The Blurb:
WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO SAVE YOUR LOVED ONE?
AND DO YOU KNOW WHO SHE REALLY IS?
'Simon Kernick writes with his foot pressed hard on the pedal' Harlan Coben
They took your fiancée.
They framed you for murder.
You're given one chance to save her. To clear your name.
You must kill someone for them.
They give you the time and place.
The weapon. The target.
You have less than 24 hours.
You only know that no-one can be trusted...and nothing is what it seems.
'That thud you hear is Kernick whipping the rug from under your feet again.' The Times Best thrillers of the month
'An absolute master of the adrenaline-fuelled ride' Peter James
Kill A Stranger was published on 26th November 2020 by Headline as an ebook, audio book and in hardback. You can purchase it from Bookshop, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon or your usual bookseller. The paperback will be released in June next year.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO SAVE YOUR LOVED ONE?
AND DO YOU KNOW WHO SHE REALLY IS?
'Simon Kernick writes with his foot pressed hard on the pedal' Harlan Coben
They took your fiancée.
They framed you for murder.
You're given one chance to save her. To clear your name.
You must kill someone for them.
They give you the time and place.
The weapon. The target.
You have less than 24 hours.
You only know that no-one can be trusted...and nothing is what it seems.
'That thud you hear is Kernick whipping the rug from under your feet again.' The Times Best thrillers of the month
'An absolute master of the adrenaline-fuelled ride' Peter James
Kill A Stranger was published on 26th November 2020 by Headline as an ebook, audio book and in hardback. You can purchase it from Bookshop, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon or your usual bookseller. The paperback will be released in June next year.
My Review:
Matt and Kate have recently returned to the UK for a few months from Sri Lanka, where they run a boutique hotel. They've rented a wee out of the way cottage and Matt is returning late after a night out in London with old friends. Not wanting to wake Kate he creeps into bed without turning any lights on, but is worried that, although he can feel her lying next to him, he can't hear his fiancée breathing. Turning on the light he is horrified to find the woman in his bed is not Kate. And she's dead. So begins Matt's nightmare... And Kate's not having the best night either...
The story is told in the first person from the points of view of the four main characters, so that kept me in my toes. The chapters are short, which I like (perfect for late at night 'just one more chapter' reading), and they keep things moving apace. And there's a wee hook at the end of each of them which just pulls you into the next chapters. The story moves backwards and forwards between events following on from Matt turning on his bedroom light and those at the police station a couple of days later with a couple of throwbacks to older events.
The storyline is tense and exciting, picking us up and tossing us around like a whirlwind as it moves between characters and timeframe. Each chapter reveals a little bit more about our main characters and most of it is not good - there are a lot of secrets in this group! I had an issue in that I didn't really like, or dislike, the main players enough to care about what happened to them. DCI Doyle would be the exception to this, as he seems to be a straight up guy, although we don't learn too much about him. From the others, I had the most sympathy for Matt, although that waned a little as time went on. I liked one or two of the supporting characters, Geeta especially, who provided me with a heart stopping moment later in the book. But the story, whilst a little outrageous, compensated for the lack of love I felt for the characters, as it fair licks along and easily kept me turning the pages. And I really wasn't expecting the reveals at the end.
All in all, this is a face paced, tense and excting thriller with secrets revealed on almost every page. A fun way to spend a few hours.
The Author:
'Well where do I start? I wanted to be a writer ever since I was old enough to pick up a pen. I started with one page stories that I illustrated myself (badly) and, as I grew older, the stories got longer. For a long time I just wrote for myself, enjoying the process of disappearing off to new, imaginative worlds, but eventually, while working as a salesman in London I experienced this desperate desire to get published.
'I've always been a huge crime fiction and thriller fan so I wrote a crime novel that, unfortunately, pretty much every literary agent and publisher in the land rejected. So I wrote another one with exactly the same result. I have enough rejection letters to decorate a whole house- three hundred in all-but finally I struck gold with my first novel, The Business of Dying, about a cop who moonlights as a hit man named Dennis Milne. It was released in 2002 (seven years after I first tried to get published!) and was described as 'the crime debut of the year' by The Independent, which was a very nice compliment.
'Since then I've written a book a year (fifteen in all now) as well as a total of three novellas. I specialise in very fast-paced thrillers set over a short space of time which I like to think grab the reader from the very first page and don't let go. My fifth novel, Relentless, was a Richard and Judy summer read, and the ninth and tenth, The Last Ten Seconds and The Payback, both reached number 1 in the UK book charts, so they're good, I promise!
'I don't have a series as such and most of the books can be read as standalones, but I do have recurring characters. Dennis Milne, my vigilante cop, returns in A Good Day to Die and The Payback, and my female detective, Tina Boyd - a woman who finds herself in dangerous situations seemingly at every turn - appears in the vast majority of the recent books.'
'I've always been a huge crime fiction and thriller fan so I wrote a crime novel that, unfortunately, pretty much every literary agent and publisher in the land rejected. So I wrote another one with exactly the same result. I have enough rejection letters to decorate a whole house- three hundred in all-but finally I struck gold with my first novel, The Business of Dying, about a cop who moonlights as a hit man named Dennis Milne. It was released in 2002 (seven years after I first tried to get published!) and was described as 'the crime debut of the year' by The Independent, which was a very nice compliment.
'Since then I've written a book a year (fifteen in all now) as well as a total of three novellas. I specialise in very fast-paced thrillers set over a short space of time which I like to think grab the reader from the very first page and don't let go. My fifth novel, Relentless, was a Richard and Judy summer read, and the ninth and tenth, The Last Ten Seconds and The Payback, both reached number 1 in the UK book charts, so they're good, I promise!
'I don't have a series as such and most of the books can be read as standalones, but I do have recurring characters. Dennis Milne, my vigilante cop, returns in A Good Day to Die and The Payback, and my female detective, Tina Boyd - a woman who finds herself in dangerous situations seemingly at every turn - appears in the vast majority of the recent books.'
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