Review for The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

The Marsh King's Daughter 
by Karen Dionne 
Publisher: Sphere
Release: 29th June 2017
Genre: Crime Fiction, Thriller
Source: Proof copy borrowed from the lovely Broadbean’s Books

Synopsis:

" 'I was born two years into my mother's captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. If I had known then what I do now, things would have been a lot different. I wouldn't have adored my father.'

When notorious child abductor - known as the Marsh King - escapes from a maximum security prison, Helena immediately suspects that she and her two young daughters are in danger.

No one, not even her husband, knows the truth about Helena's past: they don't know that she was born into captivity, that she had no contact with the outside world before the age of twelve - or that her father raised her to be a killer.

And they don't know that the Marsh King can survive and hunt in the wilderness better than anyone... except, perhaps his own daughter."

Review 
The Marsh King's Daughter was nothing like I expected it to be but in the best possible way! The book is narrated by Helena a woman born into captivity who spent the first twelve years of her life hidden away in the marshlands. Her whole world is made up solely of her teenage mother, her captor - who is also her father - and their daily struggle to survive in the wilderness.

Skip to the present day and Helena is a grown woman with her own husband and two young daughters who after her escape has severed all ties to her childhood in the marsh. But when her father escapes from prison she knows that he'll come after her and that it could be her daughters that he takes next.

In order to outsmart her father she has to become the daughter he raised - ruthless, feral, a skilled tracker and murderer so that she finds him before he can find her. But when it comes down to the love of a manipulative parent and the instinct to protect your children which would win?

Helena is far from your typical victim. Throughout the book we see her struggle with the side of her that is very much her father's daughter and her own complicated feelings towards him. It took me a while to really understand Helena as a character but once I did I found her fascinating to read about. I found it so interesting to read a book where the victim isn't scared of her kidnapper and instead struggles with feelings of adoration and love towards them despite knowing that she shouldn't feel that way. Helena's characterization and growth throughout the novel was the real highlight of this book for me.

The story is told in both the past and the present which kept the plot moving along at lightning speed. Although I loved the game of cat and mouse that Helena and her father played in the present day, it was the chapters set back when they lived together in the marsh that really held my attention. I loved learning about what Helena and her mother's lives were like and the cruelties that they'd experience, not only at the hands of their kidnapper, but also from the hard-living conditions of a life of solitude in the marsh.

Overall this is a story of our internal struggle between right and wrong and how that perception can become skewered for somebody who grew up idolizing and loving such a cruel parent. It's about survival and what it means to be a survivor. It's about the relationship we have with our parents and the thin line between love and hate, and it’s about the effect that our experiences as children have on our development. The Marsh King's Daughter is a phenomenal thriller and one that I'd recommend to fans of Room and anyone looking for something different and unexpected from the genre.

The Night Visitor Blog Tour

Hello everyone and welcome to my stop on The Night Visitor blog tour! Today I have an extract of the prologue to share with you to give a taste of what you can expect from this brilliant book. Enjoy!

Prologue 
Olivia 
The Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London 

Olivia huddled behind Arteries, Heart and Veins. Through the gaps between the tall specimen jars in the cabinet she could see the faces on the ground floor, looking up at Joy on the balcony. It was such a long way down.

The room was packed: all two hundred guests must have come. She couldn’t see their faces properly because the jars of hardened arteries and diseased heart tissue were acting as a screen and she didn’t want to look as if she was peering through them. She watched Joy’s animated profile instead. Joy was saying very kind things. Olivia felt sick.

‘Straight in at number two! That’s what we consider a triumph!’ Joy’s scarlet and gold earrings caught the light as she raised her champagne flute and cried, ‘A bestseller in its very first week. So, how about it? Shall we take it to number one?’ A cheer rang out through the museum; raucous voices lifted, echoed off the high ceilings and shivered through the glass display cabinets and medical oddities – faces torn by bullets and bombs, dissected limbs, diseased and malformed organs suspended in cloudy fluid. Bones, so gigantic that they must surely be from whales or mammoths, were displayed between the ground floor and this, the mezzanine. Under the clever, bleached lights they looked so curved and smooth-lined that they seemed more like sculptures than fragments of anatomy. ‘In case you missed it, there’s a table by the entrance where you can get the book for Olivia to sign,’ Joy said. ‘But that’s enough of a sales pitch from me. Let me hand you over to the woman of the hour, Britain’s favourite history professor, Olivia Sweetman!’ There was nowhere to put her glass so she held on to it as she stepped forwards. Joy squeezed her arm and moved out of the way. Olivia walked up to the Perspex-covered railings and looked down.

It really was too high – ridiculously so. What were the publicists thinking, putting her all the way up here for the speech? She would have been better off standing on the stairs or even on the ground floor with the guests gathered round her. But it was too late, all their faces were turned up, flushed with champagne and the energy of the night and this spectacle – her – standing alone in a yellow dress, glowing and supposedly triumphant. They were all waiting for her to speak.

She took a deep breath. She longed to unfurl wings and soar off this edge, over their heads and away to somewhere remote and hidden where none of them would ever find her, but she forced herself to speak. ‘Thank you so much, Joy, what a kind introduction. And thank you, all of you, for coming tonight to celebrate the launch of my book.’ Her voice came out clear and calm even though the glass in her hand was trembling. She rested that on the barrier too. She was used to public speaking, to facing a crowd and being listened to, but it was different to be looking down at friends, family, colleagues, journalists, TV people, bloggers and critics with this awful, sickening secret pressing in her gut like a tumour.

‘I hope you can all hear me? It’s an awfully long way down and as some of you will know I’m not that good with heights.’ There was a ripple of laughter, voices called up in encouragement. ‘We’ll catch you!’ someone – a man – yelled from the back. She wondered if the people directly below her could see up her full-skirted dress. She crossed her legs.

‘OK! Well, it’s amazing to be here with you tonight in this wonderful Hunterian Museum to celebrate the launch of Annabel.’ She noticed David standing at the front. His face was a mask of neutrality. Jess was at his side, her bobbed hair held back by a hairband. She was holding his hand. There was no sign of the boys. Olivia smiled directly down at her daughter but Jess didn’t react; perhaps she was more interested in the grisly objects in the cabinets that framed the balcony.

‘It seemed fitting to have the launch at the Royal College of Surgeons.’ She gestured at the cabinets. ‘Isn’t this an extraordinary museum?’ She knew she was stalling, unable to bring herself to talk about the book. She scanned the crowd for Dom and Paul but she couldn’t see either of them. She had to control this sick panic inside her – she had to sound relaxed. She’d prepared the speech about Annabel and they were all expecting it. She could, she would, deliver it.

Intrigued? Don't miss the rest of the blog tour!

Guest Post: My Guilty Little Secret by Cat Clarke

I've been a huge fan of Cat Clarke's books since her debut Entangled was released back in 2011 so I'm chuffed to bits to have her on the blog today to celebrate the release of her new novel Girlhood. Today Cat is telling us all about her guilty little secret and the role guilt has to play in her books.

My Guilty Little Secret by Cat Clarke 

I tend to write so-called ‘dark’ books, often dealing with subjects like death, grief and depression. But something I keep coming back to again and again is guilt. It features in almost everything I’ve written, most notably in Torn and A Kiss in the Dark. My guilty little secret is my obsession with guilt.

In my latest book, Girlhood, Harper feels guilty about the death of her twin sister, Jenna. Her guilt is so deeply felt that it’s completely intertwined with her grief; it threatens to drown her. The guilt isolates her from her parents, who are too busy grieving to even realize. It isolates her from her best friends, since she’s never talked to them about the circumstances surrounding her sister’s death. When the new girl arrives, Harper finally feels like she’s found someone she can confide in. Of course, this is a story written by me, so things don’t quite work out as planned.

Lots of people feel guilty following the death of someone we care about. We feel we should have treated them better, told them we loved them. In extreme situations, we might even blame ourselves for the death. It would never have happened if… If only I’d…

‘If only’ is a very powerful thought. A pointless, toxic thought, but one that we all have from time to time, because all of us feel guilty about something. I think it helps to talk about guilt. To confess, if you prefer to look at it that way. If you choose the right person to talk to, chances are they’ll reassure you and help put things in perspective. If you can’t face confiding in someone, then imagine your best friend, or someone you love, confiding in you. You’d reassure them, wouldn’t you? (Unless you’re an evil monster, in which case, what are you doing reading Jess’s lovely blog? Be gone, monster!) It never ceases to amaze me that we’re so much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. Humans are weird like that.

Of course, being an evil author, what interests me most is what happens when you confide in the wrong person… And you can read Girlhood if you fancy finding out.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today Cat! 

For more from Cat you can follow her on Twitter @cat_clarke 

Girlhood is available to buy now in all good bookshops

Dreaming of Venice Blog Tour

Hello everyone and welcome to my stop on the Dreaming of Venice Blog Tour. Today I have a guest post from author T.A. Williams on how much of him he writes into his books.

Me in My Books by T.A. Williams 

Well, they say you should write about what you know. And I suppose I should know lots about me. So it’s pretty inevitable that I’m going to transpose stuff from my life onto my characters. Let’s take a look at Dreaming of Venice, my second book for publishers Canelo. Where does Trevor Williams rear his bald and wrinkly head? For starters, like with my previous books, I didn’t make it easy for myself. I once again chose to write this one from the standpoint of the main character, Penny. Penny is a woman. I’m not. So not much chance of overlap there, I hear you say. Well, that’s not strictly correct.

You see, first of all, Penny falls in love with a black Labrador called Gilbert. My old Lab definitely slotted in straight after my wife and daughter in my affections (outstripping both of them on occasions, but don’t tell them I said that).

Second, Penny has dreamt all her life of going to Venice. Well, many, many years ago, I spent eight years living and working in Italy and, since then, I have returned to visit Venice on a number of occasions, most recently just before last Christmas.

Unsurprisingly, Penny shares my love of that wonderful city. I hope my description of it manages to do justice to somewhere that will always be very dear to me. If I wasn’t married to the only Italian in the world who prefers to live in England rather than in Italy, I would, without doubt, be writing this in a little house somewhere in Italy, hopefully not too far from La Serenissima, Venice.

So that’s the dog and the city. Now, what about the story? The main premise of the story is that Penny has to put her thespian hat on and act the part of reclusive billionaire, Olivia. Now, I’ve never done any acting, but I know only too well how hard it is to go to meetings and receptions, a smile permanently bolted on and a ready supply of small talk to hand. Poor Penny comes right up against it when she has to go to a cocktail party for the rich and famous and she feels like a fish out of water. I know the feeling.

Penny is an artist and I’m not, but my wife is. All the details of famous artists, painting with oils, compositions and exhibitions are gleaned from her. I’ve never lived in London, but my daughter does. So, when she gets round to reading Dreaming of Venice, she won’t be totally surprised to find some of the places being described strangely familiar. As for Penny’s love of Venice, that is definitely all me. I love the place.

In my previous book for Canelo, Chasing Shadows, the action takes place on the pilgrims’ way to Santiago de Compostela. I did that whole trip myself on a bike a few years ago and inserted any number of incidents that actually happened to me. In Dreaming of Venice, lots of events, like getting lost in the narrow alleys of the old city, actually happened to me. Penny loves champagne and Prosecco. Snap. Like me, she speaks Italian and is fascinated by history and the history of art. And we both like rabbit stew.

Above all, however, I would like to think that Penny is like me in the way she faces up to the problems that life throws at her. She doesn’t drop her head into her hands and spend a week or two sobbing. She takes a deep breath and gets on with it. It isn’t easy for her with her long-distance boyfriend, her struggle to break into the London art scene, or having to share her accommodation with a big, bold rat. But she manages. Penny, like so many of my heroines, is a very determined character. I suppose you could probably say that about me, too.

 Don't miss the rest of the blog tour!

Blog Tour: Review for Dead Woman Walking by Sharon Bolton

Dead Woman Walking 
by Sharon Bolton 
Publisher: Bantam Press
Release: 20th April 2017
Genre: Crime Fiction, Thriller
Source: Copy received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review



Synopsis:

"Just before dawn in the hills near the Scottish border, a man murders a young woman. At the same time, a hot-air balloon crashes out of the sky. There’s just one survivor.

She’s seen the killer’s face – but he’s also seen hers. And he won’t rest until he’s eliminated the only witness to his crime.

Alone, scared, trusting no one, she’s running to where she feels safe – but it could be the most dangerous place of all..."

Review 
As a surprise for her sister's 40th birthday, Jessica Lane takes Bella on a hot air balloon ride over the beautiful Northumberland National Park but what starts off as an idyllic trip soon turns into a living nightmare as they witness a man murdering a woman in the park below them.

When the killer catches sight of the hot air balloon his gun swiftly turns on them killing their pilot, as they crash from the sky most of the passengers are killed on impact. When the police arrive on the crime scene it becomes apparent that Jessica Lane is the sole survivor of the crash and she's gone on the run because although she saw the killer's face he's also seen hers and he'll stop at nothing to make sure that every witness to his crime is dead.

Wow, wow, wow! Dead Woman Walking is an immensely clever thrill ride of a read! The first fifty pages were perhaps the most intense opening to a book that I have ever read. What starts off as your typical cat and mouse chase between the killer and his victim quickly twists and turns adding layer upon layer of mystery that overtime creates a complex plot so that by the final page all of the little threads come together creating a bigger picture. I thought I knew where I was going with this book but I was completely wrong!

The story is told from multiple points of view and alternates between different timelines using short, snappy chapters so that you're slowly drip-fed small amounts of information at a time. This kept the pace moving at breakneck speed and it was so easy to think 'just one more chapter' which of course led me to read several more than I intended. I love a good twist in a book and this one had several that made me gasp out loud. It certainly gave me a good runaround!

The only thing that stopped Dead Woman Walking from getting the full 5 stars from me was that there were a few instances where I had to suspend belief and I couldn't always understand the actions that the characters made but this is only a small complaint as I still enjoyed the book immensely.

Dead Woman Walking is one of the best crime novels that I've read so far in 2017. With an intricate plot, fleshed out characters and twists galore it ticks all the boxes that make up an outstanding thriller. Don't miss it!

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