This is one of those towns where if you scratch the surface you uncover dark behaviours and secrets. Ilmarsh is filled with people who have something to hide and nothing is quite as it seems. I was transported to the town, I could hear the music blaring from the amusements, smell the fish and chips and feel the rain battering against my coat. An increasingly unreliable narrator throws shadows and doubt over what we’re reading and the mystery is less, what happened to the horses, and more, what on earth is going on in Ilmarsh? The investigating officers and other personnel fall ill. Anthrax bacillus spores had been placed around the horses’ heads. One of those infected is Alex, who crashes his car in a delirium. His son Simon is with him but when the ambulance arrives, Simon is gone. I had read this book incredibly fast as it was just so good. It's a thriller about a dying town and then something even more horrible happens that just makes things worse. Someone had stole and killed sixteen horses, leaving the heads & tails in a farmer's muddy field. But that is actually just the beginning of the problems, because an unknown killer is out there: someone really twisted and demented. But who? Why? The horses had been stolen from numerous owners. The story also includes many cryptic notes that the Detective has to try and figure out. And why sixteen? Why sixteen horses and not only one or two? Why horses? The story is not really fast paced but a slow burn at a steady pace. And it does rise to a climax at the end too. There were also a few unexpected developments in the plot as well. Cooper verifies that the heads are of sixteen horses. The animals belong to various residents of Ilmarsh, and most were stabled at Elton’s Riding Academy and Livery. Several others were independents, like Michael Stafford’s Annie, who pulled a carriage at the local seaside arcade. All the animals had been sedated at the request of their owners because of the Guy Fawkes celebration and fireworks. Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan is one of the most original crime novels I’ve read. If you’re a fan of literary crime fiction, then you need to read this book. Greg Buchanan is an exciting new voice.

Val McDermid describes it as deeply disconcerting. She is not wrong. From the start this is a traumatic tale. Disturbing in many ways. I normally read crime and horror fiction but I have never read anything like this before. Wow, it is traumatic from start to finish. halfway through I had to stop reading for 24 hours - it is rare for an author to do that to me. But I finished it, the twists and turns kept coming.Though the plot of the story may seem to be about solving the crime of 16 mutilated horses, each chapter, with a few sentences about the investigation, immediately digresses into an in-depth dissection, either prominently or peripherally, of the various characters’ lives and mental processes. Their wrong life-choices, mistakes, and regrets are carefully enumerated and at great length reiterated and agonizingly reviewed. WARNING TO READERS WHO CANNOT ABIDE ANIMAL ABUSE, the scenes are not cruelly graphic but imagination can sometimes be our worst enemy. In the village of Ilmarsh, 16-year-old Rachel Cole discovers a gruesome sight while walking her dog in one of her family’s meadows. In a small town in England, local police detective Alec Nichols finds a gruesome sight: sixteen horse heads, severed from their bodies, each buried meticulously with one eye to the sky on a small rural farm. He calls in a forensic veterinarian, a young woman named Cooper Allen, to help solve this crime - really, just classified as a "property crime" although the act is so despicable. Cooper has seen her fair share of animals being treated horribly, and her main motivation through her work is to save animals from their owners.

After sixteen horse heads are discovered buried on a remote farm, forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen is drawn into a frightening mystery… This book won't be for everyone, it is hard, gritty and traumatic. The characters are almost predictable, the tired, gruff cop, the assistance from a wary outsider, the locals in their insular lives, but Greg Buchanan twists and spins their lives, their fears, their actions in an unpredictable fashion. All set in a cold seaside town. Greg studied English at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD at King’s College London in identification and ethics. He is a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA. Het eerste hoofdstuk trekt je het boek in. Het is bondig geschreven, geeft meteen een mooie spanningsboog en weet een grote nieuwsgierigheid te ontluiken. Helaas zakt dit alles meteen in als het boek haar tweede hoofdstuk opent. Verwarring na verwarring komt aan het licht en als er eindelijk een draad lijkt te zijn vastgeknoopt, kom je al snel tot de ontdekking dat die weer begint te rafelen, waardoor er weer tal van vragen ontspruiten. Het lijkt alsof Greg Buchanon zijn favoriete films en boeken bij elkaar op een hoop heeft gegooid, hieruit de leukste en indrukwekkendste elementen heeft getrokken en dit in een trommel heeft gegooid zonder naar de uitkomst te kijken. Het resultaat is een grote warboel die tot aan bijna het eind van de vertelling overeind blijft staan. De vraag of een uitgeverij er wel naar heeft gekeken, ontkiemt dan ook onmiddellijk na het dichtslaan van het boek. Waar komen de lovende recensies en de daaruit voortgebrachte hype toch vandaan? Of zouden de uitgevers het ook niet meer getrokken hebben en van ellende maar een prachtige cover erop geplakt hebben? Sixteen Horses is the debut literary thriller from an extraordinary talent, Greg Buchanan. For fans of Jane Harper’s The Dry.

Alec is not a particularly good detective, so I was more and more fascinated to see his side of the story play out. Cooper is the big-hearted vet with an eye for crime so she was much more switched on. That being said, there never seemed to be a huge amount of progress made in the case. A lot of the secrets just came out all at once at the end. Police detective Alec Nichols is called to the scene and is unprepared for the sight. In a short while, other officials join him, among them veterinary pathologist Cooper Allen. It’s all felt very professional highly educated authory with the way it has been written without it being a story that needed to be told. I felt a connection to the crumbling seaside town as it reminded me of parts of where I grew up where houses crumble into the sea and farms are shut down to become housing developments. The writing technique used by the author is unique. There’s no gradual unfolding of the events in the story, it is more or less like watching a film with one scene cutting to the next with no rhyme or reason. In here, it works in obscuring the story and literally muddles the already muddy water. However, it may seem problematic for those readers who take frequent breaks in between their reading, in which case this jumping from one scene to the next, sometimes, leaving no clues to the narrator of the POV we are reading, may break the flow in the story and make it feel disjointed. That also could be the primary reason why the story and its characters never leave a mark but the town definitely does. Neither Cooper nor Alec induces any warm feeling and made it difficult to connect to them as a reader.

Unlike anything else you’ll read this year, SIXTEEN HORSES is a deeply disconcerting ride. Irresistible.” - Val McDermid I will say I like being confused by a book - at first. I like watching a detective or forensic specialist sort things out - because I get to do it alongside them as I read. Red herrings. Unreliable witnesses. Confusing evidence. Creepy circumstances. I eat THAT up! But here? Everyone in this book is terribly damaged, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise and it just bleeds so much into the book you can't see what's going on. (So the transparent gel is really kind of murky.) And in the end... tell me again what the point of the contaminants were? Was it just some slow way for Simon to kill his dad. How would he know his dad was even gonna get the case? Sixteen Horses, Greg Buchanan’s debut novel is affecting, challenging, haunting and compelling and I can tell you now that he is an author to watch out for. Set in a fictional town named Ilmarsh on the English coast, Sixteen Horses is a novel about harrowing events, decay and trauma and it got firmly under my skin.Or the film Se7en. Remember that? The atmosphere of that film. Every outdoor shot it was raining, every indoor shot lowly lit, that is this book. That same feeling.