Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: thriller

  • 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.

  • Kill Code

    Kill Code

    Wolf Six is back in action in the latest edge of the seat thriller from Alex Shaw, Kill Code, but he is in a bit of bind as he is on a plane with absolutely no idea how he got there. He has a terrific headache and for some reason the plane is very quiet, no engine noise, just the buffeting of the wind as it hurls the plane though space.

    Hormann, a CIA operative is on the plane with him, but he has less than no idea what is going on, other than the plane is plummeting into a large body of water. Ruslan Akulov wonders for a fleeting moment as to whether this is the way he will die but understands whatever happens next, he is not going to like it.

    So begins another stellar plot through the badlands of organised crime and the life of an assassin as Akulov discovers he has literally crash landed into a world of an organised crime syndicate in Black River that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, other than is it led by the local sheriff.

    Locked in the local gaol he ponders what has happened, realising he has been on some sort of clandestine mission for the CIA that for whatever  reason has gone terribly wrong. His nemesis Basson is also on his trail, determined to kill him for shooting him after a botched job in Amsterdam.

     Basson has never forgiven Akulov for inflicting the wounds and Akulov has never forgiven Basson for stepping over the line and becoming a murderer.

    As the private war between Akulov and Basson rages across Europe, closer to home Akulov is beginning to understand that whatever is going on in Black River may well see him killed unless something like a miracle occurs.

    Once again Alex Shaw has delivered a fast paced, engrossing and in many ways enlightening storyline as Wolf Six, a man with a dark past sets out to not only complete a mission but level a score long overdue.

  • Scam at Old River

    Scam at Old River

    Based on a true story Scam at Old River is a fast paced, well-constructed mystery thriller from Mike Mackay and is also the first book in a series built around Jack Rhodes a computer forensic expert who is not afraid to get into the thick of a case when it is required.

    A night in a bar celebrating a successful conclusion to his last case, a woman in his bed and a loud hammering on his door in the morning makes Jack think he is in the middle of a of as marital dispute.

     When the woman hands him some papers, apologizes for dragging him into her mess and vanishes, he discovers there is far more, dangerously far more to a stranger knocking on his door asking for the woman who had been in his bed.

    Set in San Francisco, Jack discovers the woman Debbie, was an accountant for a team of real estate scammers connected to the criminal underworld of LA.

    He decides to try to find Debbie and to do so he taps into his resources within the Police Department. Going undercover, he poses as a salesman for the Company. When he gets a call from a man who wants to buy a large plot of land, he discovers that not everything is as it seems and through him, he meets Stella, a woman with money, charisma, and information.

    The trail leads to Chinatown, a place which is full of danger and the closer Jack gets to finding the people behind the scam, the more danger he and Stella seem to attract. Who wants to stop them and why?

    Scam at Old River has wide appeal for anyone who enjoys a solid story line filled with action, a delicate overlay of possible romance and an enticing conclusion which leaves the door open for the next book featuring Jack Rhodes.

  • The Light Runner

    The Light Runner

    Billed as a metaphysical thriller, The Light Runner is all of that as well as a captivating journey into the world of alternate reality and what seems to be so is not but is the reality.

    After the death of his wife Hannah in a brutal carpark killing Captain Oliver Haskell has voluntarily admitted himself to the Bainbridge Psychiatric Hospital, his budding career in politics now nothing more than a dream.

    Ella Kramer is a new graduate Doctor assigned to the case even though it is complex. Her lover is the Head Psychiatrist at Bainbridge, and she is stunned when he tells her she is handling the case. She does not believe she has the developed experience to be able to deal with this complex case effectively.

    Detective Paul Moran is assigned to the high-profile case as Hannah had been a research scientist having created a drug which benefitted mentally distressed people. Her murder makes him wonder why she was targeted and who did the targeting. He goes on gut instinct and often uses the help of his partners clairvoyance to clarify difficult issues and solve challenging cases.

    As Ella struggles to understand what has happened and why, she begins to talk to and listen to the other patients at the Hospital, particularly a man called Don, who even in his confused state of mind seems to be insistent about Haskell, repeatedly calling out the word ‘Van’ repeatedly. Something about the man disturbs him profoundly.

    As the pages turn in this riveting thriller the many levels of reality are presented which at times calls for serious concentration, especially when Ella begins to realise that whatever is going on in Bainbridge is far from normal; all the patients in B Block somehow seem to be connected to Oliver Haskell and what was once considered as reality, is now a distortion of every form of reality she ever knew or understood.

    Ally Walker has in her first novel The Light Runner created an alternate reality that is all too real, blending seamlessly past and present as each of the clearly defined characters present their own reality but hide behind the façade they have created.

    Book one in The Reality Series, The Light Runner introduces a new talent to the metaphysical genre of literature in Ally Walker and launches what promises to be a riveting series in a genre that perfectly captures the conundrum that is humanity.

  • Zero Ri$k

    Zero Ri$k

    They called him ‘The Toad’ and he was universally disliked. They dreaded the meetings he Chaired as the head of the Financial Risk Operations Group of the National Bank; he loved the meetings, the rush of power, the control was like a drug to him, but he was also considered as somewhat of a financial genius so his actions were overlooked for the so called better good!

    Holly Brand was only his latest victim, even though she exposed serious issues within the security systems of the Bank, leaving them vulnerable to a well-designed cyber-attack; she was instantly dismissed as she used his Bank account to illustrate her point!

    Eight years on, with Christmas knocking on the door, Rob Tanner was dreading the annual family gathering where he would once again have to tolerate his father’s open dislike for him, while trying to keep things civil. He is also planning to enjoy a well-earned break from the Bank.

    He has moved up the ranks in the National Bank, but is still Martin Keller ‘The Toad’s’ fixer. He gets a call from the Chief Risk Officer to say there is a serious issue at the Bank unlike anything he has ever seen before; one thousand accounts have mysteriously had a zero added to their balance.

    So begins Zero Ri$k, one of the most intriguing, fast paced, riveting reads based in and around the world of Finance, cyber-crime, politics and truth to have hit the Booksellers this year. It is a blockbuster of read that moves from the Halls of London to Germany and Switzerland in an effort to track down who or which group of cybercriminals is trying to bring down the British Banking system.

    Set during the Christmas holiday period, a series of cryptic clues are being sent at 11am daily, along with another zero being added to further accounts. The clues, all based on Hironimus Boshes painting of the seven deadly sins, has even the best cryptographers confused. The longer the delay in meeting the demands, the more zeros are added until a crisis point is reached.

    Time is running out; the British Prime Minster is refusing to meet what are simple demands, and those who previously have supported him, are beginning to wonder what the end result will be if he will not listen to his advisors.

    Simon Hayes has captured the very murky world of High Finance and Politics to perfection creating characters’ who are undoubtedly based on an amalgam of people he has met over his many years of working in the world of High Finance.

    He looks at the very relevant points of greed, ego and power along with ruthless determination to   continually refuse to take the blame in any legal sense, for the of the financial and political scandals so prevalent today. He also tilts at the world of technology, the speed it is advancing and the massive influence it has over everyday life.

    Zero Ri$k It is also a novel of courage; standing up for what you believe in, facing your own reality and the intrinsic and incredibly important fact, of Truth!

  • Rogue Hero

    Rogue Hero

    Rob Sinclair certainly knows how to write a riveting thriller as Rogue Hero demonstrates right to the very last line of the story. Beginning with an attempted shooting of a Congressman, Senator Charlton and ending with a question of morals, this is a very well thought out story tapping into the world of organised crime in the world of today.

    A mysterious gunman prevented the death of the Senator and Corporate Lawyer Curtis Delany has a gut instinct that the mysterious hero of the day is his estranged brother Finn; a man who seemed to walk on the boarders between right and wrong in the Corporate world of seriously big money.

    His gut instinct turns out to be real and Curtis, in spite of having a number of issues in his life that need to be dealt with, decides Finn, wherever he is and whatever mess he has become involved in, needs his help.

     This decision plunges him headlong into a world of subterfuge, ruthlessness, crooked dealings at the highest of levels, Drug Cartels, and cold blooded murder, a world he feels ill-equipped to deal with.

    The plot is fast moving through the Corporate world, the world of high finance the background for the brutal, false but flamboyant life lead by Victor Travers, a man who had climbed the Corporate ladder with flair and ruthlessness.

    Curtis sets out to dig into what he sees is Corporate corruption at the highest levels, only to discover his brother Finn was working along similar lines, which sees Curtis facing some terrible decisions, having to trust a woman, Alyssia, he has met searching for her sister Mariana, Travers assistant of many, many years.

    A bloody disaster occurs when Finn makes the decision to expose Victor Travers for who he really is, which ends a terrifying shoot out with Curtis and Alyssia being arrested!

    Rogue Hero is a story that once began is very, very difficult to put down as the pace is fast, the action thrilling, with characters well described and defined.

    An excellent read.