‘All Fall Down’ by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards

Published by HarperCollins, 

14^th February 2013. 

ISBN: 978-0-00-746072-4

According to the author biog, the two authors in this partnership pride themselves on producing quick-fire page-turners which are ‘all thriller, no filler.’

    

That’s a pretty ambitious claim for any author in the relatively early stages of a career, but while I wouldn’t agree that they pull it off completely, they do come pretty close.

    

Mostly the pace doesn’t let up for a second. There’s a world-threatening virus with no known cure, and a bomb which wipes out half the virologists who might find one; a stunningly beautiful villainess on a quasi-religious mission; a cute kid with a feckless father; and the biggest body count I’ve ever encountered in a thriller, even before the virus starts cutting swathes through the population.

    

Having escaped the bomb through being a good mother, uber-virologist Kate Maddox is whisked off to the secret lab with only days to spare before the virus infects the whole of North America. Meanwhile her partner shakes off his FBI minder and sets off on his own mission of revenge, while the bad guys, or in this case girls, use any means at their disposal to prevent the cure being found. And Kate’s young son has his own agenda.

    

All Fall Down could be described as a plot constructed by the evil love-child of Meg Gardiner and Michael Crichton. Add to that protagonists with demons past and present, a city in lock-down and a research lab in a top-secret location, and the race to save the world (literally in this case) is well and truly on. There’s even some scientific background to add a bit of meat to the narrative.

    

Several characters even find time for the now-obligatory graphic (and gratuitous) sex scene: top of the brief list of bits I would recommend the authors jettison as ‘filler, not thriller’.

    

A page-turner it certainly is: a high-octane rollercoaster adventure with stakes as high as they can go. It’s chunky enough to make an ideal holiday read, with plenty to appeal to thriller lovers of both genders.

------

Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Mark Edwards and Louise Voss met after Louise saw Mark on a TV documentary about aspiring writers, and a writing partnership was born.  Their first two thrillers, Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death, were huge hits when the pair self-published them online, becoming the first UK indie authors to reach No. 1 in both the Amazon Kindle and Amazon Fiction charts.

http://vossandedwards.com/

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning.    

She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.