Sarah (7800 KP) rated The Outsider in Books
Jul 13, 2018
This is yet another brilliantly written King novel, filled with intrigue, suspense and a lot of fairly gruesome horror. The characters are, as always, well written and the story centres mainly around the lovable detective Ralph Anderson (although chapters centred around other characters offer some nice variety). The central supernatural plot is one that I've seen/read before in other works of fiction, but it definitely doesn't get boring seeing it from King's point of view. There are some unexpected links to some other of King's stories - one obvious and direct, but another link for me was more of a similarity to a previous character - neither of which is a bad thing.
My only criticisms of this book are fairly minor. The first is that the ending seems fairly rushed in comparison with the slow build of the rest of the book. And the second is that although it is a very good and enthralling read, it doesn't quite have the impact of some of his older epic novels (The Dark Tower series, The Stand, Needful Things etc).
ClareR (6106 KP) rated Close to Home in Books
Jan 7, 2020
I think Adam Fawley is going to be a detective that I will enjoy reading about. This isn’t a pleasant subject: an eight year old child, Daisy Mason, goes missing, and rather than doing everything they can to help find her, her parents are positively obstructive. Her younger brother is withdrawn - in fact it really doesn’t look good for the parents.
The police team are all great characters to read about, and DI Fawley is very human. We learn about his tragic background, and the reason why he works so hard to find Daisy.
I just really liked everything about this - the storyline isn’t needlessly gruesome, the characters are really well described and the ending was so good (oh, it had me rubbing my hands together!). To be honest, I’ve already bought the next two books in the series!
Many thanks to The Pigeonhole and Cara Hunter for reading along.
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Donna C (199 KP) rated The Art of Death in Books
Jan 18, 2021
Several characters could have been the killer. You decide who it is and then some small action or comment makes you think "Hang on, they just did........ maybe it's actually them?"
The two main police officers were well written, and I would like to see them again in another book. I really wanted to know Detective Inspector Grace Archer's back story from when she was a child and you do get to find out, but perhaps this will be explored further in future?
(A bit of a niggle is the number of typos in the text, at least 10-15!)
Overall, easy to get into, keeps your interest and I'd definitely read more by this author.