Crime Book Club – Video and Voting

On Monday the crime book club met to discuss The Retreat by Sarah Pearse.

Unfortunately, due to… life… I made a bit of a mess of things this month.

The meeting was Monday, as is the schedule, but in one of my blog posts I’d written it as next week and it was that date that had got stuck in my head. It wasn’t until a member emailed me on Monday to ask where the login details were that I had to kick into action.

Though I managed to set everything up, finish the book, and sort the questions, I’m afraid it did mean I’d confused some members and the meeting was a smaller group than usual. So to those members, I apologise. Next month’s meeting is already in the diary. It will not happen again.

Now onto the admin of the month.

We had a good meeting, as we always do, regardless of how many members were present – it was still a decent turnout. Members enjoyed the book overall, but there were some discussion points. You can watch the video below to see what the group thought.

Next month we are meeting on Monday 4th September. I don’t yet have my daughter’s shift pattern for next month so it will either be 8 p.m. or 8.10 p.m. I will add the time to the next blog post, but the date is set.

Now onto the vote for the book. The theme is award-winning books. Please look through the list, read the blurbs and leave your vote in the comments below, before the end of Saturday 12th August.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Two brothers meet at the border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of outback Queensland. They are at the stockman’s grave, a landmark so old, no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family’s quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish. Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he lose hope and walk to his death? Because if he didn’t, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects…

The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre

Meet Patience Portefeux, a fifty-three-year-old, underpaid Franco-Arab interpreter for the Ministry of Justice who specializes in phone tapping. Widowed after the sudden death of her husband, Patience is now wedged between university fees for her grown-up daughters and nursing home costs for her aging mother.Happening upon an especially revealing set of police wiretaps ahead of all other authorities, Patience makes a life-altering decision that sees her intervening in — and infiltrating — the machinations of a massive drug deal. She thus embarks on an entirely new career path: Patience becomes The Godmother.

Sunset Swing by Ray Celestin

Los Angeles. Christmas, 1967. A devil is loose in the City of Angels . . .

A young nurse, Kerry Gaudet, travels to the City of Angels desperate to find her missing brother, fearing that something terrible has happened to him: a serial killer is terrorising the city, picking victims at random, and Kerry has precious few leads.

Ida Young, recently retired Private Investigator, is dragged into helping the police when a young woman is discovered murdered in her motel room. Ida has never met the victim but her name has been found at the crime scene and the LAPD wants to know why . . .

Meanwhile mob fixer Dante Sanfelippo has put his life savings into purchasing a winery in Napa Valley but first he must do one final favour for the Mob before leaving town: find a bail jumper before the bond money falls due, and time is fast running out.

Ida’s friend, Louis Armstrong, flies into the city just as her investigations uncover mysterious clues to the killer’s identity. And Dante must tread a dangerous path to pay his dues, a path which will throw him headlong into a terrifying conspiracy and a secret that the conspirators will do anything to protect . . .

Completing his American crime quartet, Ray Celestin’s Sunset Swing is a stunning novel of conspiracy, murder and madness, an unforgettable portrait of a city on the edge.

Agent Seventeen by John Brownlow

You’ll never know my name.

But you won’t forget my number.

Behind the events you know are the killers you don’t. When diplomacy fails, we’re the ones who gear up. Officially we don’t exist, but every government in the world uses our services. We’ve been saving the world, and your ass, for one hundred years.

Sixteen people have done this job before me. I am Seventeen. The most feared assassin in the world. But to be the best, you must beat the best. My next target is Sixteen, just as one day Eighteen will hunt me down. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and it gets lonely at the top. Nobody gets to stay for long. But while we’re here, all that matters is that we win.

Pine by Francine Toon

They are driving home from the search party when they see her.

The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.

In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.

Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

In spare, haunting prose, Francine Toon creates an unshakeable atmosphere of desolation and dread. In a place that feels like the end of the world, she unites the gloom of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.