Release date - 28th December 2017
Book length - 384 pages Publisher - Avon Book Depository - www.bookdepository.com Amazon UK - www.amazon.co.uk Amazon US - www.amazon.com I want to thank Sabah from Avon Books UK for the opportunity to take part in this blog tour and for providing me with a copy of this book for review. I also want to thank the author James Nally for the excellent guest post which you can read further down this post. ABOUT THE BOOK Irish runaway. Insomniac. Functioning alcoholic. Life is about to get complicated for DC Donal Lynch. When a young woman is kidnapped, Donal is brought in to deliver the ransom money. But the tightly-planned drop off goes wrong, Julie Draper is discovered dead, and Donal finds his job on the line – a scapegoat for the officers in charge. But when Donal is delivered a cryptic message in the night, he learns that Julie was killed long before the botched rescue mission. As he digs further into the murder in a bid to clear his own name, dark revelations make one thing certain: the police are chasing the wrong man, and the killer has far more blood on his hands than they could even imagine. MY REVIEW GAMES WITH THE DEAD by James Nally is a compelling, engrossing, and completely entertaining crime fiction novel that will keep you gripped from beginning to end. Set back in the early 90's we are thrown into the life of DC Donal Lynch, an Irishman who is struggling both professionally and personally. Stuck in cold cases, Donal jumps at the opportunity to take part in the kidnapping case of Julie Draper, but when things don't go to plan, he becomes the easy scapegoat for his bosses. Privately, things are going downhill fast with his girlfriend Zoe, and he will do anything he can to save his family as he loves her little boy like he was his own. But like everything in life things can always get worse and Donal knows that Julie Draper is dead before anyone else because she comes to him in his dreams, just like the others ... I immediately connected with Donal as a character partly because he is Irish and I completely got all of the references that were aimed that way but mainly because here is a guy who works hard, loves his family, and wants to succeed, but because of his fear of death and the strange visions that plague him, doesn't know how to deal with everything crashing down around him. He is flawed, he makes mistakes, but he is so human and relatable that you cannot help but want him to succeed against all the odds. The drama in this story is gritty and layered, which I loved, and it was really entertaining to watch Donal and his allies try to piece together the very large and intricate puzzle. GAMES WITH THE DEAD by James Nally is the third instalment in this series but can easily be read as a standalone which is what I have done - although I have to say that I cannot wait to go back and read the other books as this series really is very good. A thoroughly engrossing detective story with a character that you will want more from. Author Bio: James Nally was a journalist for 15 years, before leaving to become a producer and director of TV and film. For more information: Twitter - twitter.com/jimnally READ ON FOR AN INTRIGUING GUEST POST FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT WHETHER PSYCHIC DETECTIVES EXIST... PSYCHIC DETECTIVES – CAN THEY EVER BE REAL? In my trilogy of books, the main character, Detective Constable Donal Lynch suffers a psychic episode every time he gets close to a recently-murdered body. Pretty useful for a detective, you might think. Except Donal is a devout sceptic and desperate to find any kind of logical, scientific explanation for his ‘waking dreams’. In fact, what he’d really love to do is banish them for good. Most of us, I suspect, would react in a similar fashion. After all, psychics are cranks, right? We’ve all read about those high-profile ‘missing persons’ cases – Maddie McCann, Joanna Yeates - where self-professed prophets provided misguided information that merely derailed police efforts and offered false hope to a desperate family. Then a psychic cropped up who challenged my convictions. His name is Dennis McKenzie and he lives near Cambridge in the English west midlands. And it was close to home where he most famously used his psychic skills for good. Who can forget the August of 2002 when ten-year-old friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing from their small village of Soham in Cambridgeshire? As police and volunteer teams searched frantically for the missing girls, Holly’s family called in Dennis. “I am really sorry, but both girls are dead,’ are the words Dennis will never forget having to utter to those families. Dennis instantly knew something ‘terrible’ had happened to the girls. In the days before their bodies were found, he described to police their killer Ian Huntley, his girlfriend Maxine Carr, the view from Huntley’s house, the red Ford Fiesta he transported the bodies in and the site where the bodies were dumped, including a nearby grain silo. Part of me sought desperately for an explanation for all this; it is an affront to common sense and logic, after all. But Holly’s dad later went public to describe Dennis as ‘the genuine article’. There’s no doubting he’s a genuinely good man. I later discovered that Dennis still charges a modest £40 fee for a reading, and does all his criminal investigation work for free. ‘I’m aware it’s a gift, but it’s not a gift for me,’ he says, revealing that he once turned down £10,000 to conduct a reading. ‘I feel very strongly that if I did exploit this gift for profit, I’d lose it.’ Like my hero Donal, Dennis McKenzie is tormented by spirits, struggles to sleep and sometimes worries that he’s mentally ill. But he now has a track record for discovering dead bodies. Take Blake Hartley, a Sandhurt cadet aged 24 who disappeared in 2004 while training in the French Alps. Dennis travelled to Chamonix and picked up that Blake had fallen into a river after hitting his head on a rock late at night. Soon after, a human thigh bone was found on the bank and DNA revealed it to be Blake’s. He worked on Mary Kelly’s case for free as she desperately tried to discover the fate of her missing 17-year-old son Richard in Limerick, Ireland. Holding Richard’s house key, Dennis kept coming up with two words: ’Bridget’ and ‘dyke’, and predicted that the body had been weighed down. Soon after Dennis’ visit, fishermen found Richard’s remains in Lough Brigid, near Bodyke in County Clare. Two concrete slabs had been tied to his legs. There are numerous other examples of Dennis’ psychic abilities which, frankly, make me feel very close-minded and cynical. As one of my main characters in Games with the Dead observes, why are we so threatened by the inexplicable? Why do so many of us refuse to believe that such abilities may exist? After all, there is so much in the human psyche and the universe we don’t understand. If my flawed-but-lovable hero Donal Lynch won’t convince you, perhaps Dennis McKenzie will. As he so succinctly puts it: ‘If I’m bonkers, why do I keep getting it right?’ DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OUT ALL OF THE OTHER STOPS ALONG THE WAY!!
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
WelcomeHi fellow bookworms. My name is Linda and I'm a reviewer & blogger, wife & mother who loves all things books! Currently ReadingUPCOMING BLOG TOURS
Privacy PolicyNo-one may use Books Of All Kinds content without my permission. Books Of All Kinds does not share personal information with third parties nor do I store information about your visit to this blog for use other than to analyse content performance through the use of cookies, which you can turn off at anytime by modifying your internet browser's settings. Books Of All Kinds is not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission. This privacy policy is subject to change without notice.
Archives
November 2023
|