Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: thriller

  • Soon

    Soon

    Set loosely in a town deep in the south west of Western Australia, where there are many small settlements left from the days of timber milling, many of which have died out completely, the story focuses on the beginning of the end of a community and a town. 

     Residents of a small town called Nebulah once a thriving community, are beginning to have issues with people disappearing and returning as non-beings, seemingly encapsulated in a mist which invades the town every evening, leaving absolute carnage in its wake. 

     Initially it was considered a hoax by developers wanting to redevelop the land, but as more people began to be killed in an horrifying manner, residents began leaving  in droves, but a few, more stubborn than most, decided to stay and see out whatever it was that was going on. 

     Three people, Peter, an ex-policeman who stayed on after his retirement, Lai who runs a small market garden holding, and Millie, the girl who proves to the final death knell for the town, remain as the last residents of this almost ghost town.

     Alex, a psychic, visits the town, as do many others, in the form of media, film makers and curiosity seekers, trying to capture and understand what is going on, but all have failed. Alex is harder to dissuade than most, as she is a firm believer in UFO’s and strange events which have been documented directly after their appearance in the many areas of Australia; events where people have disappeared only to return in an altered mental capacity but able to tell incredible tales of what happened during their time away. 

     A friendship develops between Alex and Peter, and she warns him to leave the town, to be careful around Millie as she will be the final destructive force.  As there become less and less reasons to stay and more reasons to leave, her entreaties grow stronger, but for a wide range of reasons Peter finds he can’t leave. 

      Soon is a gritty, dark thriller of a ride which pushes every emotion to the very edge in what could be considered a thought provoking look at reality, love, loss and the consequences of staying until the bitter and tragic end, in a town that no longer holds, or is considered, a community.

     

  • Based on a True Story

    Based on a True Story

    Based on a True Story, is described as Autobiographical Fiction, and the author says “Unable to free myself completely from reality, I am involuntarily producing fiction”.  This is a concentrated and deeply internal look at relationships and friendships that develop where there is a great need on both sides. One woman needs to control the situation and manage all aspects of the other woman’s life. This woman is known as L.

    The Narrator is Delphine. She has just written a hugely successful book, relating to her mother, who has a bi- polar disorder. The author is wrung out and exhausted, but needs to go on book signing contracts and talks. She escapes one of these and goes to a party where she meets L. Over time, L befriends Delphine who is an empathetic and caring person; she is smart, attractive and knowledgeable. She has so many caring qualities, and shares her life stories as the friendship grows. L keeps encouraging the weary author to begin work on her next book. L herself claims to be a ghost writer by trade, and slowly begins to inhabit, undermine and obliterate Delphine’s career.

    This aspect of the story is reminiscent of a psychological thriller, written with intense and beautiful prose. It is a thriller with an atmosphere of suspense and manipulation. L believes what the reader needs is the truth. Vigan does present this story as truth, although we know it is fiction. The use of a letter L to represent the character is curious. Could Delphine be so afraid or shocked that she can’t bear to use the full name? Or could L stand for “reader” in French (Lecteur).

    The slow moving and unfolding of this story leads one to feel safe for a short while, but gradually the reader begins to see a pattern of manipulation being used by L. It is not surprising that the film rights for this book have been picked up by Roman Polanski. The ending of the story is still quite open, and one finds oneself going back to clarify points that seemed trivial at the time, but become part of a clever trail of deception.

    If you like thrillers with a difference and the slow, unwinding story of suspense, then you will become engrossed in this tale.

     

  • Nothing Short of Dying A Clyde Barr Thriller

    Nothing Short of Dying A Clyde Barr Thriller

    Clyde Barr is finally finding peace of a sort in his life after years of horror and torment. In a reflective mood he allows himself to drift back to a time when life was different, not altogether different, just different.

    After three years in prison, unjustly so, he has contacted his three sisters with varying results, none of them good, but as he sits by the flickering lights of his campfire in his beloved mountains, his youngest sister contacts him with a frantic plea for help and then the line goes dead.  Jen is the one he has always looked out for and she for him during the years of their tumultuous childhood and he would do anything at all to go to her help, even if it meant dying.

    And so a rip roaring story commences that will see Barr and  a young woman named Allie take on one of the largest drug cartels in order to save Jen once again from the trouble that somehow, she always seems to find or that seems to find her. Fast paced, fascinating and totally riveting the story gathers pace as Jen will only be allowed to stay alive until her purpose is fulfilled, which as far as Barr can work out is only days, has something to do with where she had been working and the manufacture of drugs on a large scale.

    Allie is an unlooked for complication, as she is just one more person Barr feels responsible for but he soon comes to realise there is far more to her than he though and that she is there with the best of them when the going gets tough and it does.

    There are times, when the body count is rising, Barr reflects on the fact that he thought he had left this lifestyle far behind, but realises that in the end you are what you choose to be as he goes about doing what needs to be done, making pacts with various ‘devils’ to try and work out just where Jen is being held and how big the cartel is that he has now sworn to eliminate at all costs.

    Deception, honour, treachery, hatred and love all come together to paint a portrait of fast paced action as you are there with Barr, Allie and Jen as they struggle to survive everything life can dish up.  In the final wash-up, Barr is once again heading back to his beloved mountains when he figures out the true and lasting gift Allie gave him, which is to accept who he was and to see what he can become.

    As a debut novel by Erik Story this is a real ‘ripper of a yarn’ as they say and hopefully, the first of many more to come as Clyde Barr obviously has a few more ghosts, real and otherwise, to slay and adventures to become embroiled within.

     

     

  • The Travelers

    The Travelers

    Will Rhodes is on assignment at a luxury Argentinian Resort, wine flowing free and food of the finest quality served, which was relatively normal for him as he was an award winning correspondent for the top glossy mag, The Travellers, a magazine which focused on luxury for the elite traveller.

    What commences as nothing more than a slight flirtation over dinner, when he is singled out by Elle Hardwick, a freelance writer for Australian Adventurer, a magazine specialising in adventure, turns into a full blown night of unbelievable sex. Will is mortified as he has done something he said he would never do, cheat on his wife.

    And so begins what is a to become something that rapidly turns into the material nightmares are made of, as he finds himself slowly, ever so slowly, sinking into a world populated by people he wished he had never met.

    He returns to New York in the hope that things will eventually sort themselves out; he is filled with guilt and remorse and it certainly does not help that his own marriage is on shaky ground and does not seem to be improving, with Chloe, his wife, also away on various assignments almost continuously. And then there is the problem of restoring an old house and serious issues with finances, or rather the lack of them.

    Before Will realises it he is into something so deep, so evil and so terrifying he feels the only way out will be with his death, probably caused by someone else. He also discovers that he really does not know who to trust as wherever  he turns, something or somebody is there trying to either kill him or wanting him to do something truly terrible.

    When he realises that he has secrets he was not aware about, and that someone, somewhere, will stop at nothing to get them, Will finds he has to draw on resources he never knew he had, simply to try and stay alive and one step ahead of the game,

    The plot is of the finest with several stories running concurrently, which does eventually make up what is a seriously complicated, terrifying journey through underbelly of secret services operated by major nations, and where the person who is your friend today could be your enemy tomorrow.

    This fast paced thriller charges across the main capitols of Europe in a race to what could easily be death or salvation and is one for the serious lover of nail-bitting thrillers.

  • Maestra

    Maestra

    This book is described on the cover as a thriller. And it is, although the thrilling bits are interspersed with details about clothes and designers, class aspirations, information about the fine art world, the history of particular paintings and large chunks of erotica.  Shades of Grey is so last year!  Despite finding the story disjointed, it was an easy read – a page turner in fact with a trail of intrigue spreading through the flesh pots of Europe.  And between the thrilling bits chapters with the next fascinating expose about the art world, the world of the ultra rich in Europe and another chunk of heavy breathing erotica.

    The heroine has several names as the story progresses but she begins as Judith.  She’s not a likeable person with tendencies similar to some spiders but to say more would be a spoiler alert…….I was amazed at how much she learnt – one assumes from the Internet – about an extraordinary range of topics which wouldn’t have been included in an English degree from Oxford. And reading about the swingers parties was truly fascinating! How the other half lives – perhaps! 

    Maestra is the first of three books and it will be interesting to see if Lisa Hilton can maintain the tension throughout the next two.  Before Maestra she wrote some well respected historical fiction so this new book is a real change of direction.  One wonders if Maestra is part autobiography. Lisa Hilton came from NW England and so does Judith.   They both read English at Oxford and studied art in France and Italy before working with one of the big art dealers in London.  However Lisa describes herself as a sedate single mother with a ten year old daughter.

    Judith is a complex character always trying to be what she isn’t, in class terms. She strives to speak properly, wear the right clothes and has very little empathy for anyone – especially herself.

    No doubt there is much more money to be made from erotica.  In fact the film rights for the book have already been sold. The sedate single mother will be able to afford a different life style now!

  • The Honourable Assassin

    The Honourable Assassin

    We met Vic Cavalier as a young man determined to make the grade for admission to the elite SAS Division of the Army.

    We then meet him again some years on, his life a bit of a wreck, his marriage gone bust and his beloved daughter dead!

    He is facing the sack from his newspaper; his drinking is gaining the upper hand and it looks life is on a faster than slow downward spiral. That is until a body turns up in a laneway in Carlton with a bullet through his head in what appears to be an execution style killing.

    His editor wants the story, deciding that Vic can have one last go at changing his destiny and that just maybe, he still has the skills as an investigative reporter to get to the real truth behind the story.

    It is not is not until Vic finds himself in Bangkok working with a Jacinta Cin Lai, a special investigator he had met in Melbourne, does he begin to come to terms with just what he has agreed to undertake.

    In the streamy tropics of Thailand, Vic is forced to confront some serious personal issues, he discovers there is more to Jacinta than just a ‘special investigator’ for the Federal police and the drug cartel attempting to gain a footing in Thailand are the same Mexican cartel responsible for the death of his daughter.

    Armed with an arsenal of dirty tricks, skills honed as a young man and maintained in his life as an investigative reporter, he faces the fact that he has little choice in whether he follows the story to the bitter end or walks away.

    The more he discovers about the drug trade in Thailand and the levels of corruption in high places, it becomes all too clear that once again his life has been placed on the line, but this time it is personal!

    Fast paced, the action moves rapidly across Thailand and the murk of the underworld just keeps on getting thicker and thicker until Cavalier can trust no one at all.

    Set in the steamy world of illegal drug trafficking in a country where formidable amounts of money can change hands in a second, in a society where life is cheap and corruption is a commonplace, this is a thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end.