cold case crime

A FATAL ASSUMPTION . . . Between the covers

These Bristol based Meredith & Hodge cold-case-crime novels are rather special. Their latest case seems unsolvable. For starters it’s over a decade old. Christine Hawker was making breakfast for the children with husband Mike was upstairs getting them ready for school. The smoke alarm goes off. Mike discovered it has been triggered by a pan of burned porridge. But where was Christine? Puzzled, he took the kids to school, but then he disappears, too. The case baffled everyone, and gradually slid further and further back down the “To Do” list.

Now, the case has been reopened, because Mike Hawker’s remains have been inadvertently exposed by the bucket of a digger preparing the ground for a new supermarket. Meredith & Hodge? DCI Meredith and his wife, fellow officer Patsy Hodge are the ideal husband and wife team. Except – at the moment – they’re not. Patsy is on extended sick leave after a case went horrifically awry and has fled to relatives in New Zealand. Meredith? He’s getting over jetlag in a budget Auckland hotel having flown in to try to save his marriage.

By any standard, this is a terrific police procedural novel. Yes, all the operational details are convincing and the plotting is cleverly done. For me, however, it is the dialogue that sparkles. Marcia Turner enlivens her characters by what they say, and the idioms they use. For example, an elderly man says that he is a bit ‘mutton’. Younger readers might be baffled, but Turner knows that people of this character’s generation would recognise the rhyming slang. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff were comic book characters back in the day. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff became rhyming slang for ‘deaf’ and this later evolved into ‘mutton’ – a double play on words.

Meredith’s peacemaking overture in New Zealand is favourably received, and the pair return to the UK and face the mysteries of the Hawker case. The extended family dynamic is complex, and throws up a number of grievances. In no particular order. Christine’s father died of cancer when she was in her early teens, and she had become embittered that her mother remarried so quickly, suspecting that the relationship may have been blossoming while her father was on his bed of death. Mike’s father is cantankerous and an awkward customer, and his peace of mind was not improved a few months before his son’s disappearance when a young man met him and introduced himself as his long-lost son, conceived in a youthful fling decades earlier.

Meredith’s team clutch at what seem to be increasingly flimsy straws of evidence and imperfect recollections. What about the mysterious white van seen near the Hawker’s house on the day of the abduction? It is of no help at all that several of the potential suspects worked in trades where the proverbial ‘white van’ was ubiquitous. As is probably the case in real life criminal investigations, forensic questioning unearths all manner of ill-concealed grievances and grudges within the extended family of Mike and Christine Hawker.

Despite the proverbial quote suggesting the opposite, it is inspiration rather than perspiration which finally lifts the veil for Meredith, and it comes by way of a pleasant couple of hours the detective spends with his baby grandchildren. The next day, he calls the investigative team together, and on the whiteboard writes one simple word. The culprit returns to the interview suite, confesses, and the cold case team can chalk up another success. What Marcia Turner does so well, in addition to the captivating dialogue, is to shine a light on the petty jealousies, perceived slights and debilitating grievances that plague so many families. She is spot on. We all know what she is writing about. Thankfully, it doesn’t make us all murderers, but – as they say – we have all been there. From 127 Publishing, this excellent police thriller is available now.

March 22, 2025 0

GONE . . . Between the covers

Bristol DCI John Meredith is not at peace with the world. His wife and fellow police officer Patsy Hodge was seriously injured when she came face to face with a serial killer. Her physical injuries are, albeit slowly, healing. Mentally, however, she is shattered. Her relationship with Meredith is now fraught, riven with anxiety and tension.

At work, Meredith is saddled with an exasperating pair of cold case crimes. Decades ago, two young women, unknown to each other and years apart, caught trains from Bristol to London. Neither reached their destination, and their bodies were eventually discovered in separate locations in farmland near Reading. What links the two cases is that the forensics indicate that the two young women were not killed when they first disappeared. It seems that they lived for years before being killed. But where? And with whom? Doing what,? The timeline suggests that the first girl, Jasmine was killed in 2008/9, while Louise disappeared in 2010. Could Louise have been Jasmine’s successor, a replacement of some kind? Jasmine Jones was given up by her mother, put in care and then fostered. She married a man called Carl, but the relationship disintegrated when he had a fling with another woman. Louise Marshall was another woman anxious for a fresh start and a new job, but she found only violence and an unmarked grave.

As is often the way in crime fiction, we know the answer to the puzzle facing the investigators long before they do. In this case, there is a decidedly weird and disfunctional farming family who have a disconcerting habit of employing women as a sinister mix of housekeeper and bed-mate – and then killing them.

As involving as this is, the real beating heart of the book is John Meredith’s personal life. The scene where he meets up with his first true love (after Patsy ups sticks and goes to stay with relations in New Zealand) is brilliantly written, and so, so poignant. They wine and dine, make it back to her hotel and …. I am not going to spoil it for you, but it is the most emotionally intuitive piece of writing I have read for a long time.

John Meredith is an engaging and complex man. Realising that Patsy is mentally damaged, he is bowed beneath her slights, physical indifference, and emotional instability, but he never buckles. He hopes (rather than believes) that somewhere ahead are the sunlit uplands of the days before Patsy was so badly wounded. He wants to believe what Philip Larkin once wrote. “What will survive of us is love.” It is, at the end of the day, all he has to offer.

The dark secrets of Brandon farm are eventually exposed to sunlight and justice – after a fashion – is served. What will remain with me about this book, however, is the wonderfully observed account of Meredith’s personal life. Yes, we know that most fictional police Inspectors have tangled lives away from the job. I could start with Tom Thorne, Alan Banks and John Rebus, but CriFi buffs do not need me to continue the list, as it would be a long one. My last words of praise for this excellent novel are to say that the dialogue, copper to copper and Meredith to acquaintances and family, absolutely sparkles. Gone is published by 127 Publishing and is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

A VIOLENT HEART . . . Between the covers

David Fennell introduced us to London copper DI Grace Archer in The Art of Death (2021) Now, she returns in a complex new case which involves cold case crime and the murders of sex workers, decades apart. The investigation becomes very here-and-now when the body of a young Croatian woman called Elena Zoric is found. She died from a puncture wound to her chest, but whatever killed her, it wasn’t a bullet.

The best police procedurals always give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the personalities and tensions that exist inside a police station. Because her previous superior has been sideline and has to care for her husband, struck down with Long Covid, Grace Archer has a new boss, Chief Inspector Les Fletcher, He is described as a “gammon-faced Yorkshireman” with more than a trace of the toxic masculinity common to that breed. Archer’s wing man is Belfast born DS Harry Quinn – reliable and intuitive. Less helpful is DI Lee Parry, nephew of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. He is lazy, venal and prepared to cut corners for an easy life.

I have often observed that Detective Inspectors in British crime novels are, perhaps, overused. There are very sound reasons for this, however. DIs are perfectly placed to be both at the centre of investigations bureaucratically, while able to be out on the street, at the crime scene, and in the faces of the bad guys. Much more rare is the novel where a humble DC is the locus of activity. I can think of only one series, and that was written by Alison Bruce, and featured Cambridge Detective Constable Gary Goodhew. My review of The Silence is here. That being said DI Grace Archer is a welcome guest at a party held in a very crowded room.

We have here something of a whirling dervish of a plot, which spins this way and that and incorporates apparently disconnected events. We have a bizarre (but sadly all-too-credible) social ‘influencer’ called Calvin ‘Dixy’ Dixon whose latest Tik-Tok sensation shows him talking to the dessicated corpse of a woman sitting in a wheelchair in an abandoned house. There is also something that might become a ‘love interest’ angle, when Liam, a builder friend of Harry Quinn, is booked to renovate Archer’s house. He also happens to be extremely handsome, and brings with him freshly baked croissants to share before he starts work each day.

Then there is Mallory Jones, the guiding light in a successful podcast called Mallory Jones Investigates. She alternately helps and hinders Archer’s search for a man whose weapon of choice appears to be some kind of bolt gun. Finally, in far-off Berwick on Tweed, we have the Mercer family. Barry and Isla, and Isla’s brother Simon. Barry and Isla are both ex-coppers, but their teenage daughter Lily has fallen in with a bad crowd, and makes fistfuls of cash by appearing in amateur porn videos with her bestie, Gemma.

Archer is concerned to discover that, back in the day, her new boss Les Fletcher was, as a young PC, involved in the older murder investigations, and her informants tell her that he was rude and unsympathetic, strongly showing his prejudice that as ‘working girls’, getting assaulted by clients just went with the job.

As you might expect, David Fennell seizes the frayed ends of these plot strands and weaves them together to make for a highly satisfying conclusion. There is a savage and sanguinary denouement in, most appropriately, a disused abattoir. Not everyone survives the carnage, but as the emergency vehicles trundle off into the night, we have catharsis. Grace Archer certainly has her own demons to torment her, but she is a courageous and resourceful copper with a fierce determination to pursue the truth. A Violent Heart is published by Zaffre and is available now.

September 5, 2024 1

THE LOST VICTIM . . . Between the covers

The search for the killer of a child long dead is a recurring trope in crime fiction, and it carries with it all manner of similar plot strands. There will be dusty police files, parents – probably elderly by now – and still clinging to the faint hope that there might be answers; almost certainly we will meet police officers who made mistakes, made the wrong call, or took crucial short-cuts; there will be intriguing glimpses into what life was like twenty, thirty years earlier, and a sense of the truth being buried under too many lies, too many errors, too little police time, and – perhaps – a victim who was not attractive enough to the media.

We get all this – and more – from Robert Bryndza’s The Lost Victim. Three decades earlier, before King’s Cross in London was a dazzling hub of boutique restaurants, state-of-the-art apartments and conference venues, a teenage girl named Janey Macklin was sent by her mum to buy a packet of fags from a newsagent’s shop, which sat among the grim streets, derelict warehouses, dark railway arches, smoke-filled pubs and knocking shops that made up London N1C 4AX in 1988. Janey never returned to the pub with her mum’s cigarettes. Her body was never found, despite traces of her blood being recorded in and around the places where she was last seen.

On the balance of probability, Robert Driscoll was convicted of her murder, but after a decade in jail, his case was reviewed and with a much smarter barrister than he was given at his first trial, Driscoll was released. Contemporary with Janey’s disappearance, a series of girls were being abducted and savaged by a man the press dubbed ‘ The Nine Elms Cannibal’. This time , there was no miscarriage of justice, and Peter Conway was caught, tried and convicted. He was a police officer, and married to Kate Marshall. Kate, also a copper, survived a bout of alcoholism brought about by the trauma, left the force, but has now reinvented herself as a private investigator, partnered by Tristan Harper, and based in Devon.

When she is contacted by a media agency who say they are preparing a True Crime series based on Janet’s disappearance, and need her to provide material, she reluctantly agrees. Since the case overlaps the story of her murderous husband, she senses that she might be about to be exploited, but it is the middle of winter, and her case load is not so heavy that she can afford to refuse.It does not take long for Kate Marshall to realise that she is being played by these media spivs. Not only that, a man in a relationship with one the agency’s employees was, almost certainly, a person of interest in the original investigation into Janey Macklin’s disappearance.

With awful scenes from her own past flitting in and out of her mind, Kate digs deeper and deeper into what happened on that chilly December evening, all those years ago. She is working for nothing, and running on fumes. Robert Bryndza doesn’t spare us from the numbing sense of loss felt by the people who knew and loved Janey, and when her remains are eventually found, we are left with an almost tangible sense of loss. We know her as a person; the girl who liked a bag of chips on a Friday night; the girl who went to ballet classes, perhaps dreaming of a future that could never have been realised.

I first encountered Kate Marshall in Nine Elms, which goes some way to putting her life into perspective. Click this link to read my review of that novel. In The Lost Victim we come face to face with truly vile human beings, thankfully behind bars for desecrating the lives of young people. Kate Marshall is a spirited and determined woman – a flawed, but believable heroine. The Lost Victim is published by Raven Street Publishing, and will be available on 11th July.

July 4, 2024 0

STAY BURIED . . . Between the covers

Writing as Katherine Webb, the author (left) is a well established writer of several books which seem to be in the romantic/historical/mystery genre, but I believe this is her first novel with both feet firmly planted on the terra firma of crime fiction. Wiltshire copper DI Matthew Lockyer, after a professional error of judgment, has been sidelined into a Cold Case unit, consisting of himself and Constable Gemma Broad.

He receives a telephone call from a most unexpected source. His caller is Hedy Lambert, a woman he helped convict of murder fourteen years earlier. The case was full of unexpected twists and turns, none more bizarre than the identity of the victim. Harry, son of Emeritus Professor Roland Ferris had left home as a teenager and, seemingly, vanished from the face of the earth. Then he returns home to the Wiltshire village where his father lives. This variation on the tale of The Prodigal Son, takes a turn for the worse, however, when Harry’s dead body is discovered, and standing over it, clutching the murder weapon, is Ferris’s housekeeper Hedy Lambert. Problem is, it’s not Harry Ferris.

After a few days it transpires the the murder victim is actually Mickey Brown, a Traveller, who superficially resembles Harry. Despite the absence of any plausible motive Hedy Lambert is convicted of murder and found guilty, condemned almost entirely by convincing forensic evidence. Now, Lambert has telephoned Lockyer from her prison to tell him that the real Harry Ferris has returned to his father’s house. Lockyer visits Longacres, Ferris’s house in the village of Stoke Lavington, to find the old man at death’s door with cancer of the blood and Harry Ferris totally unwilling to co-operate with the re-opening of the murder case.

As the story develops, we learn more about Lockyer and his background. His parents are what Americans call hardscrabble farmers, elderly and increasingly unable to make a living out of the farm or see any fruits for their lifetime of hard work. The obvious person to take over the farm was Lockyer’s brother Chris, but he is long dead, having been stabbed in a fracas outside a local pub. His killer has never been brought to justice.

One of the many admirable qualities of this book is that Kate Webb doesn’t take any prisoners in her portrayal of rural Wiltshire. Yes, there are obviously some beautiful places, but there are also farms which are bleak, wind-swept and run-down; there are villages and small towns with rough and tumble pubs which are no strangers to violence. Please don’t expect the sun-kissed limestone cottages and trim thatched roofs of Midsomer; this is Wiltshire in winter from a literal point of view, and metaphorically it is darker territory altogether.

On one level, Stay Buried is a superior whodunnit, as by the half way point Kate Webb has presented us with a tasty line-up of possible killers. There is Paul Rifkin, Ferris’s factotum, the real Harry Ferris, Tor Gravich, the young research assistant who was in Longacres at the time of the murder, Sean Hannington, a violent Traveller thug with a grudge against Mickey Brown, Serena Godwin, and even Roland Ferris himself. Or are we being led up the garden path, and is the killer Hedy Lambert after all? The eventual solution is elegant, complex and unexpected. On another level altogether, the book is a forensic examination of the nature of grief, guilt, and the corrosive effect of harbouring a desire for revenge.

This is excellent crime fiction, with a central character who has the quirks and flaws to make him totally credible. The geographical backdrop against which DI Matt Lockyer does his job is painted ‘warts and all’, lending a psychological darkness to proceedings. Stay Buried is published by Quercus and will available as listed below:

Kindle – 27th October 2022
Audiobook – 27th October 2022
Hardcover – 19th January 2023
Paperback – 29th July 2023

October 3, 2022 1

UNDER THE MARSH . . . Between the covers

This is the third novel by GR Halliday featuring Inverness copper DI Monica Kennedy, and you can read my review of the previous book, Dark Waters, by clicking on the title link. DI Kennedy’s life revolves around being the best mother she can be for her five year-old daughter Lucy, and solving serious crime for Police Scotland. When those two vocations collide, she is helped out by her willing, but rather reproachful mother.

The novel begins with one of those “She’s Leaving Home” moments, but there is a difference. The worst that we know of what became of the girl in the Beatles song is that she went off with a man from the motor trade. What happens here is worse. Much, much worse.

One of Kennedy’s chief scalps was serial killer Pauline Tosh, who now faces spending the rest of her days in a remote high security jail. Out of the blue, Tosh requests a visit from the officer who ended her murderous career, and what she reveals sets off a search for a body. When it is discovered, and is revealed to be that of the long-since missing Freya Sutherland, what is in effect a massive cold-case-murder hunt is put into place.

I am not the greatest fan of the split time frame mode of storytelling, but Halliday uses it sparingly. Freya’s links with some minor celebrities back in the day provide leads for the investigation, but they are not necessarily fruitful. Along the way, the author has fun painting dark pictures of people who were once ‘something’ in the entertainment business, but whose best days are long behind them, but the questionable ethics and narcissism that brought them fame are as strong as ever. More troubling for Monica Kennedy is that one of the people who crops up in her investigation into what happened decades ago is now a prominent Scottish politician.

Monica Kennedy gets on really well with her professional partner, DC Connor Crawford, but then he goes AWOL at a time when the investigation is floundering. When he does surface, it is to tell Kennedy that he is in la merde profonde. He has become captivated with a Lithuanian stripper who works for one of Scotland’s major villains, who now has compromising footage of Crawford and Emilija. This footage will be revealed to all and sundry unless Crawford agrees to feed him with information. It is not all doom and gloom, however, as Crawford has had a bit of luck via a cassette tape which seems to indict several of Kennedy’s suspects in the search for Freya’s killer.

As with all good crime writers, Halliday (right) leads us up the garden path, and killers (plural) are actually found, but the solution is surprising and beautifully complex. Oh yes, I almost forgot. From his bio, GR Halliday is a lover of cats, so if you share his passion, there are cats in this story. Several of them.

The author brings us a dark and compelling mystery set against the dramatic and occasionally unforgiving landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Monica Kennedy is a fully fleshed out character we can all believe in. Under the Marsh is published by Vintage, and is available now.

August 13, 2022 0

SERPENTINE . . . Between the covers

No-one could ever accuse Jonathan Kellerman of not being industrious. It seems like only the other day that I reviewed The Museum of Desire (it was 9th November last year, in fact), but now Dr Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis are back again in the hills and canyons of LA, solving another mystery. A quick bio. for readers new to the series. Delaware is a practicing child psychologist who often (this is the 36th book in the series) helps LAPD detective Milo Sturgis with cases. Delware lives with a woman who repairs stringed instruments, while Sturgis has a partner, and has come through the dark years when being gay was something of a no-no in police ranks. The plot is as wonderfully convoluted and labyrinthine as ever. So (takes a deep breath), here goes.

Sturgis has reluctantly taken on the coldest of cold cases. His orders have come down from some very well-connected people in the political and civic life of LA, and so he has been pulled off all other work. The mystery? What is the truth behind the death of a woman decades earlier, found in the wreckage of her burnt out Cadillac at the bottom of a canyon bordering Mulholland Drive? Careless driving? Might have been, were it not for the fact that she had also been shot in the head.

The woman pulling the strings is Ellie Barker, a millionaire former businesswoman, and daughter of Dorothy Swoboda the lady in the canyon. She was only three at the time, has no recollection of her mother, and never knew her natural father, having been brought up by her stepfather, Stanley Barker.

Anton Des Barres was a wealthy industrialist who made his money manufacturing high quality surgical equipment. After his second wife died, he became something of a womaniser, inviting young women back to his mansion where he and his children still lived. Delaware and Sturgis learn that Dorothy was one of Des Barres’s ‘harem’. They also discover a strange coincidence. Arlette Des Barres, the man’s second wife died after a fall from her horse in the rugged country near where Dorothy died. Stanley Barker was found dead, possibly as a result of a fall, in the same area.

Historic deaths are one thing, but when Ellie Barker’s boyfriend is shot, Delaware and Sturgis are faced with the uncomfortable thought that whatever the truth behind Dorothy’s murder, it is far from being dead and buried. It is alive and well, and extremely dangerous.

The title of the book refers to a piece of jewellery, which Delaware and Sturgis eventually discover is deeply significant. Actually, the pair make many assumptions about the case, and most of them prove to be wrong, which only adds to the credibility as investigators. They are not super-sleuths; they are mortal, fallible – and consequently completely convincing. It is only in the final pages that they – and we – learn the truth about the life and death of the woman who called herself Dorothy Swoboda, and it is dark stuff indeed.

Cynics might turn up their noses at this book and dismiss it as “formula fiction”. Fair enough, and, as the saying goes, “opinions are like (insert anatomical detail) – everyone has one”. What such critics find hard to cope with, I suggest, is that writers like Kellerman are rather like alchemists, in that they take base metal – cops, bad guys, slick dialogue, zooming around in cars, and turn it into gold – conviction, reading pleasure, empathy with the characters and a sense of “can’t wait for the next novel“. That is pretty impressive, at least in my book.

Serpentine is published by Century, and is out now.

February 8, 2021 1

BROKEN GROUND . . . Between the covers

The Body In The Bog is a nicely alliterative strapline normally used to liven up reports of archaeologists discovering some centuries-old corpse in a watery peat grave. The deaths of these poor souls does not usually involve an investigation by the local police force, but as Val McDermid relates, when the preserved remains are wearing expensive trainers, it doesn’t take the tenant of 221B Baker Street to deduce that the chap was not executed as part of some arcane tribal ritual back in the tenth century.

A pair of hopefuls from England have traveled to the bleak Scottish moors of Wester Ross, armed with what they hope is a treasure map. They hope to uncover not a sturdy wooden chest bursting with pirate doubloons or King John’s lost gold, but treasure of a different sort – two mint condition vintage motor cycles, worth a fortune at 2018 prices. They disinter the motorcycles with the help of a friendly local crofter and his mini JCB, but their elation is soured by – yes, you’ve guessed – the aforementioned fellow and his 1995 Nike Air Max sportswear.

Motorcycles? Buried in a Scottish peat bog? Marked on a map? Has Val McDermid finally lost her marbles after years of inventing fiendish ways for people to die? Leaving no question unanswered, I have to say yes, yes, yes – and an emphatic NO! Breaking Ground is the fifth in McDermid’s DCI Karen Pirie series and is shot through with the author’s trademark brilliance. McDermid does complex, clever, conflicted women like no-one else, and Pirie – of Police Scotland’s Historic Crimes Unit – is a fine cop, scarred by personal tragedy, studiously unglamorous in looks and style, but with a fierce determination to seek justice for victims of crime, both living and dead. The police procedural aspect of the story is cleverly done, and provides the essential counterpont of rivalry, betrayal and bitterness which run beneath the main tune which is the public face of policing.

If music halls were still in vogue, McDermid would be the dextrous juggler, the jongleur who defies gravity by keeping several plot lines spinning in the air; spinning, but always under her control. There is the Nike bog body, a domestic spat which ends in savagery, a cold-case rape investigation which ends in a very contemporary tragedy, and an Assistant Chief Constable who is more concerned about her perfectly groomed press conferences that solving crime. They say that the moon has a dark side, and so does Edinburgh: McDermid (right) takes us on a guided tour through its majestic architectural and natural scenery, but does not neglect to pull away the undertaker’s sheet to reveal the squalid back alleys and passageways which lurk behind the grand Georgian facades. We slip past the modest security and peep through a crack in the door at a meeting in one of the grander rooms of Bute House, the official residence of Scotland’s First Minister, even getting a glimpse of the good lady herself, although McDermid is far too discreet to reveal if she approves or disapproves of Ms Sturgeon.

Karen Pirie battles the metaphorical demons of her own personal history, while facing more literal malice in the person of a senior officer who is determined to bring her down. The death of her beloved partner Phil has bequeathed emotional turmoil, anger and longing. When she meets a potentially interesting man in the course of a murder investigation, she is conflicted. Is he lying to her? Is he just a glib charmer, ruggedly beautiful in his kilt, or is his interest in her – intentionally dowdy and brusquely professional as she is – genuine?

Val McDermid answers all these questions, and poses a few of her own, particularly about the state of modern Scotland and the role of cash-strapped police forces in a society which demands quick solutions, and to hell with integrity. Broken Ground is published by Little, Brown and is available in hardback and as a Kindle. Amazon says that it will be out in paperback early in 2019.

Click the link to read the review of McDermid’s previous novel, Insidious Intent.

October 13, 2018 0

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS … Out of Bounds

There are just a handful of authors who, when you have their latest book in your hands, remind you of the sheer unalloyed pleasure that can come from reading. For me, that is the best feeling in the creative world, bar none – and that’s from someone who spent most of his professional life teaching and playing music. One of those treasured authors is Val McDermid, who you know is never going to let you down.

Her new book is the fourth case for Inspector Karen Pirie who, like her creator, is based in Fife, Scotland. A joyride for a local teenager ends in rather more than tears, as the unfortunate youth ends in a coma.No modern police novel is complete with the mystical world of DNA cropping up at some point, and in this case it links to a decades-old cold case and the terrible legacy of a terrorist bombing. Out of bounds will be available from 25th August, but can be pre-ordered here. Watch out for the full review on Fully Booked!

Blurb