Todah iI’m joining the blog tour for His Favourite Graves. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Desperate for reward money – and to rescue his marriage – an embattled sheriff takes incalculable risks to find a missing boy. An edge-of-your-seat, twisted and twisty thriller from New Zealand’s King of Crime.
 
To catch a killer…
Maybe you’ve got to be one…

Acacia Pines, USA. Sheriff Cohen’s life is falling apart – his father accidentally burned down the retirement home, his wife has moved out, and his son is bullying other kids at school.

When high-school student, Lucas Connor, is abducted, Cohen sees a chance to get his life back on track – to win back his wife and scoop the reward money offered for Lucas’s safe return.

But as the body count rises, it becomes clear that Cohen’s going to have to make the kind of decision from which there’s no coming back … a decision with deadly consequences…

A furiously paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller exposing the dark underbelly of small-town life, His Favourite Graves is also a twisted and twisty story of father-and-son relationships, and the one last gamble of a desperate man to save everything…

Review:

I’ve read a few of Paul Cleave’s novels now, and like all of them, His Favourite Graves hits the ground running. The chapters are short, the writing is fast paced and the action is relentless. At times, you do have to suspend your belief, but I could not stop reading. 

The main players in His Favourite Graves are Sheriff Cohen, Lucas Connor and Simon Grove. At first, this story is a cat and mouse story, but it becomes so much more than that and it is about so much more than finding the perpetrator, and it is these characters that make it tick. There are chapters written from the perspectives of Sheriff Cohen and Lucas, and these give the reader insight into their personal lives. As a result of this, Paul Cleave is able to explore a number of darker themes – issues such as bullying, dementia, alcoholism and childhood abuse. It’s by no means for the faint hearted but I loved that these added several more layers to the characters and made me really question the fine line between good and evil.

Paul Cleave is an amazing plotter (he must be, he can’t possibly “pants” his way through a story like this). There were many times I thought I had the ending worked out only to be blindsided further down the line.

I can’t wait to see what this author does next!

His Favourite Graves is available from Amazon.

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