story.

Within a week, the first attempt is made on Larkin’s life.

Mercenary Joe Pike is persuaded to take the job of protecting Larkin, but the safe house he takes her to is attacked shortly after their arrival. Pike successfully shoots his way out, and he and the girl move base.

Pike tries to work out how the gunmen discovered their location so quickly, and why someone would want Larkin dead just for reporting a traffic accident. With help from colleagues, Pike eventually discovers who was in the car, and decides the only way to keep Larkin alive is to take the fight back to those involved.

More bodies fall as Pike starts to track down the man ultimately responsible. A meeting Pike arranges with someone linked to that person turns out to be a trap and Pike only just avoids being burnt alive. Slowly, though, Pike gets closer to the man behind the attempts on Larkin’s life and it becomes clear not everyone is who they seem.

Action and tension abound throughout the book. Scenes are well written, and Larkin’s and Pike’s characters come to life on the page. However, Crais does use a lot of American slang that I (as a Brit) didn’t understand. For me, that slightly spoilt the story because it kept jarring me out of the action; for some British readers it may be too much to bear. If it doesn’t bother you, then this is a great thriller packed with excitement that is well worth reading.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Ascension by Oliver Harris

Ascension is a modern-day spy thriller with an intriguing plot that gets increasingly more complex as the story unfolds. Action is mainly based on Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic where Rory Bannatyne, a British spy, has died in an apparent suicide. He had been intercepting fibre optic cables that pass through the region, and MI5 sends Elliot Kane to the island to check there are no security concerns.

As Kane digs into what happened, he learns that Bannatyne may have had an unhealthy interest in some of the island’s teenagers. Worse, a girl who was seen talking with Bannatyne just before his death disappeared immediately afterwards. Are the events linked? Did he do something to her and then kill himself in remorse? If Bannatyne was responsible, it would have a massive impact on MI5 and their operations on the island.

One evening, Kane sees two men attacking a teenage boy and intervenes to stop him being seriously hurt. Kane is subsequently befriended by the boy’s parents, both of whom are US army personnel based on Ascension. It transpires that their son – Connor – was friends with the missing girl and many people blame him for her disappearance. He also knew Bannatyne and they often chatted. Not about anything in particular, he says; he was just a nice friendly chap.

Kane searches the isolated cottage where Bannatyne had lived and finds a hidden box containing an exercise book of Connor’s drawings. Why did Bannatyne have it and why was it hidden?

The story cuts between Kane’s investigations and those of his handler in London, Kathryn Taylor. She talks to Ballatyne’s sister in England and learns that he’d asked her to find out all she could about a certain doctor. But then she heard her brother was dead and did nothing with the request.

Taylor discovers that the doctor had a connection to Ascension Island and that he, too, died in an apparent suicide. Bannatyne’s death is looking more and more like it might be murder. She digs further and, as more facts are uncovered, the picture of what’s been happening on Ascension grows increasingly complex, especially when she identifies the involvement of Russian spies.

Back on Ascension, havoc breaks loose when another girl goes missing – best friend of the one who disappeared at Bannatyne’s death. Kane is arrested when the police find Connor’s exercise book in his possession. While waiting to be charged, Kane looks again through the book’s pictures and realises that one of them is of a building he now recognises. Tying it in with other things Connor had told him, Kane guesses this might be where the missing girl has gone. Kane escapes and heads there, hoping he can find her.

When Kane breaks into the building, the true implication of its role in events isn’t immediately obvious to him. However, Taylor, back in London, does now know enough to understand what’s going on, but someone is blocking all radio communication with Ascension and she cannot contact him to let him know the grave danger he is in.

It’s now a race against time, and Kane doesn’t realise the true picture of what’s been happening until near the end. The final chapter races onwards to an exciting climax.

The way the complexity of what’s been happening slowly increases all the way through the book is extremely well done, with each new uncovered fact adding a further dimension to the picture. The descriptions of the island are excellent and transport the reader there: you feel the jagged volcanic rocks beneath your feet and the heat beating down on your heard; you can sense the worry of the inhabitants for the missing girls. This is a thrilling espionage tale take that comes alive on the page.

This Month’s Third Thriller: Die Twice by Andrew Grant

David Trevelyan, a Royal Naval intelligence officer based in America, is assigned to a job in Chicago where he is to be handled out of the British Consulate by Richard Fothergil. One of Fothergil’s other agents – Tony McIntyre – has gone rouge, attempted to kill Fothergil and has now disappeared. The bigger problem is what he has taken with him: a canister of highly potent nerve gas originally stolen from the military and which McIntyre was meant to be recovering. It appears that McIntyre is now arranging to sell it to a small African country where a splinter group intends to use it on the population ahead of an upcoming election.

Trevelyan is sent to find McIntyre, his mission to recover the gas and to perform a “hard arrest” (i.e. to eliminate McIntyre).

McIntyre was injured during his attempt on Fothergil’s life and will need medical attention. London’s Intelligence Service provides the first lead when it discovers that McIntyre’s circle of friends and acquaintances includes a plastic surgeon. Trevelyan is sent to watch him in the hope he is secretly treating McIntyre, and when the surgeon makes an out-of-hours call to a dilapidated flat – clearly not the home of a private patient – it’s clear McIntyre has been found. Trevelyan questions the surgeon and forces him to return to the flat and to pretend he’s left something behind. When McIntyre opens the door, Trevelyan pounces. However, moments later, two gunmen appear and a gunfight ensues. The gunmen are killed but McIntyre escapes in the confusion.

Subsequent events make it clear the gunmen were there to kidnap McIntyre: another group knows about the stolen nerve gas and wants it themselves. The race is on for Trevelyan to find it first.

Much of the information used to track McIntyre comes from London’s Intelligence Service rather than from any investigation that Grant performs, with Grant often waiting for Fothergil to give him instructions on what to do next. Although this is probably true to real life, it does result in the plot feeling like a series of isolated action sequences. This may make the story less satisfying than it would be if we saw McIntyre investigating himself, but the increased realism counteracts this to some extent.

Many of the scenes are interspersed with flashbacks to Trevelyan’s training. While these are quite interesting, they’re only very loosely linked to what’s happening with the story and can become a distraction from the main storyline.

The novel’s climax becomes an exciting race-against-time when it’s learnt the gas has been planted and is primed for release.

The plot has no twists or turns except for one large one at the end. Unfortunately, though, it’s too well signposted to come as a surprise and is more of an inevitable occurrence than a twist.

Overall, Die Twice is a nicely written and exciting thriller with well composed action scenes. It’s great for those who read books for the action, but may not satisfy readers who like thrillers where the protagonist’s investigative skills are what propel the story forward.

From a Writer’s Desk

I’ve been buried under book edits since shortly before Christmas. My publisher finally returned edits from my second thriller, Backlash, while I was in the middle of doing a first round of edits on my work-in-progress thriller with a different editor. It was a bit confusing to be working on two books simultaneously, especially as I’d forgotten some scenes in Backlash because it’s been several years since it was written. Not many changes were required, though, which was nice to see. They used an American editor – which makes sense as the US is a bigger market than the UK – and it was a bit of an eye-opener to realise that a few words I had used in descriptions and some of the slang spoken by the characters were unknown to him or had a different meaning in The States. That’s been resolved by careful choice of alternative words, but it was an interesting lesson.

Ironically, I make that statement in a newsletter that carries a review of a US author’s book in which I complain about how much American slang he used! It had caused me, as a Brit, some difficulties: each strange unknown word I came across jarred me out of the action. It certainly shows that the differences between American and British English can be a larger gulf than one might imagine.

If you’ve got any stories about this problem, I’d love to hear them; just reply to my email.

Peak at a Blog: Plot Ideas for Thrillers

Where do thriller writers get their ideas from? This month’s blog looks at how a selection of authors answer that question: Lee Child, Val McDermid, David Baldachi, Ian Rankin, TM Logan, and others all describe what gives them the inspiration for the next thriller.

To find out, go to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

Freebies & Competitions

For those of you living in the US, Penguin Random House is giving away a set of 9 thrillers by different authors. Just search “PRH Winter Mystery Thriller Giveaway”. The competition closes on Feb 14th.

For those of you in Great Britain, there’s a chance to get a copy of Tim Sulliavan’s latest DI Cross thriller. Just pop along to the lovereading website before Feb 19th and select “competitions” from the Resource links at the bottom of the page.

Reviews of Some of the Best Thrillers

What have been the best thrillers you’ve read over the past twelve months? We’d love to know. The Shepherd book website published my view on the top three last month. You can find my list here:Shepherd.com

Please send us yours, and we’ll list them in the next newsletter as well as adding them to our “to be reviewed” list.

In the meantime, here are our reviews for November.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Fast Track by Stephen Leather

Fast Track is a brilliant thriller with a good balance of action and detective work, and a twist that deepens the mystery that Spider Shepherd is sent to investigate. Who was responsible for a terrorist bombing in Trafalgar Square in which hundreds died, and a blast later in the day that killed the head of MI6 at a safe-house? She was there to interview an insider that MI6 had inside the terrorist cell responsible for the Trafalgar Square attack, trying to find out why he hadn’t warned them of what was going to happen. Almost no-one knew they were in the house.

It’s suspicious that, while ISIS was quick to claim responsibility for Trafalgar Square, they didn’t for the safe-house bomb. MI6 keep it quiet from the press by describing it as a gas explosion, and no-one comes forward to claim it as their handiwork. Killing the head of MI6 would have been a great coup, so why not claim responsibility? There seems to be more going on than was first evident.

A man was seen leaving the safe-house just before the explosion, and Spider Shepherd’s first step is to try to track him down. This investigation covers the middle section of the thriller. Admittedly, the action and pace sag slightly here, but the detective work in this part holds the interest sufficiently in its place. It feels highly authentic, and the way Spider and colleagues slowly track them down and get images of the man they were hunting is very interesting.

The culprit behind the safe-house bomb is finally uncovered, but it seems unlikely that he’s experienced enough to have planned the whole attack, and Spider’s mission becomes finding the mastermind behind it. He starts to trace the Semtex that was used at the safe-house, and heads to Turkey, where a large amount of the same batch had been used several years before. In his bid to find who obtained what was left over from that batch, he mixes with terrorists, arms-dealers, and dangerous men in the Turkish underworld. He survives a shoot out and finally discovers who bought the final batch of Semtex from the Turkish terrorists.

Spider is sent to bring to justice those responsible for the death of the head of MI5. In a daring and exciting finale, he leads a team to snatch them from a high-rise apartment block in Dubai. But things don’t quite turn out as expected.

Fast Track is an exciting page-turner. It’s nice to find one that so cleverly mixes action with detective work. Its intelligent underlying plot is slowly revealed as the reader is drawn through the story. This is thriller writing at its best.

This Month’s Second Thriller: The Insider by Ava McCarthy

An “insider trader” is someone who buys or sells company shares using confidential information about something the company plans to do that will affect its share price. For example, if a company is going to be taken over, the stock price will rise when the move is announced. Buying stock just before the announcement and selling immediately after the shares have risen in value can make a lot of money but is illegal if it relied on the inside information.

Sol Martinez had made money in this way as part of a group of traders who worked for different finance companies. When one organisation was involved in setting up the sale of a company, that trader would tip off his friend in a company uninvolved in the deal, who then does the trade on the group’s behalf. Martinez, though, had become careless and his trades were spotted, leading to his arrest, sentence, and imprisonment. However, he refused to provide the names of the other traders in the gang, and wouldn’t say where the money went from this final trade. He is now due for release.

His daughter, Harry (Henrietta) is the story’s protagonist. She works for a company that tests the security of organisations, and her focus is on checking their defences against hacking. Her problems start when she is assigned to probe the security of the company her father had worked for; at her first meeting with them, she gets a very unfriendly welcome when they realise who she is. However, one of the partners apologises privately afterwards and seems to want to make it up to her, although she is suspicious of his motives.

Soon after, her bank account gets a sudden mysterious credit of 12 million Euros but no-one in her bank can work out where it came from – the transaction record is missing. Harry investigates, finally realising the money must be what her father had made on his final illegal trade, but why has it suddenly come to her?

Things now get serious because someone wants her dead. There’s an attempt to push her under a train, run her down, and to force her car off the road. Harry digs further into the insider trading ring her father was working with, using her hacking skills to find more information about those involved. She uncovers archived emails from the time, which reveal that someone called The Prophet was steering the trading ring in return for a large proportion of its profits. She concludes it is he who is trying to kill her. Harry succeeds in tracing his email address and contacts him, offering to hand over the money from her father’s final trade in exchange for a promise to leave her alone.

He accepts and gives her a deadline, but the money in her bank account suddenly disappears as mysteriously as it had been credited. Now she panics, unable to fulfil her side of the bargain. Her only solution is to find out where her father hid the money after the trade and to try to get it in time. However, her father is in hospital in a coma after being deliberately run down as he left prison.

Her methods to locate the money are as audacious as they are clever, but there seems to be non-one she can trust. She is now in contact with several men involved in some way with the trading, but what remains a mystery until the final chapters is who is on her side and who is trying to manipulate her for their own gain.

The Insider has a unique plot and is cleverly written. It doesn’t have much action, but the desire to work out what’s going on and who’s behind the attempts on her life are what made me want to read on.

The thriller focuses on hacking and insider trading, doing so in an interesting way that introduces the reader to that environment. Unfortunately, some of the techniques Harry uses have dated since the book was written – the use of modems for instance – and this does make the book feel dated in places, although that doesn’t detract from the storyline.

From a Writer’s Desk

Last time, I mentioned my struggles to decide on the title for my current work-in-progress thriller. I had three possible titles, and asked for votes on which was most likely to make you want to pick up the book. Thanks to those of you who responded. The thriller is now called Knife Edge.

There were celebrations in the Coates household this month after Backlash – the thriller currently with Ian’s publishers – came second in an international writing competition. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to have sped up its journey to the bookshelves because it’s still stuck with editors at the publishers.

News from the Book World: Winnie the Pooh Drawing

Some childhood books gained cult status. Winnie The Pooh is one of those. It was therefore a pleasant surprise when the last illustration that E.H. Shepard ever made of the Piglet and the famous bear was discovered recently. It had languished in the cellar of the former chairman of Foyles bookshop wrapped in an old tea towel and shoved in the back of a drawer! The theory is that it was drawn for one of the famous Foyles literary lunches, where key customers of the bookshop got to meet famous authors.

Peak at a Blog: How Artificial Intelligence Affects Authors

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be constantly in the news at the moment, so this month’s blog takes a look at the technology and describes in (hopefully) simple terms how it works and what it does. In particular, the article also looks at how AI impacts authors, and discusses how one writer managed to use it to generate a crime thriller; and I try my hand at using AI to create a front cover.

You can read the blog here, and we’d love to hear your views on the topic: iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

Freebies & Competitions

Penguin has started holding a draw every six months for a bookshelf full of their books. The first one takes place on November 30th, so hop over to their website straight away.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Black Ice by Brad Thor

Black Ice is an exciting mix of a modern spy novel and a quest that carries us from Oslo to the Norwegian Arctic Circle. CIA operative Scot Harvath is on holiday in Norway to visit his girlfriend, Sølvi, when he is convinced he sees a Chinese operative whom he killed a few years back. Sølvi works for Norwegian Intelligence and she investigates CCTV footage for him, concluding the man is called Han and is the dead agent’s cousin. She also discovers that a Russian agent was nearby at the same time. On the assumption the two had a clandestine meeting, Harvath is instructed to uncover why they were meeting in Norway.

Having found where Han is staying, Harvath follows him from the hotel but walks into an ambush from which he only just escapes alive. His attackers were Russian, confirming that something serious is happening in the country between agents of the two foreign powers. But what?

Harvath brings in the rest of his team for assistance, and they find that Han is about to leave Oslo by private jet. Using contacts in the Civil Aviation Authority, they find that the flight plan will take Han north to a town called Kirkenes, close to the Russian border.

An ex-CIA agent, Hayes, lives in that area and is called in to help. He tails Han when he arrives, and Harvath meets up with Hayes in time to watch Han and three Chinese heavies check in at a hotel. When Han is driven away later in a campervan with the three heavies convoying in another vehicle, Harvath’s team follows. They travel north towards the Barents Sea, where a key American radar station is based. When Han sets up equipment in sight of the installation, Harvath and his team are instructed to take action. Having captured Han and his kit, Harvath interrogates him.

What Harvath learns sends him to the Arctic Circle with the aim of stealing a related piece of equipment from a Sino-Russian team operating there. It’s a race against time to capture the equipment before it’s collected, and time is running out. Harvath has to overcome, not just the Chinese and Russian spies, but also polar bears and ferocious weather.

Blue Ice is an exciting read. It does suffer from quite a few deviations from the storyline, including showing us some of Norway’s tourist attractions and providing the extensive background to how Harvath’s ex-boss got his nickname, which isn’t relevant to the plot. However, those sections are neither excessively long nor uninteresting, so they don’t mar the book too much. It’s a thrilling novel with plenty of excitement, interesting locations, and a clever Cold War style backdrop.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Ballistic by Mark Greaney

Mexico. Eddie Gamboa heads up a special police team with the remit of doing whatever’s necessary to crush the drug cartels. A mission to assassinate the drug lord Daniel de la Rocha goes badly wrong, and Gamboa and most of his team die.

Court Gentry (the ‘grey man’) considered Gamboa a good friend, owing him his life after Gamboa rescued him from certain death several years before. When Gentry learns of his friend’s death from a TV bulletin, he decides to pay his last respects.

At the graveside, he’s confronted by Gamboa’s widow, who has come to remove graffiti from the cross that marks the grave. She explains that many Mexicans support de la Rocha and consider Eddie Gamboa to be scum for having led an attack on him.

Gentry is persuaded to return to the widow’s house, where he meets the family. A public celebration of Gamboa’s life has been arranged for the next day, and the widow insists on making a speech, despite being sure Gamboa’s opponents will be there to make trouble.

A close family friend is worried that serious violence will break out, and persuades Gentry to stay long enough to help him keep Gamboa’s wife safe. The two men attend the ceremony, and it’s soon clear to Gentry that violence is about to erupt. Many armed police are present and, as Gentry has already learned, they are almost certainly in de la Rocha’s pay. Sure enough, when the widow starts to speak, car horns start to drown her out. De la Rocha himself arrives and uses loudhailers to denounce her dead husband as a corrupt official who had tried to kill a law-abiding citizen. Shots are fired, and the violence starts.

Gentry steps into action, killing a handful of corrupt policemen and helping the widow and most of the family escape. De la Rocha launches a vendetta against Gamboa’s family and, in particular, his widow, who is pregnant with Gamboa’s child. De la Rocha becomes obsessed with wanting to kill Gamboa’s unborn heir in retaliation for the previous attempt on his own life. The chase begins, and Gentry finds himself caught up with the family, helping them reach somewhere they think will be safe.

De la Rocha soon tracks down their hiding place – a large hacienda in the mountains – and immediately sends local men in his pay to attack the building and kill them all. Gentry and two of Gamboa’s original team who survived the earlier mission and have now joined Gentry, successfully defend themselves against the first onslaught. Before long, though, more experience fighters arrive, and a second attack commences. This is more successful, but they are still finally repelled. Shortly after, the elite troops arrive and prepare a full military assault. Gentry knows they cannot survive what is about to happen and manages a daring and dramatic escape.

When de la Rocha later manages to kidnap Gambo’s sister, Gentry turns it into all out war and remorselessly attacks and destroys much of de la Rocha’s drug producing infrastructure until he finally achieves his objective of rescuing the sister and helping Gamboa’s wife escape to America.

All the way through, Ballistic is certainly full of action and fighting. The fights are well written, and the descriptions are not gory or overdone, but it does frequently feel more like an SAS adventure, even bordering at times on a war novel. There’s no cerebral challenge here, no mystery to solve, or any twists and turns – just an escalating series of fights. It’s an exciting read, but perhaps not one for all thriller lovers.

From a Writer’s Desk

I’ve been thinking about titles for my current work-in-progress thriller. The idea for the plot started when I was reading about the problems with counterfeit goods, and I initially gave it a working title of “Counterfeit.” Deciding that wasn’t great, I changed it to “Fake”, but I’m still not happy. Digging deeper into what the story’s really about at its heart, I came up with “Tipping Point” as an alternative. Better, perhaps? But perhaps still not ten out of ten. My plan is to find another possible title and then go a poll on Facebook to get readers’ opinions, so please look out for it so I can get your help, too. If you have an immediate thought on which of those ones stands out, please reply and let me know; I’d love to have your opinion.

Techie Snips: Sideways Moving Cars

Have you ever tried to parallel-park in a space that’s barely big enough for your car? Done that little shuffle back and forth to get close enough to the kerb without scraping the cars either side? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just rotate all your wheels ninety degrees so that the car could travel sideways into the gap? That would be so much easier.

That’s what Hyundai thought. And they did something about it. By moving the motors that drive the wheels of an electric car out of the engine bay and into the hubs of the wheels themselves, they were able to free the wheels from the constraints that normally mean they can only turn a small amount. They’ve produced a video of the demonstrator car they developed, in which they show it pulling up beside a gap, rotating its wheels ninety degrees and then driving sideway into the slot. They also show it turning on the spot by putting the wheels into their ninety degree positions and then powering the front ones in one direction and the rear wheels in the other. It has a few other nifty tricks as well. To find the video, search YouTube for “e-corner system”.

Peak at a Blog: Favourite Thriller Writers

Who are your favourite thriller writers? I wonder if they’re mentioned in this month’s blog, in which Ian talks about his favourite dozen authors. He groups them into sub-genre, from high-action adrenaline pumpers to mysteries that drag you through the pages by posing puzzles that demand an answer. He’d love to know who you would include in your own list.

Read the blog at https://iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com/2023/08/13/the-12-best-modern-thriller-writers/

Freebies & Competitions

If you live in the US, there’s a great giveaway being run by NovelSuspects. They’re offering the chance to get a set of paperbacks by Lisa Jewell; it’s open until early September.

For those of us in the UK, if you’re keen to get Richard Osman’s latest, getting it from Waterstones will give you the chance of also getting a pair of tickets on a Bluebell Railway murder mystery evening.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Anthrax Island by DL Marshall

This is probably the most exciting and tense thriller I can remember reading. It’s a fact that Gruinard Island in the North-West of Scotland was used by Porton Down scientists towards the end of World War II to experiment with the weaponisation of a virulent strain of Anthrax. Fortunately, the war ended before the bacteria was ever used, and the island had to be decontaminated afterwards. The story that follows is fiction.

Today, more than eighty years on, deadly spores have again been found there, and scientists are back to make a second attempt at cleaning up the island. When one of the technicians dies in suspicious circumstances, operative John Tyler is sent in as an undercover replacement to find out what happened.

It’s a small team of scientists working on the island, including one Russian, one French, and one American. Tyler must find which of them killed the technician and why.

He narrowly escapes an attempt on his life when he starts to snoop round, and the soldier in charge of the base makes the first of several attempts to force Tyler to leave. Soon after, though, the weather closes in, and no-one can escape the island. Worst, someone has destroyed the radio equipment. A team member is found shot, and the terror escalates. The shooting becomes a locked-room mystery, which adds an intriguing twist to the story.

At one point, it looks like the murderer and their motives are obvious, but Tyler has his suspicions and sets a trap that eventually uncovers the true perpetrator; not before others have died, though. The story then turns into a chase when the murderer gets off Gruinard, and Tyler heads after him, the story developing into an exciting car chase on the nearby island as the thriller races to its dramatic conclusion.

An addition layer of tension is added all the way through the book by the way the team need to suit-up when they go outside because of the Anthrax risk. That adds additional mystery to the plot because it’s hard to tell who someone is when they’re outside as a result, and it also means there is only one official way in and out of the buildings – through the airlock and decontamination unit, which is monitored by CCTV.

Although some of the events may sound clichéd (like the locked-room mystery and the way the small group is stuck on the island without radio communication), those parts are so well woven into the story that they appear totally natural. Anthrax Island could be described as a well-crafted meld of classic crime setups and all the elements of a tense and very exciting thriller. It’s set to get the heart racing and the brain puzzling.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Run and Hide by Alan McDermott

Run and Hide is an exciting ‘cat and mouse’ thriller. It features Eva Discrol, a CIA assassin in a secret wet-works team. When her brother is killed shortly after the death of one of his ex-colleagues from their now-disbanded three-man special forces team, she is suspicious it’s not the suicide it appears. Driscoll tracks down the final member of the team, Rees Collback, to try to discover what is happening. When she witnesses an attempt to kidnap him, she intervenes and helps him escape.

The result is that she rapidly makes herself a target for the team of killers that’s after Collback. Driscll and Collback team up to try to work out why the members of his old team are being eliminated. Driscol calls in help from an ex-CIA IT specialist, Farooq Naser. What he finally uncovers suggests it’s her own masters who are leading the hunt.

We then reach the part of the story that, for me at least, somewhat spoiled the realism – Driscoll reveals there’s a shadowy organisation called the ESO that’s led by a multi-billionaire. It controls governments, authorities, and banks around the globe, manipulating them to bring about world events that would allow the ESO to increase its wealth further. This key point of the plot felt too comic-book with an archetypal 007 baddie. However, if you can ignore that side of it, Run and Hide is a great read.

Driscol, Colback, and Naser go into hiding but are remorselessly hunted down and have to fight their way out and use all their cunning to send their hunters in the wrong direction.

Driscol hires a pair of ex-SAS soldiers to help them, whose skills at weaponry and fast-car exfiltration quickly prove very helpful. Naser eventually uncovers why Driscol’s brother, Collback, and their ex-colleagues were targeted, and how it’s linked to the ESO’s activities.

Going on the offensive, they discover the identity of one of the CIA men leading the chase after them and manage to capture and interrogate him, obtaining the phone number of the ESO member who gave him his instructions.

Naser traces the location of the phone, which leads them to the ESO’s meeting place. By watching the comings and goings, Driscol identifies the key players in the organisation and starts her own action to bring them down.

Overall, Run and Hide has plenty of tension and exciting action sequences to keep the reader totally absorbed. The hard-to-believe ESO organisation on which the plot relies spoils the overall enjoyment slightly, but if you can put that aside, this is a great read.

From a Writer’s Desk

Surprisingly, Ian is still waiting for the edits to be returned from the publisher’s team. The latest update had promised them early May, but they still haven’t arrived in the inbox. However, that does mean work has pushed forward on the thriller-in-progress, which now has a brand new fast-paced (and hopefully intriguing) opening.

There’s always a question over where exactly in a story to start the opening. It needs to be well paced and exciting to pull readers into the book, but if background is missing, the story is at risk of being confusing. The balance between the two is often interesting to navigate. I recently heard Lee Child say that a thriller should start with a big question, which shouldn’t be totally answered until the end, and I’m following that advice by opening with a short pivotal scene that raises some (hopefully) intriguing questions. I also felt it was going to be important to share the story’s catalyst – the event that triggers the events in the story – so I’ve now written some fast-paced chapters to explain the catalyst. I found they’ve helped to put the reader into the mind of the thriller’s protagonist, see his angst, and feel the painful dilemma he finds himself in. Unfortunately, it has necessitated a jump back in time between the first two chapters, which I normally prefer to avoid, but I think the overall impact on the story has worked well.

News from the Book World: Crime reading & Bookshop Loss

Did you know June is National Crime Reading Month? Events run across the whole of the UK and Ireland, aiming to celebrate the genre through various events, both physical and on-line. To find out if there are events near you, just pop over to crimereading.com.

There was some sad news recently with the announcement that the Book Depository is closing. The successful online book retailer was bought by Amazon in 2011, but they are now winding it down. How do you feel about loosing another bookshop? We’d love to hear your views.

Techie Snips: Laser Weapons

The idea of powerful laser guns started in science fiction, took its place in films (think of Goldfinger breaking into Fort Knox in the James Bond story, for example), but it's now definitely a reality. Their development has been driven more recently by the use of swarms of drones in warfare, where laser weapons are more efficient if they can be made powerful enough. The defence company Lockheed Martin announced earlier this year that their latest 50 kW design is now working. That’s thought to be powerful enough to take out a larger plane, not just a drone. Final tests will take place in 2024 when a prototype is integrated into a US Army’s Stryker combat vehicle.

Peak at a Blog: How Paperbacks are Made

Have you ever wondered how a paperback gets made? This month’s blog gets behind the scenes and looks at the printing process and how it works.

Head to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

Freebies & Competitions

If you’re a fan of Claire Douglas’ books, you might like to know that Penguin are offering the chance to get a bundle of stationary if you pre-order her latest book. Type her name into Penguin’s search bar to find the details.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Going Dark by Neil Lancaster

The job: to infiltrate a Bosnian-Serb people trafficking gang. The perfect man for the operation: DI Tom Novak, originally a Bosnian-Serb refugee himself.

His way into the gang is via two brothers – Aleks and Luka – who operate in London. Luka is an amateur wrestler, a sport Novak is good at, and Novak manages to engineer a meeting at the local gym. Soon, they’re doing regular practice bouts together, and Novak slowly gains the Serbian’s trust. Novak drops subtle hints that he is available for employment, and the two brothers start getting him involved in their work, mainly as a driver and bodyguard for the women who are being trafficked and then used as prostitutes.

A key person in the people-trafficking is corrupt solicitor Michael Adebayo. He helps immigrants gain British citizenship by arranging sham marriages with girls smuggled from Sarajevo. Novak manages to film a meeting in Adebayo’s office that will be sufficient for a conviction, but things quickly go wrong. Novak finds himself forced to help one of the girls escape the racket, an action that causes the gang to look more closely at Novak. They have a hold over several police officers, and use their influence to find out more about Novak, soon learning he’s an undercover cop and that he made a recording that can put Adebayo behind bars.

The SD card with the recording is securely deposited in the police evidence store but is subsequently found to be blank, and it’s assumed the recorder hadn’t been activated properly. It’s clear to Novak, though, that the gang has an insider with sufficient access to have erased it because Novak had (against the rules) first taken a copy himself. Fearing a repeat of last time, Novak refuses to hand the file over to the police.

The gang soon hears of the copy and attempts to abduct Novak in order to get it. The plan fails, and the circumstances prove there must be at least one other corrupt official involved. Novak realises the Serbians are being given access to his geo-tracking data, including his phone location, CCTV footage, and credit card use. No longer knowing whom he can trust, he goes off-grid in order to keep out of the trafficker’s hands while simultaneously attempting to unearth the extent of the corruption.

The gang is using all its resources to locate Novak and recover the recording, but Novak calls in a favour from a well-placed US operative and soon becomes the hunter rather than the hunted. When Novak’s foster parents get dragged into the action, the reader’s tension and emotion are ratcheted off the scale, making many chapters impossible to put down.

Going Dark is an exciting story and, because Neil Lancaster was a servicing police officer, the book carries a feeling of authenticity. In places, his writing style feels a little clunky, but that’s totally forgiven because of the storyline’s pace and excitement. It’s a believable thriller with good action sequences, an intriguing plot, and plenty of tension.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Domino Island by Desmond Bagley

‘Desmond Bagley?’ you might ask. ‘Surely he’s out of print. Didn’t he die years ago?’ There’s an interesting story behind the recent publication of this new Bagley thriller. No, it’s not written by a third party – it was a genuine Bagley manuscript. He completed the book back in the early seventies and sent it to his publishers. They put it through editing, scheduled it for production, and returned the manuscript to him for final revisions. However, one of his other thrillers was being made into a film at the time, and it seems it was decided to hold-off publication of the new book to avoid it competing with the one related to the film. Bagley therefore held on to the manuscript and got on with other things. It seems the manuscript was forgotten and, after the author’s death, it got caught up with his other papers in a university archive. It was only on 2017 that it was found there, and the publishers brought the manuscript to print.

Its protagonist is Bill Kemp, an insurance investigator who is sent to an ex-colonial island in the Caribbean to check out the death of millionaire David Salton. Should the company pay out on the million dollar life insurance? The fact the cover was doubled shortly before his death has raised suspicions.

The body had been found in a drifting boat, and the inquest’s verdict was death by natural causes, based largely on the autopsy report that showed Salton had suffered a heart attack. But the doctor who performed the autopsy was elderly, and questions are raised over his abilities. Could it have been murder? Kemp travels to the island to meet Salton’s widow and others who knew him, and tries to unravel what really took place.

Tensions are running high on the island. Salton had been standing as a candidate for Prime Minister in upcoming elections and was tipped to win. Many of his supporters think Salton was murdered by the existing Primer Minister, who is now likely to keep his post with Salton out of the running. When Kemp arrives, and news spreads that the death is being investigated, rumours quickly circulate and riots break out, fuelled by suspicions of murder.

Kemp is soon being threatened, told to drop the investigation and return home. His colleague, a loss adjustor who had travelled out with him on the same case, is severely beaten up, and an attempt is made on Kemp’s life. Kemp stubbornly digs deeper and uncovers corrupt policemen, government officials more interested in their personal fortunes than true justice, and politicians with selfish personal agendas. The island also hosts wealthy bankers who were set to lose much of their profits if Salton became Prime minister because his manifesto promised changes to the island’s financial system.

Amidst the corruption, Kemp finds two men who appear different. DS Hanna is hardworking and motivated by a desire for justice. He’s an official who’s apparently untainted by corruption, and Kemp and Hanna quickly develop a good working relationship. Kemp also gets help from casino owner Gerry Nagrini, a friend of the deceased, who’s keen to know the truth of what happened to Salton.

Kemp discovers that Salton had a mistress, and things appear to fall into place, but he then discovers there’s a lot more happening on the island than just political unrest.

Domino Island is a refreshingly different thriller with plenty of excitement as readers navigate several plot twists, and the tale races to its thrilling conclusion.

From a Writer’s Desk

Other projects have seriously affected the amount of thriller writing time I’ve had over the last six weeks, so the current work-in-progress hasn’t advanced much. I have managed to transfer the story outline to a spreadsheet, which is how I normally keep track of scenes, time-lines, and who’s where. This month, I expect to be back writing, although the manuscript that’s still with my publishers is due back any moment, and working through their suggested edits will obviously take priority.

News from the Book World: A Banned Font

Do you a favourite font for your email or wordprocessor? I’ve always loved Times New Roman. I use it for my writing and, in fact, most publishers and agents say it’s one of the fonts they prefer authors to use in their submissions. So I was surprised and shocked a couple of weeks ago to hear that the UK government has banned its use in official documents, following a similar ruling in the US. Was this some sort of silly bureaucratic snipe against nice looking paperwork? Apparently not. It seems the reason behind the decision was the result of a study that showed some people have difficulty in reading serif fonts. From now on, I’ll think more carefully about the recipient of my Times New Roman crafted text. Perhaps they need something plainer rather than prettier. What are your thoughts about the possible demise of such attractive fonts?

Techie Snips: Artifical Intelligence Authors

We’ve all heard of artificial intelligence (AI) these days – computers that can think for themselves have achieved reality. AI is now capable of creating stories and pictures, and its appearance is causing trouble in the arts world.

A key moment came recently when a publisher of short science fiction stories had to close its doors to unsolicited submissions. The reason? They normally get 10 submissions each month. Suddenly, they were getting 500 a month, most of which were only suitable for rejection, and the publisher couldn’t cope. They’ve attributed the flurry of bad manuscripts to the launch of ChatGPT, which put AI language models into common public use. So-called “influencers” promoted its use as a fast way to riches, and suddenly non-writers were using it to generate short stories and articles to try to sell. That publisher has now banned over 500 “authors” from submitting to them again as a result.

The problem of this for authors is that many writers rely on the way smaller publishers regularly have “open-windows” in which manuscripts can be submitted. If those get closed due to this influx of bad AI-generated work, genuine authors are going to lose access to publishers. That’s not good for anyone.

Peak at a Blog: How I Became a Reading Addict

A somewhat different style of blog this month. Rather than my normal fact-based articles, this time I’m looking back at what made me become a reading addict. If you love reading, it would be great to hear from you about the influences that turned you into such an avid reader (just reply to this email). I wonder if they’re similar to mine. My story is here: https://iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/how-i-became-a-reading-addict/

Freebies & Competitions

We’ve heard of a very unusual author pairing this month. Dolly Parton, the country singer, has teamed up with James Patterson to produce a thriller about a singer on the run. To celebrate the launch of a special Tesco paperback edition (wow – this is an odd three-way grouping!), Penguin are offering a draw for a juicy Tesco voucher. Go to the Penguin website and you’ll find it buried on their Articles page.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: One Little Lie by Tom Bale

Jen is a helpful and honest single mum currently working through her divorce. On her daily walk to work, she makes a nodding acquaintance with a man who is often leaving his house at the time she is passing. One day, he drops his keys as he’s carrying some boxes to a colleague’s car. Jen sees it happen, picks them up, and runs after the disappearing vehicle, but they don’t notice her.

What to do? She doesn’t want to leave them on the doorstep in case a thief finds them. Nor can she take them with her in case he come back when he realises he’s dropped them. And she can’t put them through the letterbox in case they’re his only set of door keys. Jen settles on taking them with her for safety and leaving a note with her contact details. But she has no pen or paper and is already late for work so can’t afford the time to go back home for them. The only option left is to use the keys to go into his house to find pen, paper, and tape.

Feeling nervous, she lets herself in and hunts for something to use. One room she tries appears to be used as a studio, with a large collection of beautiful hand-crafted glass figurines, presumably being made ready for sale. She eventually finds what she needs, relocks the house, and fixes her note to the door.

That evening, a policeman calls, and her nightmare begins.

Jen finds herself in a prison cell overnight, but is released pending further enquiries. Determined to get herself out of the mess her helpful action has dropped her into, she starts to investigate the mysterious man who dropped his keys. What she discovers slowly gets her into more trouble until she is met by someone who says he has information that can help.

It’s a unique and interesting plot, and what’s happening to Jen is masterfully revealed bit-by-bit as the story progresses. Be aware that the book includes some references to rather unsavoury sexual acts, but they’re not explicit, and they are essential to part of the plot.

There’s no adrenaline-filled action here, so don’t pick this one up if you’re looking for a fast-action thriller. However, the emotional power is enormous. It’s a slow burn story, but as it heads to its conclusion, it becomes impossible to put down. I would certainly recommend it unless you are desperate for continuous action scenes.

This Month’s Second Thriller: The Killing Room by Peter May

American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell is seconded to China to help police investigate a mass grave of dismembered young women discovered in Shanghai. It’s a joint investigation with the police in Beijing because of a similarity to a recent murder there.

Margaret has previously had an on/off romance with the Beijing detective Li Yan, whom she has assisted in the past, and working together now becomes problematic when it’s obvious that the female detective who has been heading the operation in Shanghai, Mu Ling, is making advances to Li Yan. How can Margaret hope to compete with an attractive woman from the same cultural background as Li Yan? The antagonism between the two women and the way they try to get the better of each other makes a fun subplot that does a good job of counteracting the horrors of what’s being investigated.

To the consternation of the Shanghai officers, Li Yan is put in charge of the whole operation because of his reputation as a brilliant investigator. But those high-up in the police force therefore expect fast results, something Li Yan is struggling to deliver.

Margaret discovers that the victims have all been subject to the removal of their organs but, strangely, it appears they have been kept alive throughout the operation, something that puzzles her and her Chinese counterpart – why bother to keep the women breathing during the procedure? If the objective is to sell their organs, there is no need to go to all the time and difficulty of keeping them alive throughout. That question continually puzzles all involved until it is finally answered in the concluding chapters.

The night watchman at the building site where the bodies were found is an immediate suspect. He is a medical student working the nightshift to fund his course, and he has a clear, almost morbid, interest in autopsies. By the detectives cannot find sufficient evidence to convince them that he is responsible for the deaths. Is his presence at the site just coincidence or is he really involved in some way?

Politics soon get dragged into the case when there appears to be a link to an abortion clinic owned by a very influential party member. Suddenly, Li Yan finds himself up against political niceties and reputations. His life gets even more fraught when his daughter disappears, apparently kidnapped. He finds himself stretched to breaking point trying to find her at the same time as keeping on top of the main investigation.

Slowly, clues that Margaret uncovers during her autopsies help identify some of the victims. Investigations into their backgrounds unfold vital links between the women them that finally lead Li Yan to the perpetrator.

It should be noted there are a couple of descriptive autopsy scenes. I’m extremely squeamish, but I only had to skip a couple of paragraphs, so this shouldn’t be a problem – it’s carefully written to avoid putting off the reader.

As always in May’s series of China books, we get an interesting insight into the culture and what it’s like to live and work there (or at least, what it was like a few years ago when the author was there).

From a Writer’s Desk

I’m still waiting for the edits for my next thriller to come back from the publishers. They must have had the manuscript for a year now. This is my first time with this new publisher, and they seem a lot slower than my previous one. It has given me the opportunity to push ahead with the next thriller, though. I took the decision to go back to the planning and to really concentrate on getting that perfect before continuing. It’s been an interesting exercise, and I’ve made some great changes that I’m really excited about. I think you’ll love the new finale; the last half-dozen chapters should be dynamite. I’m hoping to be back to writing it by next month.

News from the Book World: A Fraudster and a Lost Laptop

Ann Cleeves (the author most famous for her Shetland crime series) had a nasty shock last month when she was out in a blizzard. She was carrying her laptop on which half of her latest novel was written, but it slipped out of her bag and she only found it was missing when she arrived at her destination. Snow was falling fast, and she couldn’t find the laptop. Fortunately for her, a little while later, a schoolgirl was helping her mum dig their car out of the snow when she dug up the laptop. Thinking it had probably been dropped by one of her friends getting off the school bus, she put a post on their bus’ Facebook group, and the bus driver, who had heard that Cleeves had lost one, helped put author and laptop back together. A lesson in the importance of regular backups.

An unusual story has been circulating in the writing press for some time, but it looks like a recent arrest has now brought it to a conclusion. Many authors and literary agents had been victims of a conman over a couple of years but no-one could work out why he was doing it. He sent out emails from addresses almost identical to those used by publishers and agents, and requested copies of latest works in progress. The emails looked so authentic that people were generally tricked by them and sent across the requested documents. It was only later discussions like, “Did you get the document I sent you okay” that uncovered the fraud. However, the conman never seemed to be using what he received – the drafts were never uploaded on-line or put into print. Finally, the culprit was caught. He had worked at one of the major publishing houses and therefore knew well how the industry works and had access to author and agent names and contact details. The reason he was doing this? Just for fun! Nevertheless, he has been charged with “wire fraud”.

On a positive note, congratulations to the brilliant charity Book Aid International, who aim to get books to people around the world who otherwise wouldn’t have access to books. In 2022, they hit a milestone of shipping over 1 million books.

Techie Snips: How to Walk Again

There was a great advance announced this month for patients suffering from limited mobility – it’s being referred to as a “bionic leg wrap”. Some people’s ability to walk is hampered by their body’s inability to properly co-ordinate their leg muscles to allow them to walk. This “leg wrap” picks up signals from the nerves that are being passed to the legs and also monitors the walking gait. It then stimulates the muscles further itself to correct the muscle movement to what’s required for a normal walk. The “leg wrap” is like a sleeve of lightweight fabric containing a series of electrodes that is pulled tightly on to the legs, and is controlled by a small electronics module in a pocket. Brilliant!

Peak at a Blog: A Brief History of Codes and Ciphers

Codes and Ciphers are the focus for January’s blog. It’s a brief look at their history, including modern private and public key methods, and ancient Roman methods. Do you know the difference between a code and a cipher? Have you ever played with a Fairfield Cipher? How did the Enigma machine work? What does the “s” mean in an https website address? All this and more this month.

Read the short blog at iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com

Freebies & Competitions

This month’s suggestion is to nip over to lovereading.co.uk/competitions. If you’re there before Feb 5th, you can be in with a chance to get David Gilman’s latest international thriller, Resurrection.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: The Ice House by John Connor

His mission is to kill a ten-year old girl in Spain, and assassin Carl Bowman is confident he will have no qualms about the job. When he has her in his rifle sight, though, he can’t force himself to pull the trigger.

He’s aware of being part of a team on this assignment but doesn’t know the other operatives’ roles or who they are. Moments after he was meant to shoot the girl, an explosion rips through her house, just meters farther up the road. Realising others in the team will rapidly be instructed to take over the task of killing the girl, Bowman feels he must protect her. He kills the man in a police uniform who approaches her with a pistol immediately after the explosion, and helps her escape.

The girl – Rebecca – wants two things: to stay alive and to get back to her mum. But when Bowman checks the ruins of the house, he finds a man and a woman dead in the wreckage. Bowman calls on his brother, a Russian gangster, to help, who quickly arranges transport to get them out of the country to safety.

But things are not that easy. Several twists and problems later, Bowman also becomes a target. When he and Rebecca then get separated, Bowman needs, not only to rescue Rebecca again, but to stay alive to do so.

The Ice House has a cleverly constructed plot and is very well written. It has a lot of action and tension that forces readers to turn the next page. It also has a strong emotional pull, generated by passages written from the child’s own viewport.

It’s not until the final chapters that we discover the alarming truth behind who originally hired Bowman, and the whole storyline suddenly becomes clear. The reader now sees the preceding events from a completely different perspective. The concluding sequence and resolution are then pulled off brilliantly with lots of action and twists that make the reader desperate to turn the final pages.

This was my first introduction to the work of John Connor and I shall definitely be putting more of his thrillers on this year’s Christmas list.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Run For Home by Dan Latus

Run For Home is a modern standalone spy story based mainly in Prague. Harry Gibson is late for a clandestine rendezvous with his three colleagues from Unit 89, a spy ring based in the city. But something isn’t right. As he does his normal surveillance to check he isn’t being followed, he catches sight of a flash of light in the apartment they’re using, despite other signs suggesting the others, unusually, haven’t yet arrived. He cautiously approaches the block and sees two unknown men leaving.

What he finds when he finally enters the apartment makes it plain someone wants to remove all traces of his team’s existence. To stay alive, he must go on the run while trying to discover what’s happening and who wants to wipe his team from history.

Unsure if he can trust his own government, Gibson seeks help from a Hungarian spy he used to cooperate with and a contact in the Russian intelligence services whom he spied on during the Cold War. With their support, he escapes attempts on his life and slowly unravels the mystery of what’s happening.

Run For Home is full of tension and excitement, and I was kept up late by the need to discover what’s going to happen next. It’s only a slim book, but that does nothing to diminish the excitement. I assume its size is due to the fact it was originally published by Robert Hale, who used to impose a strict word count of, from memory, 70,000 words.

Latus doesn’t paint detailed descriptions of the locations so, a couple of times, I felt a little disorientated and unsure where the action was based, but such problems never lasted long. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and my desperation to find out what was going to happen to Gibson kept me turning the pages into the small hours. I’ve not read Dan Latus before, but I now feel eager to read more of his thrillers.

From a Writer’s Desk

The head of my publishers has been in hospital a while. That’s added more delays to me receiving the edits back for my next book because the editorial suggestions need to be signed off before I get them. Following on from COVID, things have really dragged. The initial expectation of it being out for Christmas has clearly been dumped in the waste bin.

On a brighter note, though, I love the new artwork that’s been done for Backlash, and the thriller has now been re-launched with its new cover. I’ve been surprised how many websites and social media sites have had to be updated with the new image. Take a look at the new cover and please let me know what you think – just reply to this newsletter. So far, the feedback has been great.

News from the Book World: Library Fines & Paperback Prices

Have you ever been fined for not returning a library book? Libraries in Peterborough, England, have recently announced an amnesty on fines in the hope of recovering 22,000 unreturned books. They're hoping it will encourage people to come back to libraries after the pandemic forced them to stay away and not return books.

Did you have any books out that you couldn’t return? Do you have any library book fine stories you could share?

Turning to the price of the books themselves, a lot of concern has been voiced in the publishing industry recently about rapidly rising cover prices, with publishers scared of the increasing cost of paper and energy. Sarah Shaffi quoted Valerie Brandes (founder and publisher of Jacaranda Books) in The Guardian last month, who said it was highly likely that book prices for consumers would have to increase “across all formats” by 10 to 20%.

Techie Snips: The X-37B Spy Plane

An uncrewed US spyplane loving christened X-37B is back on earth after nearly 3 years in orbit around the globe. Speculation has grown as to what it’s been doing, with both China and Russia accusing the US of using it to spy on their satellites. One Chinese military expert even suggested that its robotic arm and payload bay could be used to “steal” a satellite from space. I’m sure that was the premise for one of the James Bond films, but I can’t remember which one. I seem to remember a rather unrealistic image of a rocket opening a mouth and swallowing a satellite.

X-37B, though, is the real thing. The US say it has been doing experiments on what happens to materials in space, and also performed tests on the practicality of collecting solar power and beaming it back to earth as microwaves that could then be converted into electricity back home. Those are probably true, but what other tests or missions have been carried out during its 908 day orbit are up for speculation.

Peak at a Blog: The Role of Location in Thrillers

Thinking of the James Bond films, they would be very different if 007 performed his missions on the Isle of Wight rather than at all the glamorous locations he’s sent to. This month’s blog scratches its head and asks what role location plays in thrillers (thinking mainly about books, although similar principles apply to films). Why do authors select particular locations, and how do they affect the feeling of the story?

It also recounts the story of how Brighton’s local authority reacted to the film of Graham Greene’s book Brighton Rock. It made me smile.

To read this month’s blog, just go to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com

Freebies & Competitions

There are a couple of bookish competitions to draw your attention to this month. The first comes from the publishing giant Penguin. It’s only get a few days left to run, so hop over their quickly if you want to take part. They’re celebrating the pleasure of audio books, a format I certainly love. I was thrilled when Audible offered a contract for my thriller. The audio books in this competition are Penguin’s own productions. You get a chance to grab one of their audio books every month for a year. You won’t find the entry form on their website very easily, so Google “Penguin year's supply of audio books” and you should spot it easily enough.

And the second excitement comes from our old friend Caboodle, which we’ve mentioned in the past in these newsletters. To celebrate the 90th birthday of National Book Tokens, they’re running a draw for a book token and a monthly piece of cake. That doesn’t have to be birthday cake, but you get where their idea comes from.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: The Crusader's Cross by Scott Mariani

Ben Hope runs a training facility in France for Special Forces operatives, military specialists, and bodyguards. At Christmas, with his colleagues away, Hope is looking forward to a quiet holiday period. However, a suspiciously well-informed gang of armed robbers storm the site in an attempt to steal the extensive cache of weaponry that is used during training. Hope holds the key to the strong room where the hardware is kept, but he’s not the pushover the gang expected, despite the fact he currently has one leg in plaster, and he foils their attack.

Some weeks earlier, Hope had started work restoring an old church in the grounds of the site. Archaeological specialists survey it and discover hidden tunnels, which Hope explores, finding an ancient gold cross encrusted with precious stones. He entrusts it to a friend, who takes it to a Paris museum where he used to work, and it’s examined by an expert on religious artefacts.

It’s concluded that the cross has unequalled historic value as well as monetary. Hope’s friend is in such excitement that he immediately rushes back with it to see him, not waiting until morning. He arrives after dark in the middle of the raid and, thinking a figure he sees approaching is Hope, he starts to call out about the cross’ value. Too late, he realises it isn’t Hope – the man is one of the attackers. He kills Hope’s friend and disappears with the cross, leaving his colleagues behind, seeing the cross as a quick way to wealth.

Hope finds his friend dead and seeks vengeance. Before the police arrive, Hope interrogates the attackers that he captured and discovers the name of the man who murdered his friend and stole the cross. Hope sets out after him.

The Crusader’s Cross is an exciting and interesting thriller. In a few places, the writing appears slightly old fashioned in the way it sometimes explains something, almost jumping to the author’s viewpoint. Although that briefly breaks the novel’s spell, it only happens a few times and doesn’t really affect the drive of the overall story. There is plenty of action, tension, and what’s-going-to-happen-next moments, which all drive you through the thriller at pace. A highly recommended read.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Don't Look for Me by Mason Cross

Sarah Blackwell is surprised when the neighbour she befriended moves out of the rented house overnight without a word. A typed note is left in Sarah’s letter box – ‘I’ll call you,’ but she never does, and Sarah starts to worry. When she sees a man breaking into the empty house, she calls the police, but they’re dismissive of her assertion that something has happened to her friend.

After repeated calls to her neighbour’s mobile phone reveal only that it’s permanently switched off, Blackwell uses a spare key to look around the house. It’s empty of all personal belongings; they have definitely moved out, and managed it silently in one night. As she searches in the hope of finding a clue as to what has happened, she finds a small diary fallen down behind the bed.

In it are sketches and doodles, but on the last page is an email address written inside a picture of an emergency button with the label, ‘Break glass in case of emergency.’ Sarah emails the address, and Carter Blake is introduced to the story.

He had known Sarah’s neighbour many years before but they had separated, with Blake being told, ‘Don’t find me!’ Blake is a professional person-finder but had always followed her wishes. Now, though, he is being told his old flame seems to be in trouble, and Sarah persuades him to help find her friend.

The story has several twists and turns as the pair try to track her down. What part has her neighbour’s reclusive husband played in the disappearance? Does Sarah actually know her friend’s real name? And what prompted their sudden move-out? As they start out on her trail, they discover they’re not the only ones looking for me. And the other person isn’t worried about using violence to find her. Suddenly, Sarah and Blake’s lives are also at risk as they get closer to their quarry and the body count starts to rise around them.

Don’t Look For Me is an exciting and well-executed story with plenty of action to keep the adrenaline going as well as an intriguing puzzle that slowly unfolds and a few surprises along the way.

A highly recommended thriller. It’s the fourth in Cross’ Carter Blake series, but is totally capable of standing alone.

From a Writer’s Desk

One thing I’ve learnt about writing is that if you get a gut feeling that something isn’t quite right, you should listen to that inner voice and make a change, however difficult it might be. You won’t get away with leaving it because a reader somewhere will react in the same way as you, if your agent or editor doesn’t pick it up first. Of-course, it’s better to make that change before you’ve written too much.

I had that feeling with the final chapters of my current work-in-progress. Thankfully, I’ve not written them yet, only planned them, but the more I look at the story outline, the more I know it doesn’t feel quite right. It will work and the story will hang together okay, but there’s something about it that doesn’t feel totally satisfying. It will be four stars instead of five, so I spent a lot of time in September brainstorming ideas for alternative endings. I’m glad to say I now feel much happier that the new scenes sit far more harmoniously with the rest of the book. I’ve still got some loose ends to tie up – the new ending makes it more difficult for the assassin to achieve all his aims in one big finale but I know it will be much more satisfying; I know it’s a change I’ve got to make. So, a bit more planning to do to tie up the last few ends that the change has caused, and I can get back to the writing. Wish me luck!

News from the Book World: A Queen of Crime

There was a furore in the literary world last month when the estate of Agatha Christie threatened Val McDermid’s publishers with legal action. Posters for McDermid’s latest book declared her to be “the new queen of crime”, to which Christie’s descendants took severe umbrage. ‘We have trademarked the expression “Queen of Crime”,’ they declared and threatened ‘our lawyers will be in touch’ if the publishers persisted in using the phrase. The irony is that McDermid works with the Christie estate to write new Miss Marple stories for them!

What do you think about this tussle? Is it right that Christie’s estate can trademark a phrase such as “Queen of Crime” and stop it being used to describe other similarly prolific crime authors.

On a more joyous note, this weekend (Saturday 8th) sees the arrival of National Bookshop Week. It’s a campaign intended to encourage us to visit our local bookshop, with limited edition book bags for sale and various local celebrations, author signings, offers, and more. Perhaps you could go and buy a book from the Queen of Crime! For more details go to the BooksAreMyBag website and click on their Bookshop Day tab.

Peak at a Blog: Thriller Sub-genres

Do you know your crime thrillers from your mystery thrillers? This month’s blog delves into the murky area of thriller sub-genres and tries to shed light on the differences between the 13 most popular sub-genres. Can you list all thirteen?

Take a peak of this month’s blog. You can find it at iancoatesthrillers.wordpress.com

Freebies & Competitions

Are you an Ian Rankin fan? Waterstones (UK) is offering a Rebus-themed sightseeing itinerary, including a drink in the Oxford bar with Ian himself. They’re also throwing in a one-night stay in Edinburgh at a 4* hotel, a train travel to get you there, and a gift card for use at local restaurants. To have a chance, you need to pre-order a signed copy of Rankin’s latest book from them before its launch on Oct 13th. Details on the Waterstones webpage.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Killer Intent by Tony Kent

An assassin on a roof top with a sniper rifle prepares for his shot. As the action commences, he succeeds in only part of his mission, the final element thwarted by Joe Dempsey, part of a team assigned to the day’s security. Not completing the mission has many consequences.

Dempsey, who had been one of the best SAS operatives, now works for a government group called DDS. The book opens with him and his team assigned to assist with security during a visit from the American President, who is giving a speech in London’s Trafalgar Square. One of Dempsey’s team gets shot and killed during the assassin’s attack, and Dempsey is desperate to hunt down the man responsible, but the assassin has disappeared.

The novel has three threads that are followed to its thrilling conclusion – the assassin, as he obeys instructions to eliminate anyone who might have information that could uncover who hired him; Michael Devlin (a solicitor) and Sarah Truman (a reporter), who find themselves on the assassin’s “clean-up” list; and Dempsey, as he tries to track down the assassin.

Dempsey is not allowed to investigate the case officially because it’s one of his team who died, but when it’s discovered who the assassin is, Dempsey’s boss encourages him to hunt the assassin anyway: it’s a man Dempsey knows from his SAS days, and it’s possible that Dempsey is the only one good enough to take him down.

It’s a cleverly constructed story that’s well written, and the underlying conspiracy is slowly revealed as Devlin calls on family friends to help him, pushing the story to its adrenaline-fuelled conclusion. Killer Intent is full of excitement and action all the way through; a great read.

This Month’s Second Thriller: Remembrance Day by Henry Porter

Awesome beginning, fantastic end, and an entertaining, if slightly confusing, middle.

The explosive action-packed opening drags readers straight into the story as they experience the shock of a London bombing along with Con Lindow, who is caught in the blast. But as we follow him through its aftermath, we discover he used to have a connection with the IRA. When he refuses to discuss it, he instantly becomes the focus of the police investigation, although Commander Foyle, the officer in charge of the case, soon concludes that neither Lindow nor Lindow’s brother, who was killed by the bomb, was responsible. However, Foyle’s attempt to find the true perpetrator is hindered by the other government departments involved. They have something to hide about their own involvement with the bomber, and are determined to lay the blame on the two brothers.

When Foyle is forced off the case because of his continual insistence that Lindow is innocent, he forms an alliance with Lindow to uncover the truth. Lindow soon discovers that his brother worked for the IRA, and finds documents that suggest he had been tasked with finding a pair of bombers intent on derailing the Irish peace talks. The IRA forces Lindow to continue his brother’s mission to track down the two-man splinter group before their final atrocity can take place.

The well constructed plot does suffer from a large cast of characters, and there are times in the middle of the book when this is confusing. This is exacerbated by Porter having given two of the policemen very similar names (Forbes and Foyle).

One point that jarred for me was a coincidence related to breaking the encryption on a set of computer disks. The codes were based on the lettering used to represent the different genetic enzymes in DNA. This just happens to be Lindow’s specialist area (he is a research scientist), and he is therefore miraculously able to help with their decryption. That felt very contrived.

But those problems aside, this is a beautifully written thriller that’s hard to put down, even though the action is a little lacking in the first half once the opening scene has passed. Remembrance Day is a very enjoyable read and forms a good introduction to Lindow, who is the main character in Porter’s subsequent two books, A Spy’s Life and Empire State.

From a Writer’s Desk

I’ve thinking hard about my current thriller-in-progress this month. Although I was happy with the plot and the action, I felt it needed something extra to elevate it to the next level. After much head-scratching, I decided I needed to get more into the head of the protagonist so I went back into brainstorming mode. He’s an ex-assassin who left his old way of life behind after accidently causing the death of his best friend’s son. I looked deep into his heart and realised that what he was afraid of most was the new life he had built for himself collapsing. When something happens that persuades him to temporarily call on his old skills, he’s going to struggle to reconcile what he needs to do with his fear of his past being discovered and losing his new way life as a result.

I’m now going back to the early pages and to the overall plan to work out how introducing that new element is going to drive the story forward.

Any day now, I should get back the first round of edits from my publisher for Backlash, the thriller due out at the end of the year. Hopefully, I’ll squeeze in this re-planning before they arrive. I’ll let you know next time how I got on.

Peak at a Blog: The 7 Weirdest Assassinations in History

What are the 7 most unusual assassinations in history? Assassination plots have had their place since the earliest days of history, but some have been more unusual and imaginative than others. We’re not talking here anything as normal as an assassin’s knife or bullet, but far more weirder methods of dispatching victims. From conning people into thinking they’re doing a prank for a Japanese YouTube channel to a boat designed to sink and a spear up the bottom, as well as getting jabbed by an umbrella at a bus stop.

These and more are described in this month’s blog. Go to iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

News from the Book World: a New Type of Book

Have you heard of a-books? Since the invention of the e-book, pundits have heralded the death of print books but it hasn’t happened and the two formats currently seem to co-exist. Now welcome the a-book, which could start to blur the distinction between the two by bringing some of the e-book’s advantages to physical books.

One thing an e-book can do is to provide easy access to related information. For example, in a text book, you can touch a word to open an information box with a definition or associated facts. In a travel guide, it could provide a weather forecast or flight times. In a thriller, tapping a character’s name could bring up their back-story. A method to do this with print books could be on the way thanks to a six-year project at the University of Surrey, England. It’s not ready yet, but it’s getting closer. This magical book could allow a reader to sweep a finger across a word on the paper, and for a mobile phone linked to the book via Bluetooth to display the linked information.

How’s the book powered you might ask? It wouldn’t be much use if the book needed a power lead or was weighed down by a battery. Instead, the team at Surrey are currently embedding ultra-thin solar panels into its pages. A key driver, and possibly the most important factor in their work, is to keep the reading experience the same as with current print books. The next step is therefore to develop these solar-powered pages further so that they feel the same as a sheet of good quality paper.

And in case you wondered, the “a” in a-books stands for “augmented reality”.

Techie Snips: Spectacles to Help the Deaf

Making it easier for the deaf to hold a conversation... by wearing a pair of glasses! Details of a great invention hit the news recently that should be able to help those suffering from loss of hearing... and it comes in the form of spectacles. A mobile phone’s mic picks up the other person’s speech and converts it to text, like automated subtitles. A Bluetooth link from the phone then passes the words to the glasses, where they are displayed on the inside of the lenses in such a way that the wearer can see them easily while looking at the other person in the conversation. There’s a great video clip out there recording the reaction of the first deaf person to try it out. Just Google “XRAI glasses”.

Freebies & Competitions

Lovereading is running a nice competition for lovers of crime fiction this month. For a chance to get a copy of Clare Mackintosh’s latest book, The Last Party, just pop along to their website before September 4th. They’re throwing in a bottle of champagne to go with it.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: Missing Pieces by Tim Weaver

When Bek Murphy accompanies her brother on a trip to a remote island off the American coast where he is to interview an archaeologist, she could never have guessed how her life was about to be turned upside-down.

The novel is very suspenseful almost all the way through – the tension is visceral on virtually every page. It opens with Bek on her own on the island, and we soon realise the place is only inhabited during the summer and she has missed the last ferry of the season. Worse, someone is trying to murder her and she has been separated from her brother. One question that hangs over the whole story is what has happened to him and why.

Totally isolated and knowing the killer is getting ready to come for her, she must prepare while she can. She knows the saying that “attack is the best form of defence”, and Bek is a determined and resourceful woman, but even that doesn’t seem enough to keep her alive when the killers arrive.

It’s a cleverly structured thriller, cutting repeatedly between events happening now on the island and what happened when they first arrived, slowly revealing the dire situation she is in and raising more questions about who is involved and why she has been targeted.

Although the end is possibly a little flat in comparison to the rest of the story, it does satisfactorily answer all the questions and nicely ties up all the loose ends. Overall, this story is very tense and page-turning, and definitely recommended. A great standalone thriller.

This Month’s Second Thriller: The Chain by Adrian McKinty

A clever and intriguing plot about unwilling kidnappers. Unfortunately, there were quite a few places where I thought, “That wouldn’t happen,” which did spoil it somewhat. However, the story was tense, and I found myself keen to know what happened next, which was more than enough to keep me reading despite my disbelief.

The tale is told in two halves. The first part starts when Rachel O’Neill’s daughter is kidnapped. The release demand is not solely money – the hostage will only be released once she has also kidnapped another child and passed on the same demand to their parents. It’s called “The Chain”, and the female kidnapper tells Rachel that her own child was taken and will only be released once Rachel has done what’s needed.

Frantic, Rachel complies and, with the help of her brother-in-law, targets another family. Having prepared the basement of a nearby unoccupied holiday home, she kidnaps a young girl and keeps her locked up. True to their word, the woman who had been forced to kidnap Rachel’s daughter now releases her.

But the story is far from over. Having been released, Rachel’s daughter is clearly suffering PTSD. Rachel, too, has been affected psychologically and is continually watching over her shoulder. Eventually, she decides she can live like that no longer and realises the only way to get her life back is to find out who is behind The Chain and to prevent them from continuing.

She starts by using the Tor anonymous browser and creates a blog asking for anyone with info about The Chain to contact her. The one answer she gets sets her on a dangerous trail that eventually brings her face-to-face to those behind the crimes.

It’s definitely exciting and well worth the read provided you’re happy to set aside the occasional “that wouldn’t happen!” I discussed it briefly with someone else who had also read the book, and they made exactly the same comment; like me, though, they were also happy to recommend it as a good book to read.

Peak at a Blog: Crazy Paperback Book Size Changes

Have you noticed how mass market paperbacks have become larger over the last 10 years? I’m talking genre fiction here rather than “literary” stuff. Have you ever wondered why? Certainly, if I look at my bookshelves, my collection of thrillers from the seventies and eighties are all exactly the same small size, whereas more recent ones have a variety of larger sizes.

This month’s blog digs into why the change has come about and what standards exist for paperback book sizes.

Take a peak of this month’s blog. You can find it at iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

From a Writer’s Desk

While I’m sweltering as my office hits 28oC indoors, my work has moved to China. No, I’ve not headed to The Orient in person, but the protagonist in my work-in-progress thriller has just flown there via Hong Kong on the trail of criminals making counterfeit medicines. I was in China myself on business for a short period a few years ago while I worked in electronic product design, and I took copious notes in a tiny notebook. I’m mining those as I create the scenes, but I now wish I had made even more observations – as I write, I’m finding bits I didn’t record. More photos would have been useful, too. I think I’m going to have to supplement my notes with some good travel guides.

If you can recommend any books that give a real feel for the smells, sights, and sounds of China, please drop me an email (just hit reply).

In the meantime, I’m wondering how to get the temperature down a bit in here. I’ve got the router, my PC and monitor, a RAID system (hard drives that give some protection against disk failures), desk light, and other IT stuff all generating heat around me. Moving everything on to a laptop and sitting outside in the shade is tempting, but it’s even hotter out there. I’ll just have to keep up the ice cubes down by shirt back.

News from the Book World: Indie Bookshop Week

Last month contained Independent Bookshop Week. Its aim is to facilitate a series of nationwide events that celebrate the role indies play in the community. Did you get to any? A lot of author talks and signings took place around the country, some of which tried to be different by including demonstrations or activities. Two that stood out for me were one in Bristol where the author ran a demonstration of fermentation, and another in Cardiff that included a workshop on how to sew recycled bouncy-castle fabric into a book bag.

Techie Snips: Supersonic Flights

I was fascinated to read this month how NASA is working on producing supersonic aircraft designs that reduce the loudness of the sonic booms as they cross the sound barrier. Do anyone of you remember Concord? I used to live in Reading and it would regularly fly overhead as it left Heathrow. I never got to hear its sonic boom because it only ever went supersonic over sea, but it was noisy enough as it was. Beautiful to see if flying, though.

What NASA is doing is working on the wing shapes. They believe they can reduce the boom to no louder than a slamming door by getting the shape right. If successful, do you think this might reintroduce supersonic passenger flights?

Freebies & Competitions

Dead Good Books is holding a draw this month for a paperback of Cameron Ward’s A Stranger on Board, a novel they describe as “a twisty thriller”. It’s open until July 23rd, so you’ll need to get over to their website sharpish to be in with a chance for that.

First of This Month’s Thrillers: We Can See You by Simon Kernick

Kernick makes life for his protagonist Brook Connor more painful with virtually every chapter. Her problems start when her daughter, Paige, is kidnapped – terrifying enough in itself, but her life continues to unravel further as she battles to stay firm and recover her child. Eventually, she’s arrested for multiple murders.

The book cleverly cuts between her interview at the police station and the earlier events surrounding her hunt for her daughter. When Paige was snatched, Brook and her husband got a phone call from the kidnappers, but they won’t talk to Brook, only to her husband. He is acting strangely, and she begins to suspect he is somehow involved. Her mind is in turmoil as they drive to the handover, but things don’t go as planned and life for Brook starts to worsen.

Soon, she wonders if there’s anyone she can trust. All she knows is she has to stay alive and out of a prison cell long enough to find Paige.

I found it strange at first that Kernick had set this book in America. I thought this might have been his publisher’s doing, wanting to make the novel more attractive to that market, but then I decided it was probably because handguns play a key part in the story and it would have been difficult to keep the plot realistic in the UK, where firearms are not readily available. In the end, I concluded it was probably both reasons – the somewhat annoying use of American-English (for a Brit) did suggest that Arrow was aiming this thriller at the US market.

We can See You is a great thriller – palpable tension, situations getting worse when you didn’t think it was possible, plenty of action and emotion... One of the best books I’ve read for a long time with a brilliantly tense and unexpected ending.

This Month’s Second Thriller: The Night Gate by Peter May

What links a recently unearthed World War II corpse and a modern day stabbing? Enzo McLeod, a forensic investigator, is looking into the ancient death but, while visiting the site, he notices the police at a nearby house where a man has just been stabbed to death. The detective in charge recognises McLeod and persuades him to consult on the murder.

The fact the stabbing occurred only a few days after the World War II corpse was discovered is no coincidence, and McLeod slowly unearths the connection, eventually discovering both killers’ identities. We are rapidly taken into the art world and the German theft of masterpieces from France during the occupation.

I found the way the novel constantly switches between three different time periods a little confusing at several places in the novel. One storyline follows McLeod’s current day investigation, the second comes in the form of an elderly woman recounting events in France during the war that her mother had told her about, and the third jumps back to a few days before the current-day murder, following the main suspect in the time leading up to the crime.

As the three stories unfold in parallel, we see an intriguing story from the Nazi’s occupation of France and how it led to the modern day crime.

It’s a clever story, and the desire to solve the mystery is what keeps the reader glued to the pages. However, because I found the jumps in time somewhat confusing, I hesitate to give it the full five stars. Nonetheless, I certainly found it an excellent read with a believable and ingenious storyline. If you’re happy with books that chop between multiple timelines, then this is a great mystery for you. If not, approach with a little caution, but once you get used to the jumps, you’ll probably love it.

From a Writer’s Desk

I heard from my publisher recently that COVID has delayed their publishing schedule, but the edits on my latest thriller should be back with me by the end of July. That gives me about eight weeks before I need to knuckle down with intensive work on the manuscript. I’ve made the most of the unpressured period waiting for the edits by doing some techie updates to my website. They seem to have come out well and have made it more mobile-friendly as well as much easier to maintain, although they took me a lot longer than expected. It does mean work on the first of a thriller series has slowed embarrassingly, and I really need to get back to completing the first draft. Alas, it won’t be finished by the time edits arrive on my desk, which is a disappointment.

But as the sun starts to shine here in England’s Worcestershire, I’ll be getting straight back to writing the new book just as soon as I’ve signed off here.

News from the Book World: Crime Reading Month

Did you know June is National Crime Reading Month, organised by the Crime Writers’ Association? The festival celebrates crime reading through events and activities in bookshops, libraries, museums, and theatres across the UK and Ireland, as well as online events, culminating in the CWA Daggers ceremony at the end of the month.

To discover the crime reading events near you, go to their website at crimereading.com and select your region from a pull-down menu.

Techie Snips

Has BMW taken the next big step towards James Bond’s invisible car (from Die Another Day)? The heavy-hitting car manufacturer recent demonstrated a concept car that it called the iX Flow. One of its coolest features has to be that it’s wrapped in an e-ink display – that’s similar to the display used in many e-readers, which looks like paper in sunlight and only takes power when it’s changing colour. The designers say it’s designed so that drivers can better reflect their personality but, in a nod to the environmentalists, they also point out that it allows the body to be changed to white when it’s sunny, which reduces how much the car’s interior heats up and leads to less air conditioning use.

So far, it seems to be one colour at a time for the whole body, but it’s built from a series of precisely laser cut panels to fit the car’s contours, so one can imagine the next step being the ability to set each segment to a different colour. If that can ever get to the stage of displaying an image that’s captured real-time by a camera, the car could camouflage itself against the background.

Who knows if concepts from the iX Flow will ever see it into car production, but the opportunities are certainly exciting.

Peak at a Blog

Nowadays, there’s a lot of focus on the environment and, not surprisingly, publishers have started to look at the impact of publishing books. This month’s blog considers what can be done to reduce CO2 emissions in publishing. Is it better to use recycled paper than fresh? Is an e-reader going to be better than buying a paperback? (The answer to that is not as obvious as you might think!) What role does FSC certification play on the choice of paper? What parts of a book’s complete beginning-to-end lifecycle cause the most emissions?

Take a peak of this month’s blog. You can find it at iancoatesthrillers.wordpress

It’s the time of year when we need to plan blog topics for the rest of the year. We’ve got a growing list of possible titles, but would love to get a load more so we can pick the best ones for July – December. If you’ve got any suggestions, please reply to this email and let us have them; if you have a social media profile, we’ll be happy to include that in a credit when we publish a blog on a topic you suggest.

Freebies & Competitions

This month, you have an opportunity to win a signed first-edition paperback of Eavesdrop, Ian’s fast-paced thriller. Unfortunately, we can only open this one to those of you with a UK postal address because of shipping charges – sorry! Just reply to this email with “Competition” in the subject title to enter the draw, which will take place at the end of July.