Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler.

This debut novel is a first person narrative of a young New York woman who grabs her boyfriend’s phone to discover he is an anonymous conspiracy theorist. Felix has never told her about his hobby, wanting to keep it secret. Follow her as she explores the issues of online lies and fake identities.

I did not like Lauren’s writing style, it rambled on and appeared to have no structure. Her story lacked focus and there was very little plot. Lots of characters popped into the story but character development was poor. There were no real surprises and the ending was a let down.

Lauren explored at great length the restrictions imposed by social media on the online character, identity and truth of posts. But this discussion on the scope of fake accounts on social media could be covered far quicker and better by reading a newspaper feature article.

I got very little pleasure from reading Fake Accounts and found it quite boring and uninspiring. It was a book that was very easy to put down and quite frankly, if ALL books were of this low quality, I would give up reading books as a hobby and move onto something else.

I am very surprised that a major publisher took a chance with this debut novel. I think Fake Accounts is a book to AVOID, so I vote it the lowest score of 1 star. The irony is that the best quote I can offer from this book also sums it up so well…

Keep in mind, too, that once you get with someone it’s easier to stay with them than to leave them, and that once you dedicate a certain amount of time and effort to a relationship or hobby or whatever, it feels as if that amount of time will have been wasted if you stop.

…Which is why I read this book to the very end. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher 4th Estate/William Collins for giving me an ARC on the understanding that I write a review.

Fake Accounts was written in 2021 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

Sea to Sky (Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery #3) by R. E. Donald.

 A dead man rides a chairlift at the popular ski resort on Whistler Mountain. Follow Hunter Rayne as he gets involved in a murder investigation. Although the third in the series, Sea to Sky can be read as a stand-alone. This story is set way back in 1997, so make allowances for the changes in technology that people take for granted nowadays. Later on in this story Hunter goes into a public library to obtain information that today can be grabbed with a few taps on a smartphone anywhere in the world. On the trucking side there are no digital tachographs, telematics or vehicle tracking.

Sea to Sky is a mystery surrounding the private life of Hunter. This all makes for a very relaxed cosy murder mystery. There are bits of relationships that progressed from books one and two, a little romance, some trucking with the usual challenges plus the investigation to find the chairlift killer.

The pace of this novel was quite slow and laboured over the characters from the earlier books and those surrounding the chairlift killer. There were odd bits of dialogue to make you smile, for example…

“If you would just shut the heck up for five seconds and let me speak, woman!” boomed Sorry. “Sasha, Bruno. Say hello to the big lady.” The two kids looked up briefly from petting Peterbilt and said in unison “Hello, big lady.” One was a little girl about seven years old, the other a little boy of about five.

...The story plodded along with gentle and very minor sub plots. Apart from the actual scenes of the chairlift murder and how the victim was killed, nothing else was exciting or gripping in this story.

I found Sea to Sky a relaxing read to simply roll along with - better than a daily newspaper but nothing to recommend to a friend. Sea to Sky is an OKAY 3 star read but nowhere near as good as the previous novel called Ice on the Grapevine.

Sea to Sky was written in 2012 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

The Family Friend by C.C. MacDonald.

Erin comes home to her fiancee Raf and meets a stranger, Amanda, who he claims to be an old family friend. Follow Erin as she copes with this new visitor.

I enjoyed reading The Family Friend which is a psychological drama highlighting problems around relationships and social media. It is very current in it’s outlook and I liked how it explored people’s engagement with social media. Erin is an Instamum and has become an influencer on Instagram. She is successful on Instagram and has lots of #gifted items for her and her baby Bobby. I liked how the business model of Instagram was explored in this novel and how it affected Erin and her followers. A nice discussion was made about how people can so easily  become addicted to Smartphones and social media. I enjoyed reading about the psychology behind the creation and following of Instagram stories.

I liked how this story developed and how suspicions of Amanda and Raf grew. Okay the plot was not brilliant but the character development was wonderful. The Family Friend is a character driven novel and the reader very quickly develops an empathy for Erin with her screaming baby Bobby.

I loved how many social issues were featured in this novel. Although the author is a man, he puts the world along the Kent coast purely from a young mother’s perspective. I found it very easy to enter and engage with Erin’s world as she struggled with her screaming baby, mother and toddler groups, strolling along the coastline and managing an Instagram account with negative comments and trolls.

I think The Family Friend would make for a typical British television drama which are popular at the 21:00 broadcast slot. Reading this novel was engaging and had a nice steady flow. I consider The Family Friend to be a GOOD 4 star read and would be happy to read another book from C.C. MacDonald.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher Random House UK/Vintage for giving me a #gifted copy on the understanding that I publish a review.

The Family Friend was written in 2021 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

Ice on the Grapevine (Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery #2) by R. E. Donald.

A lorry driver pulls over for a regular mid-journey vehicle check and discovers a frozen corpse in the trailer. A nightmare for any truck driver, still these things happen even when double-manning. This incident leads to the drivers being arrested and their transport manager enlists the help of ex-RCMP trucker Hunter Rayne to assist in their release.

 

This second book in the series can be read as a stand-alone and thankfully the reader does not need any back story. I found this book to be a refreshing mystery with plenty of characters and sub-plots. The story progressed at a steady pace and there was a lot of warmth between the characters.

 

The trucking parts provided a good backdrop for this story and I loved the little details like cabotage. Where this story scores though is the relationships people develop with others and not just the two legged sort. We meet Peaches, a Pomeranian who, like most dogs, love to travel.

 

I enjoyed the chemistry that developed between the characters, Hunter warming to Peaches, romance among the adults and sexy scenes to make you smile. Angie was a big surprise, one of those scenes that once you read you can’t unread. As for the couple who after the third time shared a can of Budweiser, well - laughing out loud - I would be very disappointed if you offered me half a can of beer after performing three times. I would want a full can and three biscuits, thank you.

 

I liked how this mystery unfolded with lots of possibilities about how the victim ended up in the trailer and all the likely people who may have wanted him off the scene.

 

I think this character driven mystery is a GOOD 4 star read and is considerably better than the first book in this series, Slow Curve on the Coquihalla.

 

Ice on the Grapevine was written in 2011 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

Find You First by Linwood Barclay.

Miles Cookson was a sperm donor but now he has a terminal illness and wants to find his adult children. Follow Miles as he searches for them before his time runs out.

I found Find You First to have the 3 e’s - engaging, enjoyable and entertaining. Although this novel deals with terminal illness and characters who disappear or are killed, it is easy reading because Linwood writes so smoothly. He writes about current times, attitudes and social issues in a soothing style like listening to a radio phone-in programme. All the lifestyle trigger points are covered, for example landlines, burner phones, following Gwyneth Paltrow on Twitter, binge-watching TV, teenagers at home with their mobile phones and ear buds, who text or email with voice calls the last option, Airbnb, Nespresso, and Google Alerts.

There were a lot of twists and turns through this story, lots of finger pointing and a fair range of good and bad characters. These characters gave Linwood the room for subtle humour which made me chuckle, for example…

He’d be ruined professionally. The clinic would be shut down. God, he might even face criminal charges. He’d be lucky to have a job as a Walmart greeter by the time the dust settled.

“You get to a certain age you can throw your back out just wiping your ass.”

Maybe this was what marriage was, Gilbert mused. Unrelenting unhappiness, but at least you had someone to talk to.

“Four stops, four days. Like I’m Drake on tour.”

… I found the plot of Find You First to be okay but the really clever bits were from the beginning and as the story unfolded, slowly but steadily the intriguing elements reduced to a mediocre race to the end. I think Find You First is a GOOD 4 star read but I did not enjoy it as much as his previous book Elevator Pitch.

Thanks to Netgalley and HQ the publisher for providing an ARC on the understanding that I write a review.

Find You First was written in 2021 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. 

Slow Curve on the Coquihalla (Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery #1) by R. E. Donald.

Follow Hunter Rayne as he solves a mystery back in 1995 when a lorry crashes off a road in Canada, killing the driver.

 

I found Slow Curve on the Coquihalla to be a soft, cosy mystery even though it involved a fatality. Hunter Rayne is a fellow trucker who was asked by the dead driver’s daughter to look into her dad’s death. But Hunter is no average trucker because he used to be a mountie with the RCMP.

 

R. E. Donald writes a lot of detail into her mystery - loads of paragraphs describing the colours of the landscape, the roads and locations alongside plus the workings of a haulage company. I was not bothered by her lengthy descriptions of landscapes and vegetation but loved that her locations were real and not fictional or generic.

 

Of great interest to me were all the details about the workings of the transport industry. Readers must remember that the technical side of trucking has moved on a tremendous amount since 1995. With modern telematics, every damn thing is monitored and recorded, there would be no mystery at all about this road traffic accident.

 

R. E. Donald used to work in the haulage industry and her understanding of the work and the drivers really shines through. I have never driven a lorry but many of my Facebook friends have moved over from coaches to lorries and the attitudes and issues they raise are the same as she describes. For all that bus, coach and lorry drivers enjoy their job and working on their own, whenever they compare notes, they are always moaning about similar things, year in, year out. Honest, all professional drivers are content and happy but we can have a good old moan.

 

Solving the mystery of the lorry crash was a steady plod with lots of finger pointing. I found the parts about Hunter’s family life tedious to read through and were an unwelcome distraction from the core of this mystery. The solving of the mystery was not mind blowing and was something to roll along with. Because the quality of her writing about trucking culture held my interest throughout this book, I consider this novel to be an Okay 3 star read. 

 

Kitty Dunn had a small part to play in this story but she had the best line of dialogue when she said “Yes, it suited me well. Over the years, I’d gotten used to being alone, and I like having my own home without the clutter of a full-time husband”.

 

Slow Curve on the Coquihalla was written in 2011 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.

Cold Snap by Sam Clover.

Iddy is a gay 20 year old homeless man. The city is covered in snow and rumours are that a monster is hunting the streets at night. Can Iddy and his homeless friends stay safe from the cold, the snow and the monster?

I really enjoyed reading Cold Snap. It allowed me to enter a very different world to the one I live in. A world of homelessness and homosexuality. Cold Snap has gritty urban issues, gay sex and horror from the monster seeking it’s prey. I think this story would make a great film.

I think Sam is a great author because she engages the reader with situations they may not have any experience or understanding about. Her talent shines when she writes about man to man emotions and gay sex. I naively assumed that only homosexual male authors could write about gay sex. But Sam covers the gay sex so well and I feel it should not offend straight readers of either gender.

I thought the character development was very good, especially Ben, the bi-sexual police officer. There was a good discussion about sexual politics and diversity of lifestyles.

I found Sam’s writing high quality and loved her wide range of language. She made good use of informal North American words which made this British reader tap his Kindle to pull up the dictionary to confirm the meaning. The use of these local words gave the story colour and context.

I loved the banter and humour shared between the characters. The dialogue was very witty and constantly made me smile. For example…

“You know, in case the pretty one turns up dead and you crave some hardcore street cock!” Ben kept going. “I mean, if you’re gonna do dirty, do it right!” Gary insisted. “This meat is ripe! I haven’t showered in three weeks, and it burns like fucking acid when I pee!” He caught Bot nodding and quirked a brow at him. “What, you too? Man, we gotta spring for some ointment.”

...I think Cold Snap is an OUTSTANDING 5 star read from Sam Clover and I hope she writes more books of the same high quality.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher NineStar Press for giving me an ARC on the understanding that I write a review.

Cold Snap was written in 2020 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.