Crime Book Club – The Vote is Open

The crime book club met and discussed the difficult book Gray After Dark by Noelle W Ihli. Difficult because of its subject matter and that it was based on true events. It was an interesting discussion and I thank all members for their input.

For our next book we are reading a bestseller – because we haven’t tended to read such high profile books, so I thought we’d go there over the summer.

Please read the blurbs below and leave your vote in the comments before the end of Friday 12th June.

The next meeting is Monday 6th July at 8 p.m. BST. If you’re not yet a member but want to join you can sign up HERE – necessary for login details of the meeting.

The Tenant by Freida McFadden

Blake Porter is riding high, until he’s not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone that he shares with his fiancee, he’s desperate to make ends meet.

Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She’s exactly what Blake’s looking for. Or is she?

Because something isn’t quite right. The neighbors start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night. And soon Blake fears someone knows his darkest secrets…

Danger lives right at home, and by the time Blake realizes it, it’ll be far too late.

The trap is already set.

Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse

In this zen and zany crime debut, a shady lawyer transforms his life through mindfulness—and uses his newfound techniques to kill his way to the top.

Criminal defense lawyer Björn Diemel has been given an ultimatum: repair his work-life balance, or his wife will leave him—and take their daughter.

He reluctantly starts a mindfulness course, and to his surprise, it’s a revelation. He becomes calmer, happier, and more focused as he starts to understand what’s really important in life. When his worst client, brutal kingpin Dragan Sergowicz, tries to interfere with his precious family time, Björn will stop at nothing—not even killing—to protect his peace.

The New Neighbours by Claire Douglas (Neighbors for the US)

You know your neighbours are plotting a crime but no one believes you . . .

When Lena helps her teenage son gather sounds for his media studies project, she doesn’t expect her boom-microphone to pick up a conversation between her neighbours, the Morgans.

And she’s certain they are planning a crime.

Her family and friends tell her that she must have misheard. After all, the Morgans are a well-respected, upstanding couple in their early sixties. They’ve never been in trouble with the law.

Yet Lena can’t stop thinking about it. Because what if she hasn’t misheard? What if she can prevent something awful happening?

After all, stopping it could help ease her conscience about her own dark past . . .

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee

It’s a week until the US presidential elections when a bomb goes off in an LA shopping mall.

In London, the police storm Heathrow Airport to bring in a father for questioning about his missing daughter.

In Florida, a mother makes a connection between her son and the bomber, fearing he has been radicalized.

And in Oregon, an unknown organization’s conspiracy to bring America to its knees unfolds…

On the run from the authorities, the two parents are thrown together in a race against time to stop a catastrophe that will derail the country’s future forever.

But can they find their kids before it’s too late?

I Will Find You by Harlan Coben

David Burroughs was once a devoted father to his three-year-old son Matthew, living a dream life just a short drive away from the working-class suburb where he and his wife, Cheryl, first fell in love—until one fateful night when David woke to discover Matthew had been murdered while David was asleep just down the hall.

Half a decade later, David’s been wrongly accused and convicted of the murder, left to serve out his time in a maximum-security prison—a fate which, grieving and wracked with guilt, David didn’t have the will to fight. The world has moved on without him. Then Cheryl’s younger sister, Rachel, makes a surprise appearance during visiting hours bearing a strange photograph . . . in the background, just barely in frame, is a boy bearing an eerie resemblance to David’s son. David just knows: Matthew is still alive.

David plans a harrowing escape, determined to achieve the impossible–save his son, clear his own name, and discover the real story of what happened. But with his life on the line and the FBI following his every move, can David evade capture long enough to reveal the shocking truth?