#BlogTour: Trust Me by T. M. Logan

Two strangers, a child, and a split second choice that will change  everything . . .

Ellen was just trying to help a stranger. That was how it started: giving a few minutes respite to a flustered young mother sitting opposite her on the train. A few minutes holding her baby while the mother makes an urgent call. The weight of the child in her arms making Ellen’s heart ache for what she can never have.

Five minutes pass.

Ten.

The train pulls into a station and Ellen is stunned to see the mother hurrying away down the platform, without looking back. Leaving her baby behind. Ellen is about to raise the alarm when she discovers a note in the baby’s bag, three desperate lines scrawled hastily on a piece of paper:

Please protect Mia

Don’t trust the police

Don’t trust anyone

Why would a mother abandon her child to a stranger? Ellen is about to discover that the baby in her arms might hold the key to an unspeakable crime. And doing the right thing might just cost her everything . . .

On a train to Marylebone Station, Ellen holds a young woman’s baby girl while the mother takes an important call. As the train pulls out of the next stop, Ellen is shocked to see the young woman on the platform, abandoning the child in her care, along with a note telling her to trust no one including the police. Arriving in London, and convinced that she is being followed by a strange man who had sat opposite her on the train, Ellen resolves to take the child to a police station. Instead, she finds herself abducted and held hostage...

TRUST ME is a fast moving thriller, full of twists and turns, red-herrings and believable characters. Largely narrated by Ellen, a sympathetic character, whose choices make sense based on her situation and what she tells us about herself, the story is one of suspicion and paranoia. Ellen is thrust into a situation that she does not understand. Having had failed IVF treatment, abandoned by her husband, who is now expecting a child with his girlfriend, Ellen is naturally drawn to the baby. But she does not know who to trust.

T. M. Logan has a real talent for thrilling, psychological mystery. The story is told in short chapters, cliff-hangers which make the reader want to press on. We learn just enough about the supporting cast to make us share Ellen’s confusion and suspicions. The ending is perhaps telegraphed a little, but it doesn’t matter; TRUST ME is exciting and entertaining. It keeps the reader guessing and moves with an intensity and breathlessness; an ideal lockdown read.

Thanks to T. M. Logan, Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers and Zaffre Books for the invitation to take part in the Blogtour.

View all my reviews

#BlogTour: The Fall of Koli by M. R. Carey

The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Fall of Koli is the third and final novel in the breathtakingly original Rampart trilogy – set in a strange and deadly world of our own making.

The world that is lost will come back to haunt us . . .

Koli has come a long way since being exiled from his small village of Mythen Rood. In his search for the fabled tech of the old times, he knew he’d be battling strange, terrible beasts and trees that move as fast as whips. But he has already encountered so much more than he bargained for.

Now that Koli and his companions have found the source of the signal they’ve been following – the mysterious “Sword of Albion” – there is hope that their perilous journey will finally be worth something.

Until they unearth terrifying truths about an ancient war . . . and realise that it may have never ended.

published by Orbit Books 

Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series

I never do this!

“For a bit of excellent Tartan Noir”, said my Glaswegian pal, “try Alan Parks starting with Bloody January.” So, Paul’s recommendations being highly valued, I started with BLOODY JANUARY. A couple of weeks later, I had read all four of Park’s Harry McCoy novels back-to-back.

BLOODY JANUARY introduces Glasgow Detective Harry McCoy. It’s January 1973 and McCoy witnesses the murder of a young girl in Glasgow’s central bus station whose killer commits suicide before he can be apprehended. Investigating, McCoy finds links to a high-powered family, and to his own past. Part of that past is Stevie Cooper, a career criminal, pimp, drug dealer, and gang boss, whose stock is rising in the Glasgow underworld. Cooper is also Harry McCoy’s friend and sometime protector.

FEBRUARY’S SON finds McCoy investigating the death of a young Glasgow Celtic football star, murdered in grisly circumstances. McCoy uncovers links to a Glasgow crime family. Then the bodies start to pile up…

The third novel, BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER, jumps to August 1973 with Glasgow in the middle of a heatwave. A young girl has gone missing, a citywide manhunt in operation, but McCoy is shut out of the investigation run, as it is, by an old adversary in the force. Reduced to following up a series of small time bank robberies, McCoy also looks into the apparent overdose death of fading Glasgow rock star, Bobby March. This is possibly my favourite of the novels, with a fever-dream-like visit to ‘70s Belfast a highlight.

THE APRIL DEAD. April 1974. Bombs are going off in Glasgow but, despite the city sharing some of Northern Ireland’s sectarianism, this doesn’t feel like the IRA to Harry McCoy. Meanwhile, Harry is approached by the father of a US sailor who has gone missing from a nearby American naval base.

All four novels are well plotted mystery-thrillers, Alan Parks clearly knowing how to construct a story. But it is the characters and the setting, the atmosphere that sets these books apart. Parks’s Glasgow is a dark, bleak place populated by drug dealers, prostitutes, criminal gangs, the homeless, good and bad polis, police in the Glasgow vernacular. It feels authentic, as much a character in the stories as Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or Lawrence Block’s New York. 

McCoy is not a dirty cop, or polis, but he is conflicted. He has a strong sense of morality, knows what is right and wrong, but the dividing line doesn’t always tally with where others, particularly other polis, would consider it to be. He has allies in his boss, Murray and his new partner, Wattie, but continually tests their support. He has a complicated relationship with Stevie Cooper, to whom he has a strong loyalty due to their shared past when Cooper protected the young McCoy, often suffering in his stead. But McCoy is not blind to Cooper’s sociopathic nature. In Cooper, we see echoes of Hawk in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels or Mouse in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins stories. Cooper is no sidekick, no gangster with a heart of gold. He is a genuinely dangerous man, one whom McCoy reluctantly allows to run, feeling perhaps that Cooper is a better alternative to his criminal rivals, but knowing that there will be a reckoning and that he will someday have to take Cooper down. The reader, and Harry McCoy, suspect that this may prove impossible.

This is simply one of the best continuing series out there at present and can stand with the best of any era. Think Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, William McIllvaney, Ian Rankin. Yes, all the standard elements are there and, in lesser hands, the books could be clichéd but they transcend the genre. Violently. Viscerally.

The only real problem is that, now that I have caught up, it’s going to be a long wait for the next in the series. I can’t wait for May, whenever that might be…