The Blurb:
Fans of Lee Child and David Baldacci will be gripped by this heart-racing FBI thriller from bestselling author Ed James.
Megan Holliday opens her eyes and finds herself slumped on her doorstep. The last thing she remembers is being in the car with her two kids. She sees a handwritten note on her lap – Don’t call the police. It’s then that she realises her car is missing, and her children are gone…
Leading the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team, FBI agent Max Carter will stop at nothing to find children taken from their families. After all, he was once one of those taken children, so he knows exactly what’s at stake. When he hears that a young senator’s two children have been abducted and their mother left for dead, he races to the Holliday family home in Washington State.
Facing a wall of police cruisers and blacked-out SUVs, Carter quickly uncovers the facts. Megan Holliday was ambushed by a man with a gun as she returned home from taking her kids out for ice cream. Bound and drugged, the attacker left her unconscious on the doorstep with the sinister note on her lap.
As Senator Christopher Holliday walks through the halls of the US Federal Building in Seattle, his phone beeps with an alert. Frustrated by the interruption, he takes a cursory glance and is horrified by the image on the screen – his two children, Brandon and Avery, unconscious. The message he gets simply reads Meet me or they die.
When Agent Carter tries to make contact with the busy senator, it seems the politician has gone missing, fleeing from the Federal Building and abandoning his distraught wife. If Carter knows one thing, it’s that Holliday has something to hide. And he just became Carter’s prime suspect.
Tell Me Lies was published by Bookouture on 21st January 2020.
Buy Links:
Amazon: https://geni.us/B07ZJC71FCSocial
Apple: https://buff.ly/2JBFrYz
Kobo: https://buff.ly/2NbeXxL
Google: https://buff.ly/2Pj0Edm
My Review:
I am late to the party with Ed James (I know, I know) because he's written a ton of books. But I've arrived now, and what better place to start than at the beginning of a new series. And what a belter of a book to start with.
Set across the pond in the US, this is the first book featuring FBI agent Max Carter who heads up the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment (CARD) team. He has his own reasons for choosing this particular line of work, which are explored throughout the book.
The team is called in when the wife of a US senator is drugged and her two young children kidnapped. It starts a cat and mouse chase across the state. Tension, jeopardy, lies, politics, corruption, violence, sadness - this book has it all.
As a parent I can't think of anything worse than my child going missing like that. I would be out of my mind. Just like Megan Holliday is - her desperation is obvious. I wanted to give her a big hug - although she doesn't strike me as someone who would appreciate a hug! Anyway, her husband doesn't seem to share her concerns, ignoring her and the FBI 's request to.come home. Whilst I'm fairly sure I would do pretty much anything to save my kids, I just couldn't get behind Christopher Holliday 's efforts. I didn't warm to him at all.
Max Carter is very likeable. Relatable. A loving family man with a demanding job and his own fair share of troubles. He struck me as someone you could rely on, who would do the right thing. His total commitment to the job shines through the writing, as does his frustration when things don't go to plan. The rest of this team deserve a mention, especially Tyler who repeatedly performs all sorts of techie magic during the search for the children. He brought to mind the computer wizards in such shows as CSI and NCIS.
There is a lot going on here. The action comes thick and fast, told in short sharp chapters from different points of view. Sometimes, we see the same event through two or three different pairs of eyes. This could prove repetitive, but here it doesn't, and I found it to be a really interesting and effective device.
The story behind the kids being taken is told in layers. You peel one back, there's another one underneath. The same might be said for the corruption that appears in the book. It's all really well written because it keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next.
This is clearly well researched, and told with confidence. I loved the nods to other crime writers, and the use of the term SNAFU made me smile - it's a phrase not often seen in novels, at least not the ones I read.
Everything comes together into an action packed crime thriller, with a promising new character, which punches you in the gut more than once. And there are moments of real heart wrenching, raw emotion which can be hard to find in a story of this kind. I can't wait to see more of Max Carter!
The Author:
Ed James is the author of multiple series of crime novels.
The bestselling DI Simon Fenchurch series is set in East London and published by Thomas & Mercer.
The self-published Scott Cullen series of Scottish police procedurals features a young Edinburgh Detective Constable investigating crimes from the bottom rung of the career ladder he's desperate to climb. The first book, "Ghost in the Machine", has been downloaded over 400,000 times, hitting both the Amazon UK & US top five.
The Craig Hunter books is a sister series to the Cullen novels, with a PTSD-suffering ex-squaddie now working as a cop investigating sexual abuse cases. With lots of slapstick and banter.
Ed lives in East Lothian, Scotland and writes full-time, but used to work in IT project management, where he filled his weekly commute to London by literally writing on planes, trains and automobiles.
Author Social Media Links:
Mailing list -- http://bit.ly/EJMail
Email -- ed@edjames.co.uk
Twitter -- http://www.twitter.com/edjamesauthor
Facebook -- http://www.facebook.com/EdJamesAuthor
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