You’ll Never See Me Again – Lesley Pearse – Blog Tour.

 

Back of the book :

Betty is running for her life . . . 

Young Betty dreams of settling down to an ordinary life with her husband. But when he returns broken and haunted from the Great War, she finds herself persecuted by his distraught mother – and yearns to escape.

It is only when a storm devastates the village that Betty sees her chance. Fleeing to Bristol and changing her name to Mabel Brook, she seeks a new life – only to discover destiny has other plans.

Penniless and alone, Mabel suffers a brutal attack before being rescued by a psychic named Nora Nightingale. She gets her first taste of those who receive messages from the dead and realizes she may have this power herself.

But Mabel fears her gift may be a terrible curse as it becomes ever harder to hide from the truth about who she once was – and the tragic life she left behind.

Soon Mabel receives her own message and is forced back to the very place she has escaped. A place of heartbreak and perhaps even murder – but to secure her future Mabel must confront her past one last time.

 

What I think :

1917.

Betty lives in a small fishing town in Devon. She’s 22 and married to Martin. They lead a very simple life. Martin went out on the fishing boat with Betty’s father to make a living and Betty kept house and helped out if needed on the boat too. Then her father died in a freak accident, he was swept overboard in a storm, they didn’t find his body till three weeks later.  Martin went off to enlist and when he came back from the war he wasn’t the same, in either mind or body.  So now Betty’s life is awful, she’s left with a husband that doesn’t even know she’s there and a mother-in-law that really hates her, she resents her for taking her son away from her.

So one day when a really bad storm visits the village Betty knows this is her only chance to get away and change her life. She lets people think that she was swept away by the sea whilst trying to save her belonging’s from her and Martins beach side cottage.

Betty becomes Mabel Brook, war widow. She runs to Bristol, but when she gets there things go really wrong and something really bad happens to her. Luckily she’s saved by Nora a medium. Could Betty/Mabel have the gift too ?

Sooner or later Betty/Mabel realizes that she has to return to her previous life. Is is able to go back ?

You always know your on to a winner when you’ve got a Lesley Pearse book in our hands. I have read all of her books and really enjoyed them. Lesley always writes about life, good and bad. Her characters are really well-formed and relatable. With her books being nearly always set in the past you can get a sense of what things were like then. Beautifully researched and wonderfully descriptive it makes you feel as if you’re there in the thick of things. 

This is a easy read, that keeps you absorbed until the last page. Sometimes awfully sad but in others really uplifting. I loved it and look forward to the next one !

I give brilliant novel 10/10 ! (5 Stars)

Published by Penguin, Micheal Joseph on 27/06/19.

A big thanks to Ellen Casey at Penguin for the review copy of the book in return for a honest review.

You’ll Never See Me Again by Lesley Pearse is out now, published by Michael Joseph, priced £20 in hardback.

 

A Cornish Summer – Catherine Alliott – Blog Tour.

 

Back of the book :

Flora’s been in love with her husband for twenty years. The trouble is, he’s been married to someone else for the past fifteen . . .

Now she’s been invited to spend the summer in the shady lanes and sandy coves of Cornwall. It should be blissful.

There’s just one small snag: she’ll be staying with her former mother-in-law, Belinda.

And Flora discovers she’s not the only one invited when her ex-husband shows up out of the blue, complete with his new wife. So now there are two small snags.

Can Flora spend the summer playing happy families with the woman who stole her husband’s heart, and the mother-in-law who might have had a hand in it?

Or will stumbling on the family secret change her mind about them all?

 

What I think :

Flora loves her husband, the only problem is that they have been divorced for fifteen years ! Her husband Hugo has remarried and has 2 more children (Flora and Hugo have a son Peter together) Flora cant seem to to be able to get over Hugo and move on. So maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for her to spend the whole summer at her ex in-laws house in Cornwall. Her ex mother in-law, Belinda has asked her to paint a portrait of Hugo’s father Roger.

She has her best friend Celia with her and they’re not going to to be staying at the main house ,but in a little holiday let down the road so it wont be too bad … Also Hugo and his new wife Christina are sailing aboard for the summer, so there’s no chance of bumping into them … what can go wrong?

A lot it would seem, as when they arrive Tommy Rochester and his latest squeeze is there (Hugo’s best friend and Flora secretly blames Tommy in part for her and Hugo’s break-up.) And then her worst nightmare happens, Hugo and his wife and two shiny new children are at the house also.

Will Flora be able to be around the man she has loved for so long unrequitedly for the whole summer ?

Then a family secret is exposed, can she finally use this time to move on from him … ?

Its seems like forever since Catherine’s last novel, but in my opinion it was really worth the wait.

This is an epic of a family saga, with loads of brilliant characters. I especially liked Flora and also Babs who I really loved. even although I  wasn’t very struck on Belinda she was marvelously written and she reminded me of a few people I’ve met over the years !

I did think however, that it wasn’t quite as the back of the book describes, hilarious wouldn’t be a word that I would choose to describe it. I found it quite serious in places if  I’m honest. But that said, I thought it was a good novel, just not something that I’d take to the beach for an easy read.

With a quite brilliant twist quite close to the end, which was something I wasn’t expecting. I give this book a 9\10 (5 Stars)

Published on 13\06\19 by Michael Joseph (Penguin random House)

A big thank you to Sriya Varadharajan at Penguin for the review copy of the book in return for a honest review 🙂

 

 

Forget Me Not – Claire Allen ~ Blog Tour.

Back of the Book :

I disappeared on a Tuesday afternoon. I was there one minute and the next I was gone. They’ve never found my body…

It’s six in the morning during the hottest summer on record when Elizabeth O’Loughlin, out walking her dog, comes across Clare, a victim of a horrific knife attack, clinging onto life at the side of the road.

Clare dies minutes later, but not before whispering her haunting last words to Elizabeth.

When it becomes clear that Clare’s killer has more than one murder on his mind, Elizabeth has to take drastic action or face losing everything.

But what if she can’t stop a killer determined never to be forgotten?

What I think :

Elizabeth.

On one very hot summers morning, Elizabeth takes her dog, Izzy for a walk. She takes her around this time every morning because it’s just too hot at any other time. As they are strolling along the grass verge near the farmhouse that they live in, Izzy runs off, and starts whining at something on the ground. As Elizabeth gets closer she sees that it’s a woman. She’s got some pretty serious neck/throat wounds, she very barely alive. There is so much blood. Elizabeth stays with the woman whilst the ambulance arrives. It’s then, just as Elizabeth can hear the siren, that the woman whispers ‘Warn Them’ and sadly dies. But who ?

Rachel.

Rachel, Julie and Claire have been friends for over 30 years, since infant school. So when Rachel and Julie hear that it was Claire that a been murdered on the verge by Elizabeth’s farm they just can’t believe it. Rachel goes into survival mode, she must protect her family. Julie just seeks relief at the bottom of a bottle.

Why would anyone want to hurt Clare ?

Why would they murder her so violently ?

Are the remaining two friends in danger ?

It would seem that they all are, Elizabeth is first to receive a bunch of Forget-me-not flowers and an odd note. Flowers that have a personal significance for Elizabeth. Then whilst visiting the site where Clare passed away she notices a bunch of forget-me-nots with a strange rhyme attached and when she gets back home she also receives a bunch as does Julie, both with quite sinister rhymes attached.

Is the murderer trying to tell them something ?

Are they next ?

I loved the start of this book, it has a pretty brilliant prologue that whets your appetite and gets you thinking. I was second guessing most of the way through, trying to work out who it was. This well thought out book keeps you guessing right up until the end. With its excellent twist at the end that I didn’t guess ! ( I did think I was pretty good at getting who-Dun-it as well!)

The book starts off quite slowly building up the pace with loads of twists, plenty of turns and a few red herrings thrown in just to keep you on your toes. It really takes you on a bit of a hairy ride.

Excellent characters that could be the neighbours living up the street. They seemed so real and normal to me !

All in all a hell of a book that I thought was really brilliant. I give this chiller of a novel 9/10 (5 stars)

Published by Avon Books on 30/05/19

As Always the biggest thank you to the very lovely Sabah Khan at Avon Books for the review copy of the book in return for an honest review.

Here for your reading pleasure is a small extract from the book 🙂

Extract :

Even with every window open, this house is still too warm. It’s only half past five in the morning and I know there will be no reprieve from this heatwave. It didn’t cool more than a few degrees overnight and I’ve not slept properly in days. Izzy looked at me mournfully, big brown eyes, pleading for the chance to run about outside before the heat becomes oppressive. I feel sorry for her – even though she’s shed her winter coat, it’s much too warm for her. Like me, she’s become a virtual prisoner in our home.

We’d changed our walking routine a few weeks before. Setting out early now. Before six. Doing our best to avoid the full heat of the sun, though the temperature didn’t seem to drop much overnight. This heatwave was stronger than any I remembered in my lifetime. Even warmer than 1976. That morning I was tired, though. My bones ached and I felt every one of my sixty-seven years, and then some. Still, I’d be back at home within an hour, I reasoned, and I could spend the rest of my morning doing what I had planned – baking bread for my grandchildren, who were coming here after school. I eyed the bananas on the worktop – brown spots seeming to multiply with every hour that passed. I might even throw a quick banana bread in the oven. With chocolate chips. The children would love that.

I had to leave the dough for the bread to prove for another hour anyway – wrapped in clingfilm in the airing cupboard – so I had no excuse but laziness and the persistent ache in my left arm. It hadn’t been the same since it had been broken eighteen months earlier and was, according to the doctor, unlikely to improve further. I’d just have to work through it.