By all accounts Simon Kernick always wanted to be a crime writer, and from the look of things on the list below he’s made a reasonable fist of it, though I’m not a fan...
Read:
- Relentless, a best seller in the U.K. that's heavy on ordinary bloke caught in situation he doesn't understand action. While I could see why the average reader might have found this gripping, I found it predictable, and won't be chasing up Kernick's other work in a hurry.
It rattles along at a lively pace from the time happily married IT salesman receives a Saturday afternoon phone call from his old mate Jack Calley, a lawyer he hasn't heard from for ages. Calley's in the process of being murdered, and since he's telling his assailants Tom's address it seems reasonable to assume he's next.
Predictably, Tom decides home isn't the place to be, and takes his kids to the mother-in-law's and sets out to find his university lecturer wife, finds a colleague murdered and is attacked himself, setting up a chase where many players aren't quite what they seem.
The story's part first person recount (Tom) and par all-seeing author, and works well enough, an was an interesting potboiler though hardly in the same league as my regular reading, which explains the absence of a list of titles to chase...
Other titles:
The Business of Dying (2002)
The Murder Exchange (2003)
The Crime Trade (2004)
A Good Day To Die (2005)
Severed (2007)
Deadline (2008)
Target (2009)
The Last 10 Seconds (2010)
The Payback (2011)
Siege (2012)