🌠 Delighted to be part of this exciting blog tour 🌠
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| Verve Books 5 September 2019 My thanks to the publishers for my e-copy of this book and my invitation to this blog tour |
She doesn’t trust the police. She used to be one of them. Hardened by ten years on the murder squad, DNA analyst Sian Love has seen it all. So when she finds human remains in the basement of her new home, she knows the drill. Except this time it’s different. This time, it’s personal...
What did I think about it..
Ex-DCI, Sian Love, now a DNA analyst, moves into a disused public house which once belonged to her uncle Rob. That she is now the owner of this building fills her with some trepidation especially when Elvis, her ex-police dog, who has been trained to search for cadavers, finds something suspicious in the cellar. This creepy start to the novel sets the scene for an unsettling mystery which flits forwards and backwards in time to when the pub, known as the Loggerheads, was a hive of nefarious activity in the 1970s.
The story is tight and complex and the author has done a great job of bringing both past and present to life in a realsitic sort of way. The 1970s was a very different time when both language and social aspirations had a certain edginess, and setting the book in Nottingham allows a certain amount of vernacular, which I'm not always keen on in novels, however, the author does this local dialect well, and it all fits in with the way the characters would have behaved at that time.
I enjoyed getting to know Sian Love, she's an odd character, rather feisty and argumentative one minute, then vulnerable the next, but there's always a complexity to her, and as the animosity she feels towards the police force starts to become more apparent, so the general feeling of unease starts to develop. Her tenuous relationship with her partner, Kris who also happens to be a DI in the police force, adds an interesting dynamic to the way the connections within the story evolve.
Dead Flowers is a well written crime thriller which held my attention from first page to last. I can easily see Sian Love in other stories as her role as a DNA analyst would certainly lend itself to other complex crime cold cases.
Ex-DCI, Sian Love, now a DNA analyst, moves into a disused public house which once belonged to her uncle Rob. That she is now the owner of this building fills her with some trepidation especially when Elvis, her ex-police dog, who has been trained to search for cadavers, finds something suspicious in the cellar. This creepy start to the novel sets the scene for an unsettling mystery which flits forwards and backwards in time to when the pub, known as the Loggerheads, was a hive of nefarious activity in the 1970s.
The story is tight and complex and the author has done a great job of bringing both past and present to life in a realsitic sort of way. The 1970s was a very different time when both language and social aspirations had a certain edginess, and setting the book in Nottingham allows a certain amount of vernacular, which I'm not always keen on in novels, however, the author does this local dialect well, and it all fits in with the way the characters would have behaved at that time.
I enjoyed getting to know Sian Love, she's an odd character, rather feisty and argumentative one minute, then vulnerable the next, but there's always a complexity to her, and as the animosity she feels towards the police force starts to become more apparent, so the general feeling of unease starts to develop. Her tenuous relationship with her partner, Kris who also happens to be a DI in the police force, adds an interesting dynamic to the way the connections within the story evolve.
Dead Flowers is a well written crime thriller which held my attention from first page to last. I can easily see Sian Love in other stories as her role as a DNA analyst would certainly lend itself to other complex crime cold cases.
Nicola Monaghan has lived and worked in London, Paris, Chicago and New York but returned to her home town of Nottingham in 2002 to pursue a masters in Creative Writing. She graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 2004 with a distinction, and went on to write her first novel, The Killing Jar, set on the council estate where she lived as a child. This debut novel was highly critically acclaimed, and won a Betty Trask Award, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Prize and the Waverton Good Read. She has written several other novels, novellas and a collection of short stories. She also teaches Creative Writing at De Montfort University, and online at YouTube, Udemy and Skillshare.
Twitter @nicolanovelist #DeadFlowers
@verve_books
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