What I read on vacation…
As I left town for vacation, I was ready for vacation and had a stack of great summer reads!
First up was the much sought after Gone, Girl by Gillian Flynn. This was a great read because nothing is what it seems right up until the very end of the book. A wife’s disappearance is only the beginning of this mystery. The author uses the different perspectives of the main characters to lead the reader down a path where they think they know where they are going and then all of a sudden the landscape changes. Gillian Flynn uses all the traditional mystery/thriller plot devices and uses them in a unique way. Definitely worth a read. That’s all I can say…
In keeping with the gone theme, I moved on to Gone by Mo Hayder. Gone, is another entry into Hayder’s series about a crew of police detectives who work in the Major Crimes Investigation Unit a in Bristol, England. What at first appears to be a straightforward carjacking turns out to be much more complicated and compelling. This was the first Mo Hayder book I have read and I really enjoyed it. There were several different story lines, each equally suspenseful . Gone made me want to go back and read previous books by Mo Hayder and I will definitely be looking for future installments featuring detective Jack Caffery and sergeant Flea Marley.
The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell is another police procedural crime novel. This was a debut novel for Dan Waddell and he has since written a sequel- Blood Atonement. In The Blood Detective, Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster investigates a body found in a graveyard. The autopsy reveals that superficial knife wounds on the victim’s body are actually carved letters and numbers (an index number) referring to a file in the city’s archive of birth/ death certificates and marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is called in to help search the archives and discovers the index number refers to 100-year-old crime. Detective Chief Inspector Foster and Nigel Barnes will have to solve the old murder in order to understand the new murder. I really enjoyed this mystery because it was a great police procedural and it had a lot of history and genealogy in it as well.
The Line Between Here and Gone by Andrea Kane was the second installment of author Kane’s new series featuring the Forensic Instincts team. While this is the second in the Forensic Instinct series it can also stand on it’s own and I didn’t have any problem reading the second book without reading the first book (The Girl who disappeared Twice) . The Line Between Here and Gone is a very suspenseful story about a mother, Amanda Gleason, trying to find the father of her child in order to save his life. The only problem is, Justin’s father, Paul, is dead-or is he? Amanda hires the Forensic Instinct team to investigate whether a picture that was sent to Amanda is really Paul, Justin’s father, who Amanda thought died in a car accident. For the most part, I really enjoyed this book. There were a few aspects to the plot that I guessed, but in general, the author kept me thinking about what was happening and why. I like the premise of the Forensic Team and will definitely read the next book in this series. I also went back and read the first book, The Girl Who Disappeared Twice.