Review: Taken for Dead by Graham Masterton

Title: Taken for Dead (Katie Maguire, #4)
Author: Graham Masterton
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication Date: 12th February 2015
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9781781856802
Source: Unsolicited Review Copy
Rating: 3.5/5
Purchase: Amazon

It is a sunny Saturday in county Cork, and an Irish wedding is in full swing. Drunk uncles are toasting the bride. The Ceilidh band have played for hours. But the cutting of the cake will bring the wedding to a horrifying end. For there, grinning gruesomely up from the bottom tier, is the severed head of the local baker.

Katie Maguire, of the Irish Garda, does not have any leads - until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances. The murders appear to link to The Kings of Erin, a terrifying gang of torturers and extortionists. But these are dangerous men. And they will stop at nothing to throw Katie off the trail...

Review: Border Angels by Anthony J. Quinn

Title: Border Angels
Author: Anthony J. Quinn
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication Date: 7th January 2015
Pages: 240
Source: Unsolicited Review Copy
Rating: 4.5/5
Purchase: Amazon

A charred corpse and a set of footprints in the snow lead Celcius Daly into the twilight world of people trafficking.

Inspector Celcius Daly is hunting for a missing woman, Lena Novak, who mysteriously disappeared one winter's night along the Irish border, leaving in her wake the corpses of two men.

Daly finds himself hooked together with a prostitute and a hit man in a life-or-death chase. His investigation leads them deep into border country, a wild terrain of disappearing lanes and blown-up bridges, abandoned ghost-estates and thick forests - the ultimate refuge for anyone who does not want to be found.

Guest Review: Angel of Death by Ben Cheetham

Title: Angel of Death
Author: Ben Cheetham
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication Date: 8th May 2014
Pages: 352
Source: Review Copy
Rating: 4/5
Purchase: Amazon

Would you break the law to see justice done? A former prostitute turns to murder in order to take revenge on the men who abused her.

Sheffield: a bankrupt businessman has murdered his family. It seems like an open-and-shut case: a desperate man resorting to desperate measures.

Middlesbrough: a woman named Angel is heading south. She is a woman alone. A prostitute. Now a murderer. And she has only one thing on her mind: revenge.

Two crimes, a hundred miles apart, but a terrible secret connects them. And although the courts may not agree, DI Jim Monahan has all the proof he needs to bring down justice on a group of particularly vicious criminals...

Review: Disappeared by Anthony Quinn (4/5)

DISAPPEARED introduces Celcius Daly, a Belfast Police Inspector laden with flawed judgment and misplaced loyalties. One of 2012's top ten crime novels.

A retired Special Branch Detective succumbing to early-stage dementia disappears from his remote home in rural Northern Ireland. An ex-intelligence officer is tortured to death. But why was his obituary printed in the local paper before his death? A son seeks his father's long-lost body and vengeance against those who murdered him. A stone-cold killer stalks the outskirts of Belfast. But at whose behest is he hunting his targets? And why?

All are connected by a single strand spun out of the past... but as Inspector Celcius Daly knows, the past is never dead... it's not even past.