Book Review of The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd

 

 

* * * * *

A wholly original and gripping thriller which shocks and surprises until the end.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is going to be a very positive review, not least because when I reviewed the author’s previous novel I suggested that it shared a few features with his first novel (which had some points of contact with one by John Fowles) and the next one needed a clean slate.

The People Watcher got that clean slate all right! It benefits from this.

Most of the story is seen through the eyes of a brain-damaged person and some of the tension comes from this character’s inability to really know her own next move or even face her past. The bulk of the tension, though, comes from an accelerating sequence of ever more fraught and frightening events in the present and revelations about the past. Some of the relationships and actions depicted in this novel are spectacularly unwise and unhealthy, but are realistic in that murder is a perverse response to any situation, especially when that situation is normal life. What Sam Lloyd gets so right is the bell-curve of perversity that follows such an inappropriate and disproportionate response, where everything goes from bad to worse for quite some time until a catastrophe allows normality to begin to force her way back in.

There are moral challenges, too, for the reader as well as the main protagonist (who strives to right serious wrongs with small acts of kindness and is shocked when darker methods seem to work.)

The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd is published by Random House UK on the 12^th of June 2023

Book Review of Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro

 

 Second forensic thriller in the Ally Dymond series.

* * * *

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

In the aftermath of the traumas suffered by Ally Dymond and her daughter, Megan, in “Breakneck Point” “Slaughterhouse Farm” is a fast-moving and compelling story of how long-buried traumas and abusive relationships can lead to crimes decades or even generations after that initial trauma.

What unravels is not one thread of a single mystery, but a web of interlocking crimes committed by different people from three generations and several families and for a wide spread of reasons, which means that the pressure on CSI Ally Dymond and her family, and the tension for the reader, never let up till the very end. This wouldn’t be an Ally Dymond story if it did! And if you don’t know everything that’s going on, how can you ever know who to trust?

This is a very good read, but so much goes on that you more or less have to read it from cover to cover in order to keep everything in your head.

 

Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro is published by HQ on the 25^th of May 2023.