Today I’m delighted to bring you my review for Know Me Now by CJ Carver. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have given it 5*’s, though I would give it more if I could as i thought it was fabulous!
Know Me Now will be available in ebook on the 14th December and in paperback on the 11th January 2018, but is available to pre-order here.
Book Blurb:
A SUICIDE. A MURDER. A CONSPIRACY.
DIGGING UP THE PAST CAN BE DEADLY . . .
A thirteen-year-old boy commits suicide.
A sixty-five-year old man dies of a heart attack.
Dan Forrester, ex-MI5 officer, is connected to them both.
And when he discovers that his godson and his father have been murdered, he teams up with his old friend, DC Lucy Davies, to find answers.
But as the pair investigate, they unravel a dark and violent mystery stretching decades into the past and uncover a terrible secret.
A secret someone will do anything to keep buried . . .
My Review:
It’s so lovely to start a book and realise within a few pages that you are going to love it! It makes you relax into the book and means that you are able to enjoy it more. This is what happened when I started reading Know Me Now. I knew almost instantly that I was going to like it and felt certain that I had found a new favourite author.
The story unfolds slowly but with enough action/revelations to keep the reader interested and intrigued enough to keep on reading. I soon found the book very hard to put down, reading long into the night when I should have been sleeping. You know you are reading a good book when you are thinking about it constantly and trying to work out when you will next get a chance to read a bit. I found myself trying to hide upstairs from the kids or even attempting to read whilst cooking, not a good idea i don’t recommend it, just so I could read a few more pages.
I loved the three main characters, but particularly loved the two women Grace and Lucy. I’m a big fan of strong female characters, especially those that are in normally male dominated jobs like Grace and Lucy are. I admired the way they held their own against quite strong opposition at times and how they were able to get results from tricky situations. The author does a brilliant job at not resorting to typical stereotypical methods normally used by female characters in such books. Instead the women get results by using their intelligence and by showing that they know what they are talking about which made for a very refreshing change.
CJ Carver perfectly describes what life in a small community is like, with everyone knowing everyone else and thinking they know their business. I could definitely imagine how this might hamper a murder investigation with local residents thinking they knew what what was going on when in fact they didn’t. I could almost feel Lucy and Grace’s frustrations coming off the page and felt frustrated on their behalf when their investigation was hampered because of this. The small community environment did however help inject some humour or light relief into the book when you realised just how much everyone knew each other and in what way. Some of these revelations actually had me laughing out loud as they were so funnily described and unexpected.
This is the first book by CJ Carver that I have read and it definitely won’t be my last as I have already bought the first two books in this series to read. It is probably best to read the series in order as there were a few events mentioned in the book that I was unaware of but this wasn’t enough of an issue to stop me enjoying it.
Huge thanks to Emily Palmier-Bignold and Bonnier Zaffre for my copy of this book and for letting me be part of this blog tour.
About The Author:
CJ Carver is a half-English, half-kiwi, author living just outside Bath. She lived in Australia for ten years before taking up long-distance rally driving – she has driven London to Saigon, London to Cape Town, and completed 14,500 miles on the Inca Trail.
Since then she has written nine critically acclaimed novels that have been published in the UK, USA and translated into several languages. CJ’s first novel Blood Junction won the CWA Debut Dagger and was short listed for the USA Barry Award for Best Crime Fiction Novel of the Year. Spare Me the Truth, the first in the Forrester and Davies series, was shortlisted for the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Best Crime Novel Award.
CJ is a co-founder and one of the first judges for the Women’s World Car of The Year Award.
Find CJ Carver on her website, on her Facebook page and on Twitter – @C_J_Carver
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If you like the sound of Know Me Now from my review, do follow the blog tour and see what these other fabulous bloggers are saying.
Over The Rainbow Blog 