Am writing like fury to catch up on my reviews which have been getting madly behind since my return from the Land of Oz. By the time this is up on Random I shall be in Madeira lolling around and though I have my laptop with me I don't want to be on it all the time so am writing before I leave and scheduling them to pop up while I am covered in Factor whatever by the pool.
So here we go.
First up, Trespasser by Paul Doiron. I read the first novel by this author last year, review here, and this is the second featuring Mike Bowditch, a game warden living in Maine. One foggy evening Mike received a call for help. A woman has reportedly struck a deer on a lonely road but when he arrives there is no sign of either her or the deer though there is blood on the road. Mike feels a sense of foreboding that something is not right and he is proved correct when a day later he discovers her mutilated and brutalised corpse which modus operandi is similar to a case seven years ago. But the murderer had been found and is in jail though protesting his innocence and does this mean that a mistake has been made and the real culprit is still around? We shall see....
Very atmospheric with a real sense of place and background. The reader will feel that he or she knows the Maine woods and rivers by the time this book is finished. Characters from the first novel turn up in this one and it looks as if this is a series that is in for a long run. I hope so as I found this unputdownable with a good twist at the end which I was not expecting. Recommended.
In total contrast next up is Could it be I'm Falling in Love? by Eleonor Prescott. Again this is another author who had a debut novel last year which I read and thoroughly enoyed, Alice Brown's Lessons in the Curious Art of Dating, review here, and so I knew I was in for a treat when I read this one. Roxy Squires is famous, or at least she used to be, she is now a rather aging laddette who is no
One day she discovers that the local window cleaner is Woody, one time famous pop star and that he runs a self help group for others who have been famous and whose careers, for one reason or another, have stalled and who are now lonely and miserable and frustrated. Roxy is amazed to find she is living with this motley crew of former start and decides that they need somebody to propel them back into the big time. But do they want it? and is Roxy only doing this for herself? And why does she go all week at the knees when Woody is around?
Not sure when I started this book that I was going to like it as much as the first as Roxy grated on me a bit to begin with, but I soon warmed to her and then, as with Trespasser, found this story unputdownable (is there such a word I wonder?) and read it through in one sitting.
It is funny, touching, warm and human and I loved every word of it. Roll on the third.
