‘The Bad Place’ by M.K. Hill

Published by Head of Zeus,
5 September 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-78854826-7

Twenty-six years ago six teenagers were held prisoner at Baden Place since nicknamed The Bad Place. Their captor was a Jerry Swann and they all escaped except Becky, he slit her throat.

Since then they have all met up each year at one of the girl’s places, Karin's. This year she decides it will be the last as none of them really enjoy it and they don't get on too well either.

They have all arrived except Lydia, who comes in late in floods of tears. She tells them she witnessed a girl of fourteen or fifteen being pulled into a van. She is convinced Jerry is back, but he was shot dead by the police all those years ago as the five of them escaped.

Sammi a teenager is then reported missing and later a stolen van is found abandoned with her coat inside.

Detective Inspector Sasha Dawson heads the team looking into the abduction. She was actually a newly recruited police officer when the children were snatched all those years ago and remembers them all. As enquiries progress it becomes clear that somehow one or all of the remaining five hostages must have something to do with the latest girl being taken.

Then Karin starts receiving texts purporting to be from Becky the close friend of hers who was the only one of the six to die. Is someone trying to drive her insane?

When a teenage boy is then snatched, they all start to wonder, can Jerry be back? Someone is obviously trying to unnerve the survivors, but why after all these years?

Not only does Sasha have the abductions to deal with, but she is having problems at home. Her husband Kev has been acting very strangely recently and now her mother has left her father and unexpectedly arrived at Sasha's to live. However, she is very interfering and controlling especially where the children are concerned. Then tragedy strikes.

Now Sasha not only has pressures at work to contend with, but her home life falls apart and she has to use her detective powers to solve a family crisis. Is she strong enough to deal with so much stress?

A very cleverly interwoven plot connecting the past to the present. It shows how even after many years, events can still come back to haunt the people involved. It is interesting to read how the different characters deal with the guilt of having survived their ordeal whilst their friend Becky did not.

I found the story all the more interesting as the action takes place in and around Southend, a place I know well.

I can't recommend this book enough, it grips the reader from beginning to end, I felt quite exhausted when I finished it!

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Reviewer: Tricia Chappell

M K Hill is a pseudonym used by Mark Hill who has been a journalist and an award-winning music radio producer. He worked for about five minutes in PR. He now writes the Drake and Crowley thriller series. Mark says he loves writing. It's his dream job.  The Bad Place is the first book in the Sasha Dawson series written under the name M K Hill.  The Woman in the Wood, the second book in the series will be published 3 September 2020.

markhillauthor.com
Facebook.com/MarkHillAuthor
Twitter @markhillwriter
Instagram: @markhillwriter

Tricia Chappell. I have a great love of books and reading, especially crime and thrillers. I play the occasional game of golf (when I am not reading). My great love is cruising especially to far flung places, when there are long days at sea for plenty more reading! I am really enjoying reviewing books and have found lots of great new authors.

‘Girl at Midnight’ by Katarzya Bonda

Translated by Filip Sporczyk

Published (U.K.) by Hodder & Stoughton,
11 July 2019.
ISBN: 978 1 473 63041 3 (HB)

Sasza Zaluska had once worked as an undercover cop in her native Poland and in the course of doing so had become a serious alcoholic after a traumatic case and had also become pregnant. So she had then decided that the best way to get her life back was to go to England and study for a postgraduate degree. She began with geographic profiling of offenders but then switched to psychological profiling concentrating on offender life narratives. Her supervisor, Professor Tom Abrahams, is both demanding and supportive but when she decides to return to Poland, along with her beloved daughter Karolina, he is surprised and not altogether approving. But Sasza is determined; with her English academic qualifications she believes she can move away from crime-related topics and into some well-paid sphere like banking.

Once in Poland she finds a splendid flat for herself and Katarina who will go to a nursery while Sasza’s mother will care for the child when necessary. But all is not going to be as Sasza hopes; even before she leaves the U.K. she receives a mysterious phone call from someone who seems to know all about her and offers her work. She rejects the offer. Within a day of her arriving in Gdansk in Poland she is offered a job: the proprietor of a night club believes that his partner and some of his employees are stealing. He is Pawel Blawicki (Bouli), a former policeman, whose partner is a well-known singer Janek Wisniewski, whose soubriquet Needles is also the name of the club. He had become famous through one song, ‘Girl at Midnight’, although since then both the club and his own singing career have gone downhill. Apparently a well-known criminal, Jerzy Poplawski (the wheelchair-bound Jug-Ears) is behind various threats to the club. In fact, we have already met these characters and a number of others in an episode some years before involving several teen-age boys, Marcin Starok (whose maternal uncle is Jug-Ears and even then heavily involved with criminal gangs), Przemek Mazurkiewicz (whose beautiful young sister Monika Marcin falls in love with), and Needles himself. In that episode the three boys and Monika are trapped not only by the gangsters but by the corrupt police involved with those gangsters – and one of those policemen is Bouli. Confused? It gets more so as the story progresses and Needles is shot and killed and his assistant Isa Kozak severely wounded, and Sasza is drawn into the inquiry into Needles’s killing despite the scorn that many of the Gdansk police have for psychological profiling. It had been suggested that Lydia Lange, a barmaid at Needles, might prove a useful source of information; Lydia is now a suspect but Sasza does not agree with this.

This is an immensely complex narrative, told from the points of view of numerous characters and ranging back and forth, which depicts Polish society as corrupt from top to bottom – not just the police but elements of the judiciary and the business and financial world. Some online reviews have described it as convoluted and I have to say I agree. However, it is at the same time very compelling and I read on, anxious to find out what it was all about and what exactly was the clue hidden in the words of the song ‘Girl at Midnight’.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Katarzyna Bonda was born in Poland in 1977 in Bialystok. She was a leading journalist and scriptwriter by profession, before becoming the most popular crime writer in Poland.  All her books have become bestsellers. First published in 2014.  She wrote a criminal trilogy featuring profiler Hubert Meyer (The Case of Nina Frank, Only the Dead Don’t Lie, The Florist). Her most popular series and a huge commercial success (over 2 million copies sold in Poland alone) is The Four Elements of Sasza Zaluska: Girl at Midnight, The White Mercedes, Lanterns and Red Spider. Girl at Midnight received the Readers’ Award at the 2015 Wroclaw International Crime Festival, while The White Mercedes (Okularnik) won the 2015 Empik Bestseller Award. Foreign rights to the books have been sold to 14 countries to some of the largest publishers in the world, including Hodder & Stoughton and Penguin Random House. She currently lives and works in Warsaw.

katarzynabonda.pl

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.

‘Payback’ by R.C. Bridgestock.

Published by The Dome Press,
9 January 2020.
ISBN: 978-1-91253417-3 (PB)

Four years ago, Charley Mann broke up rather acrimoniously with her boyfriend of many years. At the same time she was promoted to Detective Sergeant and sent to London to further her career.

Newly promoted once more she has now been sent back to her old village as Detective Inspector and head of C.I.D. in nearby Huddersfield at her old police station.

She is not best pleased when she meets up with her old friend Kristine to be told Danny her ex-boyfriend has separated from his wife and is living back in the village working as a reporter for the local paper. The first day at work she is greeted with the news that a woman's body has been found hanging from a tree. On arrival at the scene the team are surprised to see she is hanging by her feet. It reminds them of a carcass at a slaughterhouse, there is blood on the surrounding ground. Charley is especially puzzled to see the corpses shoes are on the wrong feet.

Back at the station an incident room is set up. Charley meets her immediate boss Divisional Commander Brian Roper and remembers him being a bully and a liar from when she previously worked there. She soon realises he hasn't changed a bit and she is going to have to be wary of him.  Putting him out of her mind Charley attends the post mortem to be alerted to a few surprises concerning the body.

A few days later two young boys find another body in woods. This time it is a black man lying under a tree, he had been strangled. Are the murders connected? Both scenes contain strange articles which Charley is sure have been put there to confuse the police. For example, why was the first body wrapped in netting and at the second scene why was there a syringe with no trace of drugs either in it or in the body?

Slowly the team gather evidence, but Charley is frustrated when Danny shows himself and accuses her of cheating on him four years ago, which she positively denies. He tries to bully her into giving him information on the murders, but she is determined not to tell him anything, and he turns quite nasty.

Soil is then found on both bodies which forensics prove to come from the same place as each other and not from where they were found. Charley has the positive connection at last, but can the team find the perpetrator before they strike again?

A really good book full of red herrings and surprises. The Bridgestocks certainly have a great talent for descriptive narrative, once again their characters come alive and leap out of the book at the reader. I look forward to the rest of the new series about D.I. Charley Mann with great anticipation and highly recommend that people read Payback and all Charley's next cases.

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Reviewer: Tricia Chappell

R C Bridgestock  is the pen anme of the writing duo Carol and Bob Bridgestock.  Carol and Bob were both born and lived in West Yorkshire until they relocated to the Isle of Wight in 2003. Between them they have a staggering 47 years employment with the police, Carol being a member of the Civilian support staff and Bob being a Senior Police Officer. As a career detective Bob worked in the CID at every rank. For over half of his service he was a senior detective, retiring at the rank of Detective Superintendent. As a Senior Investigative Officer (SIO) in charge of homicide cases he took command of some twenty-six murder investigations, twenty-three major incidents including shootings and attempted murders and over fifty suspicious deaths and numerous sexual assaults, some of which were extremely high profile in his last three years alone. In 1988 Carol commenced working for the Police as a member of the support staff in the Administration Department. As a supervisor she received a Chief Constable's commendation for outstanding work for her determination and drive creating a poster competition for an Autumn Crime initiative.

 http://www.rcbridgestock.com/

Tricia Chappell. I have a great love of books and reading, especially crime and thrillers. I play the occasional game of golf (when I am not reading). My great love is cruising especially to far flung places, when there are long days at sea for plenty more reading! I am really enjoying reviewing books and have found lots of great new authors.