Blue Wolf Reviews

Category: Thriller

  • The Vatican Conspiracy

    The Vatican Conspiracy

    The Hunter Files, 6.

    Murder and abduction in the Vatican set the scene for another riveting thriller from Rob Jones, The Vatican Conspiracy, as Max Hunter, now on a temporary assignment to the Vatican unwilling becomes involved in a conspiracy that will push him to his very limits.

    Old friend and mentor Professor Marco Vitali is murdered in the hallowed portals of the Vatican, Cardinal Giovanni Rovina, president of the Governorate Archbishop is abducted, the Vatican gendarmerie along with Interpol are looking for answers and they believe Max Hunter is the man with the knowledge and skill to help find them.

    His previous success as consulting archaeologist with the HARPA team and their recent discoveries of Atlantis, Noah’s Ark, the Titanic and the Flaming Sword of St Michael has unfortunately made him the ‘go-to’ person for matters such as these. Not a role he relishes!

    Facing his friend’s death and wondering at the sign scrawled in blood next to his body leads to a trail of lies, deceit, secrets and death that will test Max and his friends from HARPA, called in to help, as they race against time to try and rescue Cardinal Rovina.

    The Vatican is refusing to cooperate fully as the Brotherhood of the Serpent is demanding an Icon kept hidden within the Vatican archives for centuries as the ransom to release Cardinal Rovina. The Vatican believe that this is the key to a secret so dangerous that if ever discovered will destabilise the not only Christianity but the very foundations of the Catholic Church.

    Once again Rob Sinclair has carefully researched his subject and crafted an intricate and delicately woven tale of the many aspects of greed and power together to create a cliff-hanger of a read which will enthral until the unexpected becomes the expected.

  • The Brief

    The Brief

    Simon Michael introduces a new legal thriller series The Brief, with protagonist Charles Holborne, a lawyer who is married to Henrietta, daughter of a Viscount, practices Criminal Law at the Temple and simply does not fit into what is considered an elitist Practice.

    He is Jewish by birth, had a ‘good war’ as a Spitfire pilot and was State Educated! He is good, very good at what he does which has caused resentment in the close-knit ranks of Barristers. He is a Londoner, a ‘Cockney’, through and through. In moving away from his Jewish background, he has also lost his London accent.

    Life is good in the Courts but not so much at home as he and Henrietta are drifting apart – he works long hours, she loves to socialise, which sees them facing the issue of Divorce. Things go badly. When Charles is charged with Murder he finds he is on the run and needs to tap into the Criminal element of men he has successfully defended over the years, to find out who set him up.

    Set in 1960’s London, a time of corruption within the Metropolitan Police Force, the notorious Kray Brothers ruled the world of Gangs and the Underworld, The Brief is slow to begin as Michael sets up the storyline character by character, delivering a sense of time and place that is authentic.

    Based on his life as a Lawyer working in Criminal Law the story follows to some degree his life, and the people who passed through his practice over the years, many of whom are now represented in the pages of this impressive Crime Thriller series.

    The Brief is an excellent read, slow: steady and immersive concluding in an unexpected manner.

    Book Two in the Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers, An Honest Man is available now.

  • The Golden Sphinx

    The Golden Sphinx

    More than a hint of Clive Cussler with a dash of Indiana Jones is evident in The Golden Sphinx, a fast paced and intriguing mystery set in Egypt, as an ancient aspect of Egyptian history comes into contention when noted Egyptologist Professor Tobias Goodwin is murdered.

    Ethan Frost, the reluctant heir to the Frost Consortium is at a crossroads in his life. Recently discharged from Delta Force and grieving the death of his parents in a helicopter crash, he is astounded when he hears the news that his old lecturer and friend Tobias Goodwin is dead and for no clear reason.

    He makes the decision to go to New Haven to find out more, to see if there is anything he can do to help find the perpetrator. By doing so he discovers an entirely different aspect of Egyptian history, one that is only slowly beginning to emerge, with evidence recently uncovered to a prior and far more sophisticated civilization having been in existence long before the Pyramids were constructed.

    Ethan, with the help of Sophia Lockwood, a research assistant working with Goodwin, begins to understand that whatever Goodwin was working on in his retirement was extremely sensitive, which has been based on the diaries and hand drawn maps of an American explorer and Egyptologist in 1906.

    As they dig deeper into the information in Templeton’s diaries and Goodwins research notes on the ancient past of Egypt, they also realise there is a modern-day terrorist cell active, which is responsible for the death of Goodwin and a Shopping Complex bombing in Egypt.

    But why sees Ethan forming a team of old friends and new, before heading to Egypt to follow the evidence they have and see where the pathway leads.

    How these aspects are based firmly in a well-researched modern and ancient Egyptian historic background forms the basis of a very good thriller, as although Ethan and the team are equipped with the very latest and then some technology, it will come down to who survives the brutality of the dessert at its most challenging.

    The Golden Sphinx from Lex Faulkner is book one in a two part series and recommended for a thriller of a read on a lazy afternoon

  • All That Smolders

    All That Smolders

    All That Smolders from James Sulzer is set in Nantucket, Massachusetts in the 1980s is a slow burn to begin with but it is well worth persevering as it gets, better, much better as each of what seems to be a tangle of loose ends going nowhere, begins to form into a murder mystery that is thoroughly entertaining.

    Peter Christie has been through a bitter divorce and has moved to a Nantucket to begin again. He hopes a fresh start will work and when he meets Haddie Danville, he hopes this is the beginning of something good, but Haddie does not want to be rushed; she likes to take things slowly. 

    When her beloved grandfather is murdered, she is devastated. Peter hopes that by putting his often abused journalist skill into action, he may be able to help find the killer; a man who as it turns out is prepared to kill and kill again. The issue is why?

    As Haddie and Peter dig deeper into the past of the Island community, they begin to discover that all is far from what it seems; that one man’s secret seems to be the motive behind the killings but is it a powerful enough secret to make one man believe he needs to kill?

    Digging ever deeper they find there seems to be more questions than answers. When they finally isolate the person, whom they believe is responsible for the murders, they find they become the hunted which plunges them both into a quandary and immense danger.

    All That Smolders is an armchair murder mystery every wannabe sleuth will enjoy.

  • White Tiger

    White Tiger

    Set in Japan this edge of the seat thriller White Tiger from Andrew Warren is quite a journey into the world of Yazuka, the criminal gangs or Clans that hold sway over business, the drug trade with many having links into North Korea.

    Two men, powerful clan chiefs have met to try and reconcile their differences and discover what is happening inside their various clans: that by once again working together they can become stronger, more powerful.

    Their tea ceremony turns into a blood bath as they realise that someone inside the organisation has deliberately set out to kill them both; Koichi survives, Goro dies.

    Thomas Caine is in South Korea watching a man he believes is a killer. He is doing a surveillance mission with Sue Mi Bae an undercover operative for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and not really enjoying the mission. Unfortunately, it goes bad and, in the aftermath, he runs for cover, a new identity.

    But his past and a debt of long standing is about to catch up with hm as Kiochi is calling him to help find the rotten core in his network, and Caine feels like he simply must fulfill his obligations.

    Torazama is a man marked by his brutal past, determined to change the world, destroy the USA and is obsessed with the Japanese board game shogi, a game of which he had memorised the board, the pieces, and the game strategies. He is known as the White Tiger, a tattoo of which he has on his back.

    Caine finds himself deeply immersed in a plot so horrific that should it succeed, there will be global destruction. The White Tiger, Torazuma, is the man who is out to create destruction with absolutely no regard for anyone or anything except power.

    Chilling and plausible, White Fang is ruthless, pulls no punches for violence and delivers a well thought out plot which will have wide appeal to readers of high-octane thrillers with many a twist and turn. White Tiger is book 6 in a 7 book series featuring Thomas Caine.

  • The Angel Prophecy

    The Angel Prophecy

    The Angel Prophecy, book five in the  Hunter Files from Rob Jones is a chilling, fast  moving adventure that sees HARPA members in some serious trouble, kidnapped and held ransom by a man who is pure evil; a man who believes his beliefs are the true way of life and means to make sure he succeeds in banishing evil.

    Alesky Petkevich, or Oriax, a religious zealot has spent a lifetime creating immense wealth, collecting invaluable religious artifacts, and using that wealth to open doors as well as clean away the evil he has also created. He is illusive, wicked and you could say depraved.

    HARPA’s last mission was to uncover what they believed was King Arthurs Sword, Excalibur at Tintagel, which is now in their custody, but the reality is, it is the Sword of the Archangel Michael, a powerful weapon which in the wrong hands could result in utter devastation. Oriax is aware of this and wants that sword; he is prepared to go to any ends to get it, to use the power to fulfil what he considers his life’s work.

    Max Hunter and the team, those whom have not been kidnapped by Oriax, are now trying to work out how best to not only rescue their team members Quinn Mosley, Professor Juliette Bonnaire from UNESCO and Jim and Suzannah Gates but keep the sword safe.

    This leads them on a mission that is both horrifying, fraught with danger at every turn and brings them to St Catherines Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai, built more than one and a half thousand years before at what is considered to the site where Moses saw the Burning Bush  and is now a sacred site for both Jewish and Christian religions.

    Petkevich brings them all together, unwillingly in Harper and the team’s opinion, to witness the power held within the sword, and believes that with the sword in his hands he is unstoppable. But is he!

    Rob Jones has taken a slice of history and used it as a very real possibility which does make the storyline a lot more believable as well as offering an interesting place to be researched, that of St Catherines Monastery built between 548 and 565, which is the world’s oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.

  • Deadly Mistake

    Deadly Mistake

    Known for his gritty, no holds bared thrillers Rob Sinclair has with his new damaged hero Simon Peake, taken a leap into the dark and terrible goings on of a world most readers can only imagine in Deadly Mistake.

    When cartel fix-it men come knocking on Peake’s door to get help disposing of a body, he reluctantly agrees, after all the money will be useful and then they can go away and leave him to his hard-earned peace.

    But as it turns out the body is not dead, but alive, if only just and it is a woman who is smartly dressed. He immediately wonders what is going on and over the course of the next hour, two of the men who arrived are dead and the third, vanished without a trace!

    Peake makes the decision to try and save the woman and by doing so opens the door to his past once again in a far more challenging way than usual. He has inadvertently set of the inevitable hornets’ nest of Syndicates vying for top position in a very small playing field.

    As the woman slowly regains consciousness, she appears to have amnesia, but as Peake is slowly beginning to discover, something is just not right; who is she and what is she really trying to get him to do is something that will most certainly get him killed if he can’t work out who is the man pulling the strings and what does he really want.

    Bloody and bloodthirsty Deadly Mistake is perhaps one step too far in the gruesome stakes, but the plot line is solid, the characters leap up off the page and the heat from the desert regions of Gorgia where the novel is set is palpable. Not for the faint of heart at all but a good read.

  • Hostile Asset

    Hostile Asset

    Dane Winter has managed to get himself into a seriously bloodthirsty situation in Hostile Asset as he reluctantly takes on a job in the small but utterly corrupt Mexican town of San Yetaxa, which should have been a simple, straightforward security job. Instead, it becomes a killing field in which he is badly injured and friends of many years, all experts in their field, are killed, leaving him furious and out to balance the scales.

     Having met Maria Pineda, a waitress at the one and only café where you can get decent food in San Yetaxa he discovers she is to work at the function where they are to provide security. When the rival faction breaks into the heavily guarded compound, she manages to get Winter away, her brother, a Doctor at the local hospital tending to his wounds.

    As the days pass, he and Maria realise they are in danger of also being exterminated but understand that to be able to discover what is really going and who is behind the carnage that occurred they need to stay together.

    Bloodthirsty with no holds bared this second book in the Dane Winter Thriller series sees a damaged man working hard to amends, learning to once again face his own demons by helping those less able to seek justice even if the cost is very high.

    Hostile Asset tries almost too hard to deliver an edge of the seat thriller which in this instance does not quite gel: but so saying, if you like this type of thriller, you will enjoy the fast paced, well thought out plot line as Dane Winter sets out to even the score, by any means possible, once again. Hostile Asset is book one in a two part series.

  • Revelation Beach

    Revelation Beach

    As the fifty-year anniversary of the execution of the five innocent Australian journalists, known as the Balibo Five during an Indonesian incursion into East Timor approaches, the launch of Susan Francis’s compelling psychological thriller “Revelation Beach” is very timely.

    This comprehensively researched novel weaves a page turning narrative, which not only exposes the destruction resulting from the 1975 invasion of East Timor and the murder of the ‘Balibo Five’ by Indonesian militia, but also the less than honorable stance and role in the shameful cover up of events at this time, undertaken by the Australian Government.    

    After 44-year-old interpreter Dr Eleanor Freeman daughter of the deceased Australian Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia, survived a house fire in which her beloved Indonesian step mother, Ida died, she is determined to understand and come to terms with the role Ida played in the 1975 invasion; where was she in the 22 years she was missing?  Was Ida an Indonesian spy, did she betray the Balibo Five or was she also a victim of the atrocities committed on the people of East Timor by the Indonesian soldiers?  

    This captivating story, which spans the years 1975 – 2000 is set in both Australia and Timor. As Eleanor learns the truth about what happened during the invasion, the reader is not only confronted with the details of the devastation, but also with the cruelty perpetrated on the population of East Timor.

    I highly recommend this book, as I am sure that those readers who have little knowledge about the death of the journalists and the wholesale slaughter of the East Timor people, will be inspired to research the relatively new nation of Timor-Leste.    

  • The Hawk Enigma (Voodoo)

    The Hawk Enigma (Voodoo)

    They call him Voodoo, a man haunted by his past, a man with a military background who works for a deeply secretive military research organisation and a man, thanks to a voice from his past finds himself once again in the front line using his formidable skills with technology in a race against the clock to prevent what could surely be a global disaster occurring.

    When a Scientist and his research assistant go missing, one murdered and the other kidnapped the alarm is raised as a code with the ability to change the Arms Race is also missing. A call from his former Seal Team Leader sees Voodoo back in action, the ghosts of his past all to present, the future far too unpredictable, his phenomenal skill base stretched to its absolute limit.

    Racing against time to rescue the kidnapped scientist the Team begin to realise that the level of A.I. development along with the sophisticated and deadly Japanese underworld is far greater than they expected, far more dangerous and their reach far more widespread. It is not a case of can they success, but will they succeed in recovering the ‘God Algorithm’ which if it is ever used will have devastating repercussions.

    Fast paced, terrifying in its reality and absolutely enthralling The Hawk Enigma is wrapped skilfully around technological crime and the rapidly developing world of A.I. While military and scientific terminology is used it is done in such a manner as to be easily relatable for anyone without either a scientific or military background.

    Using his previous life skills JL Hancock has tapped into the world of Artificial Intelligence and the all to probable applications to which this this science could  be utilised  to deliver what is an absolutely riveting thriller based very firmly in the world of modern technology.