Stig Abell put regelmatig uit oude klassiekers om het verhaal kracht bij te zetten. De oom van Jake, Adam, laat een ware bibliotheek achter. Dit is toch de droom van elke lezer. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. Jake leaves his failed marriage and job as Detective for a house in the middle of nowhere. Living totally off grid offers the opportunity to renegotiate a life that hasn’t gone well so far.. Embracing the practical and mental challenges of his self imposed exile, Jake is consoled by a library of detective novels, listening to music, swimming in the lake and the wildlife..

Find the hottest teen books, connect with your favorite YA authors and meet new friends who share your reading interests! The author blends mystery with an incredibly atmospheric setting which he really brings to life with his lyrical and descriptive writing. Things start off slowly, gradually gaining momentum as the danger levels ramp up in the second half of the book. This pace suits both characters and setting, for me anything else would have felt wrong. Thank you, Harper Collins for an ARC of Death is under a little sky. I can’t believe this is a debut novel. At first, I thought is this actually a crime novel? As, the writing is beautiful, quite poetic in fact. This is a very experience writer. As you know I’m always on the lookout for debut Crime Novels and when I saw Death Under A Little Sky, I was immediately drawn in by the beautiful cover and the premise. And to be honest, the premise of being left a property in the middle of the countryside, sounded like a wish come true to me, but maybe not with these happenings!

The isolated setting worked well, although it was fairly unbelievable that you could have a whole house and modern extension, with some modern fittings, without any kind of access road or lane. There seemed to be no issue with vehicles travelling across anybody’s land (and the locals are hardly amenable.) I enjoyed this one to a point. It did seem a bit confused about what it wanted to be. Starts as a mystery thriller then veers into cosy thriller, a sort of self discovery book and a romance novel. The end I thought was a bit of a let down and a bit hard to swallow.

Dodelijke Afloop is een Whodunit met persoonlijke sfeer. Je speurt als lezer met Jake mee. Zijn angst wordt levens echt beschreven. Het voelt alsof je hetzelf ervaart. Dit geeft het verhaal body en kracht. I’m a bit of a newbie to the crime detective genre and the pace was a slow burn, but I can confirm I was satisfied with how the plot escalates as the case draws to a head, the last few chapters had me gripped and the realisation over what’s been happening in the calm, cosy, peaceful village is unsettling to say the least!It’s not long before he finds that a woman died in the small village a decade earlier under mysterious circumstances. When he brings the subject up with the locals, they close shop and don’t want to discuss it at all. Some even start to warn him off about digging up the past.

We have a love interest as well that bulks the book out and some very stereotypical nasty villager types. Stig Abell is a successful and well-known British journalist and this is his first venture into fiction. He has apparently been a fan of crime fiction since his pre-teen years, having followed the same trajectory as so many of us have, via Holmes, Christie, Sayers, etc., and then on to contemporary crime. I wondered if this was going to be a kind of homage to the golden age authors he clearly reveres, but although he references many of them entertainingly, his style is very much his own. And he writes like a dream, making this pure pleasure to read (despite being in the present tense) with a distinctly literary feel.

The stunningly written, evocative new debut crime thriller you won’t want to miss!

A slow burner, if you can handle the slow pace you’ll enjoy this book, but if you don’t like slow paced plot this isn’t going to be your cup of tea. The first thing you notice about this novel is the writing - loaded with description, lyrical. This was like watching a movie as the vistas around Little Sky opened up before me. I loved how the author really took his time, introducing the landscape and his central character. I enjoyed being part of Jake’s evolving routines, running and swimming in the lake, his mediation..…I wasn’t in a rush for this to become anything else and when it did it felt so organic. These initial chapters aren’t fast paced, and I loved that! Abell was from 2016 to 2020 editor of The Times Literary Supplement and from 2013 to 2016 managing editor of The Sun. He was formerly a fiction reviewer at The Spectator and reviewer at Telegraph Media Group as well as The Times Literary Supplement. He was also a presenter on LBC Radio. Jake discovers a need for more than this when he meets Livia, the attractive local vet. She invites him to participate in a local treasure hunt for a historic 'bag of bones' and he rises to the challenge. Only what he finds is not the pretend bones put in the bag by the hunt's organizer, but real, very human bones. Discovering the mystery behind his find leads him and those he has come to care for down a very dangerous path indeed... He unwittingly, has stumbled upon a crime a decade old - and cold case crimes are what he excels at. What starts as an innocent game turns sinister, when a young woman’s bones are discovered. And Jake is thrust once again into the role of detective, as he tries to unearth a dangerous killer in this most unlikely of settings.