Crime Thriller Book Log: Kernick, Chambers, Hilton & Beckett
Simon Kernick is one of those writers who kept knocking on the door of the writing business, and didn’t let a few rejection slips get him down. Sure enough, he made it as a writer – and a hugely successful one at that – and you can get the ins and outs of his journey on his website here.
Kernick’s tough coppers and pwopa nawty villains have proved a big success and his latest, Stay Alive, like all the other releases, is published in hardback and kindle on Thursday.
The blurb keeps it enigmatic:
One witness: You’re on a trip with your family, miles from anywhere. A shot rings out - and your whole life changes in an instant.
One secret: A woman is racing towards you, chased by three gunmen. Although you don’t know it, she harbours a deadly secret. She’s in terrible danger. And now you are too.
No escape: You’re running, terrified, desperate to find safety.
You know that the men hunting you have killed before.
And if they catch you, you’ll be next .
Kimberley Chambers was wondering what to do with her life when she was offered the opportunity to train as a hairdresser. Quite sensibly, she didn’t do that, she wrote a book instead.
She writes terrifically about how she found her vocation in life on her website. Do go and check it out if you require a kick up the writing jacksy.
Kimberley’s now on her ninth novel about the diamond geezers and equally steely ladies in who inhabit the East End underworld. Payback is a sequel to The Feud, about sibling gangsters Vinny and Roy.
The blurb knows where you live:
Family. They’re supposed to watch your back. Not stab you in it
When the enemy is one of your own, the payback is twice as hard.
The Butler brothers are the Kings of the East End, and their motto is ‘what goes around, comes around’.
In their world, family counts; so when the truth about Vinny’s cousin’s death comes to light, it rocks the Butlers to the core. One by one, Vinny’s friends and family are turning against him…
Then, the unimaginable happens – Vinny’s little daughter Molly goes missing. She’s the one chink of light in all their lives, and the one they’d commit murders to bring back.
But is it already too late for that?
Is this Payback?
Vigilante Joe Hunter has been knocking criminal heads together across the States in eight previous books. In the ninth, The Lawless Kind, he takes on a Mexican drugs cartel. Presumably, that’s Hunter and a lady friend on the cover. He’s so tough he’s walking to Mexico.
The blurb is going to settle this the hard way:
Ex-counterterrorist soldier Joe Hunter has been called to Mexico to bring an end to a cartel that preys on the people they smuggle across the US border. Once the mission’s ended, however, Joe’s mission leader and mentor, CIA Black Ops director Walter Hayes Conrad, confesses that the bloody mission is not the real reason Joe has been summoned south of the border.
For years, Walter has kept the details of his private life - especially his family - secret from everyone, even his closest friends. But disaster has struck: his great-grandson Benjamin has been abducted, kidnapped by Walter’s sworn enemy, the leader of one of Mexico’s largest drug cartels. Walter will do whatever it takes to get the boy back. And he know Hunter is the man for the job.
But there’s one complication—the drug boss just happens to be Benjamin’s father.
Hunter is as American as you get, but what you may not know is that author of the series, Matt Hilton, is a former Cumbrian policeman and private security expert, who is practiced in the combat art of Kemp Jujitsu. He submitted his novels to publishers for 20 years, and like Kernick, he didn’t give up.
Author Simon Beckett takes time out from his usual novels about forensic anthropologist David Hunter - no relation to Joe - to write a stand-alone novel called Stones Bruises.
The blurb has got a stitch:
Sean is on the run. We don’t know why and we don’t know from whom, but we do know he’s abandoned his battered, blood-stained car in the middle of an isolated, lonely part of rural France at the height of a sweltering summer.
Desperate to avoid the police, he takes to the parched fields and country lanes only to be caught in the vicious jaws of a trap. Near unconscious from pain and loss of blood, he is freed and taken in by two women - daughters of the owner of a rundown local farm with its ramshackle barn, blighted vineyard and the brooding lake. And it’s then that Sean’s problems really start…
Simon is another writer who kept plugging away at publishers for years until everything came right – I fancy we’re picking up a pattern here. If you don’t mind the author himself staring at you from the wallpaper of his website, you can read his about his journey to full-time author.
