Greetings Sweet Friends! As most of you know, in addition to fiction writing & disability counseling, I'm a professional book reviewer for Publishers Weekly as well as several individual publishing companies. In fact, when you are looking up Christian books on Amazon, many of the editorial reviewers were written by yours truly! I read so many wonderful books, I started a blog a few years ago to keep track of them and share them with others. With the launch of my new website, I'm moving my blog here! I hope you will discover some new favorite authors! I'd love to hear your thoughts if you'd like to read and discuss any of these books as well! Think of it as ongoing book club that you can participate in whenever you like! I'm excited to have you.
For today's book review, I'm featuring the second in Tom Threadgill's Christian suspense series starring detective Amara Alvarez. I was counting down the days until I could get my hands on this book after being blown away by the series debut, Collision of Lies. Network of Deceit continues to follow Amara from her rise from the lowly Property Crimes division to her new promotion to Homicide. This book centers around the death of a 17-year-old boy at a popular water park that soon goes from being labeled as accidental to murder. Threadgill, as always, is a master at plotting and the clues are small but significant. The story is clean - there aren't any depictions of violence, gore, sex, or cursing. What I enjoyed best is learning more about Amara, her family, faith, and developing (dare I hope?) relationship with Starsky. I loved seeing Wylie - Amara's previous colleague, now retired and in a relationship with Amara's mother, again. He shines as probably the most three-dimensional of all Threadgill's characters! In short, this is certainly an excellent mystery, crafted with fine detail, snappy writing, and plenty of intrigue. It's definitely several tiers above most thrillers by far with the focus on plot development, story arc, and writing, rather than unnecessary fillers (such as violence, sex, or gore). This being said, the first installment of this series (Collision of Lies) should qualify Threadgill for Lifetime Achievement Award of some kind in its pure creativity, research, and brilliant suspense. It's tough to put forth a Grammy-winner and then try to have a follow-up! I would have liked this one to be the precedent, and for Threadgill to have saved Collision of Lies for the final book in this series as that one is sure to leave readers completely breathless.
Comments