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A young woman is found dead on the outskirts of St Petersburg on a freezing January morning. There are no signs of injury, and heavy snowfall has buried all trace of an attacker.
Captain Natalya Ivanova's investigation quickly links the victim to the Decembrists, an anti-Putin dissident group whose acts of civil disobedience have caught the eye of the authorities. And Natalya soon realises she is not the only one interested in the case, as government security services wade in and shut down her investigation almost before it has begun.
Before long, state media are spreading smear stories about the dead woman, and Natalya suspects the authorities have something to hide. When a second rebel activist goes missing, she is forced to go undercover to expose the truth. But the stakes are higher than ever before. Not only could her pursuit of the murderer destroy her career, but her family ties to one of the victims threaten to tear her personal life apart.
A captivating, pacy thriller that plunges right into the beating heart of Putin's Russia.

Black Wolf is the second thriller in the Captain Natalya Ivanova series based in St Petersburg, Russia.
This sequel to Abson's debut thriller, Motherland, again features Captain Natalya Ivanova of St Petersburg's Serious Crimes Unit.
This is police procedural novel that is filled with drama, suspense, police and political corruption and lots of drinking.
The story has lots of twists and turns to keep you gripped.
The characters are well established and strong lead female also.
Well written story which I enjoyed.
Recommend reading.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers' for the ARC. This is my honest voluntary review.
  
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Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2395 KP) rated The Library Game in Books

Apr 18, 2025 (Updated Apr 18, 2025)  
The Library Game
The Library Game
Gigi Pandian | 2025 | Mystery
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Murder Strolls into a Library
Tempest Raj and the rest of the team are working on turning a house into a new library in Hidden Creek, this one focused on classic mysteries. While the library isn’t ready to open yet, they are participating in the Summer Stroll program that kicks off in a few days. Their contribution will be an escape room and an interactive mystery play that Tempest wrote with her best friend, Ivy. Naturally, Tempest is there for a dress rehearsal. Unfortunately, it goes horribly wrong with one of the actors turning up dead after a scripted power outage. However, by the time they call the police, the body is gone. Is he really dead? If so, who moved the body?

The case is even more impossible than I was able to work into my teaser, and I had fun watching Tempest lead us to the logical solution. The pacing might have lagged a bit in the middle, but that might be me. It was fantastic to spend time with all the regulars again, and I’m curious where some of the relationships will go from here. The suspects were good, too. We get a delicious sounding recipe for Blackberry Crumble Cobbler and more references to classic mysteries. I really need to find a time to read some of them. This book will work well as an intro/standalone if you haven’t read the earlier books in the series yet. But you’ll want to go back to read them after the fun you’ll have here. Fans will be glad they picked up this book.
  
Day of the Dead (1985)
Day of the Dead (1985)
1985 | Horror
9
8.4 (12 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Bub The Zombie (1 more)
Capt. Rhodes
Night, Dawn and Day: The Perfect Trilogy
Day of the Dead- is the final movie in George's trilogy. It started with Night, than Dawn and now Day. The perfect trilogy about surival, surviving, surival of the finest and the livng dead. With great charcters, excellent villians and of course the zombies. In this one you have, Bub the zombie and the evil Capt. Rhodies. So thats a plus.

The plot: Trapped in a missile silo, a small team of scientists, civilians and trigger-happy soldiers battle desperately to ensure the survival of the human race, but tension inside the base is reaching breaking-point, and the zombies are gathering outside.

Romero originally intended the film to be "the Gone with the Wind of zombie films. This forced Romero to scale back his story, rewriting the script and adjusting his original vision to fit the smaller budget.

A total of five scripts were written as Romero wrestled with the film's concepts and the budgetary constraints. The first draft was over 200 pages, which he later condensed to 122 pages. This is the true original script, and to date no copies of it have come to light. This version was likely rejected because UFDC felt it was too expensive for them to produce even with an R rating. Romero subsequently scaled down the scope of this script into a 165-page draft (often erroneously referred to as the original version), then condensed it again to a 104-page draft labeled the 'second version, second draft' in an unsuccessful final attempt to get the story within budget parameters. When this failed, he drastically altered the original story concept and ultimately produced a shooting draft that numbered only 88 pages.

Its a perfect ending for a excellent and phenomenal trilogy.
  
Bornless Ones (2016)
Bornless Ones (2016)
2016 |
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Take 4 Outrageously good looking guys and gals, A 5th guy with some sort of life challenging disease… Move them into a new out of the way house with a secret history, not to far from an Institution, Have them desecrate and destroy what look to be supernatural symbols boarding up the windows and you have Bornless Ones… Oh and there is scary possession, Craziness and a fair bit of really well done gore, Seriously well done Gore!!!

Now that’s not to say that this movie lacks originality in any way because it really does not. Ok we may have seen the creepy house in the middle of nowhere that scares the crap out of its occupants before, but can we really ever get too much of that. The difference I found was that Bornless Ones is in many ways a spiritual cousin to movies like Evil Dead and in many ways actually betters what has come before in its Genre. One of those ways is the performance our cast put in.



Emily (Margaret Judson – The Newsroom) has decided that she cant look after her Cerebal Palsy suffering brother Zach (Micheal Johnston – MTV’s Teen Wolf) anymore, she is going to move him to an institution. However fearing he is going to be too far away from her, Emily and her boyfriend Jesse (Devin Goodsell) buy a house nearby, the house has a past. Emily and Jesse are accompanied by there friends Woodrow (Mark Furze – Home and Away, Underbelly) and Michelle (Bobby T) to help them move in. That’s when the movie cranks it up to 11 and everything goes nuts as our core characters are taken hold of by a paranormal force one by one and must fight for survival.

My horror kick has absolutely continued into 2017 and Bornless Ones was a fantastic place to start. Its a hell of a lot more Evil Dead than the Evil Dead Remake which sucked and this movie really had me in from the start. It does help that it wastes no time at all, no sooner had they all moved in and the shenanigans began.

Alexander Babaev has done a great job on Directing and Writing with this movie and while it falls into the Indie bracket of movies it deserves to be seen by a wider audience. The acting from our core cast is better than you might expect, infact they all smash it out of the park. The acting once possession has taken hold is creepy as shit and utterly compelling.

Bornless Ones is definitely worth a watch if you are a fan of this genre, it is a lot better than most of the possession movies coming out these days. Give it a try…
  
Prey
Prey
2017 | Action/Adventure
Enemy design (0 more)
Like if Ken Levine made a Dishonored game
I’m still surprised this game actually made it to release. Developed by Arkane, (the same studio behind the Dishonored games,) and published by Bethesda, this game finally made it onto store shelves after around a decade spent in development hell and while it may not have been worth that 10 year wait, there is a decent game here. The trailers made this out to be a horror game along the lines of Dead Space, but really it’s closer to Bioshock or System Shock 2. If you liked Ken Levine’s games, there is a clear inspiration from them seen here. The game was created using the same engine and art style to Dishonored, so while it’s not the best looking game to come out this year, the art style is still kind of cool. The monster design could have been more varied, but this is still a fun, sci-fi adventure and definitely worth playing through.