Today it’s my turn on the blog tour for The Bodies. My review is written with thanks to Zoe O’Farrell for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Your child said it was an accident. Then it happened again.

The new break-out thriller from Sam Lloyd, author of Richard & Judy Book Club pick The Memory Wood.

When you look down at your newborn baby, you realise they were right, those smug parents you’ve always rolled your eyes at: you’d do literally anything for your child. To make them happy, keep them safe.

So when Joseph Carver wakes one night to find his teenage son Max scrubbing the kitchen, hands wet with blood and panic flooding his voice as he promises it was an accident, he didn’t mean to do it, Joseph does the only thing he can. He helps Max bury the body.

Joseph thinks that’s the end of the nightmare. Until he finds Max with stricken eyes and bloody hands once again . . .

You’d do anything for your child – even cover up a murder.

But would you do it twice?

Review:

I really enjoyed The Memory Wood by this author, so I was excited to get stuck into The Bodies. Sam Lloyd is a great writer and I felt the sense of foreboding from the atmosphere in the woods straight away in the prologue. From there, it doesn’t let go, and I genuinely struggled to put this one down. I read the whole novel in about 12 hours!

The characters in The Bodies have very colourful lives, and it’s clear from very early on that most of them are dealing with a lot of trauma. Although the novel is written in third person, the chapters are written from different viewpoints, and I enjoyed looking at their lives in more depth and trying to stay ahead of the curve as the story unravelled. I had a lot of sympathy for Joe, even though at times I wanted to shake him, and I really hoped that things would work out for him and his family.

As you might expect from the title, there is a lot of blood, guts and gore in this novel, which was perfect for me. I loved the tension in the story and the way it grew and grew right until the end when I was holding my breath! I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but it’s safe to say I was on the edge of my seat!

I hope I will be reading more from Sam Lloyd soon!

The Bodies is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: