The third in my backlist series is catching up with the previous three books in the Lori Anderson series by Steph Broadribb before I take part in the blog tour for her new book, Deep, Dark Night. I’m really enjoying this binge-reading of the backlist titles in a series, it’s the literary equivalent of a consuming Netflix box set over a single weekend.

Lori Anderson is as tough as they come, managing to keep her career as a fearless Florida bounty hunter separate from her role as single mother to nine-year-old Dakota, who suffers from leukaemia.

But when the hospital bills start to rack up, she has no choice but to take her daughter along on a job that will make her a fast buck. And that’s when things start to go wrong. 

I listened to the first two of these novels on audio and this was a really great way to get to know the characters. The narrator, Jennifer Woodward, maintained a perfect Florida drawl for Lori throughout the book which brought the character sharply in to my mind’s eye. It made me realise that I never really read with the accent of the character in my mind when I read from text, and it gave the story an extra level of texture. I found myself hearing Lori talk in this voice throughout books three and four, despite the fact that I was reading rather than listening to them.

I’ve never read a book with a bounty hunter as the main character before, and a female one at that, so it was a delicious departure from the norm for me, and the book truly transported me to another world, as all really immersive novels should. I fell in love with Lori immediately, a tough, independent, determined woman, but we, the reader, also get to see her vulnerability with regards to her daughter, Dakota, and in her relationship with JT, as the book unfolds.

Having a bounty hunter, rather than a police officer, lawyer, detective or other member of the law-enforcement establishment, as the main character raises some interesting questions of where the moral lines sits between justice and revenge, where the line between good and bad blurs, and whether people can judge that for themselves according to their own moral code. Lori’s actions go beyond what you may perceive on paper as being truly law-abiding, but then you ask yourself what you would do in the same situation.

The book is packed front to back with drama, action and tension, as we criss cross the US from the mountains of West Virginia to the alligator-infested swamps of the Florida Everglades. It is a book that picks you up and runs with you from the opening pages, and doesn’t put you down until the last chapter. Even then, there is the tantalising prospect of the next case dropped in at the end, and you are left desperate to see where fate is going to take Lori next. A kinetic opening novel to a thrilling series.

Deep Down Dead is out now and you can get your copy here.

Single-mother Florida bounty hunter Lori Anderson’s got an ocean of trouble on her hands. Her daughter Dakota is safe, but the little girl’s cancer is threatening a comeback, and Lori needs JT Dakota’s daddy and the man who taught Lori everything alive and kicking.

Problem is, he’s behind bars, and heading for death row. Desperate to save him, Lori does a deal, taking on off-the-books job from shady FBI agent Alex Monroe – bring back on-the-run felon, Gibson ‘The Fish’ Fletcher, and JT walks free. This is one job she’s got to get right, or she’ll lose everything…

So, we’re back with Lori and now she is faced with the reality of the love of her life in jail awaiting trial for murders he didn’t commit and at risk of facing the electric chair. Despite the ordeal she and her daughter, Dakota, have just faced in book one, Lori now has to leave Dakota behind and travel to San Diego on a mission for a dodgy FBI agent who has promised to arrange for JT to be exonerated if she brings in an escaped felon.

This novel adds a new dimension to the narrative by having us follow two timelines, one led by Lori and her attempts to track down the criminal in California, and the other charting the trials and hardships JT is suffering in jail. We also meet a new central character, a PI named Red who lives on a houseboat and has helped Lori in the past. I have to say, Red quickly became one of my favourite characters and I fell a tiny bit in love with him. If he were to be cast in a movie, he would be played by Sam Elliot, and I refuse to entertain any other suggestions.

So, again, we have Lori dashing around in California, trying to track down the missing ‘bad guy,’ having to work as part of a team of other bounty hunters she doesn’t know that goes against her instincts. She is trying to work out who she can trust, who is on the make and whether the facts she has been given are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Of course, they aren’t, the lines between right and wrong, justice and injustice bleed in to one another. the right people don’t always end up winning and Lori is muddling through the best she can, relying on her own moral code and what is best for her daughter and her partner. You can’t help but get taken along as she battles the outside enemies, and the demons within, whilst only relying on her own skills, smarts and the three people in the world she knows she can trust.

The books are fast-paced and quite bloody, with lots of devious twists and turns of fate, and the author is really excellent at ramping up the peril. This book is mad, extreme entertainment, the equivalent of an action-movie in novel form and I raced to the end to find out if everyone I cared about made it out alive and free. Fantastic, adrenaline-fuelled excitement, perfect for getting your heart pumping while you sit on the couch.

If this review has tickled your fancy, you can get a copy of the book by following this link.

A price on her head. A secret worth dying for. 48 hours to expose the truth…

Single-mother bounty-hunter Lori Anderson finally has her family back together, but her new-found happiness is shattered when she’s snatched by the Miami Mob – and they want her dead. Rather than a bullet, they offer her a job: find the Mob’s ‘numbers man’ who’s in protective custody after being forced to turn federal witness against them. If Lori succeeds, they’ll wipe the slate clean and the price on her head – and those of her family – will be removed. If she fails, they die.

With North due in court in 48 hours, Lori sets off across Florida, racing against the clock to find him and save her family. Only in this race the prize is more deadly – and the secret she shares with JT more dangerous – than she ever could have imagined.

In this race only the winner gets out alive…

The author gets really ambitious in this book, when Lori gets blackmailed into doing a job for the head honcho of the Miami Mob, a man whose vendetta has been haunting her since the events of book one and who she needs to get off her back if she is ever going to manage a quiet life with JT and their daughter, Dakota. That possibility seems to get further and further away throughout the course of this novel, as Lori is once again separated from JT and her daughter, chasing down a mobster-turned-rat, with only 48 hours to find him.

Steph keeps finding ways to ramp up the stakes with every book, and finding new ways of testing Lori and her loyalties. She has to, once again, involve herself with Alex Munroe, the FBI agent who has his own agenda and whose motives she can never 100% trust. Again, nothing is as straight-forward as it seems and she has to evaluate whose side she is really on, whilst only truly being able to rely on herself to get everyone out of trouble.

This is a fantastic book for anyone who loves a gangster story, and there is the most marvellous battle towards the end that would grace the screen of any mob movie you ever saw. In fact, these books would make perfect films, I would definitely go and watch them (IF Sam Elliott is playing Red – see above – non-negotiable!) but, until that happens, the story completely comes alive on the page and is surely something you should all be reading to take your minds off the current situation we find ourselves in. Anything more completely unlike what you are currently experiencing locked in at home in the UK you’ll be hard-pushed to find, and it will sweep you out of reality for a little while, without requiring you to strain yourself, the author has done all the heavy lifting in the flow of the writing. I still find it hard to believe she is from Buckinghamshire!

Deep Dirty Truth is available now and you can get it in all formats here.

So, hopefully this has caught us all up to the current state of affairs with Lori Anderson and we are ready to hear what the latest book, Deep Dark Night, has to offer. Come back to the blog later today to see my review.

About the Author

So, next in my occasional feature where I catch up on the back titles in a series before I review the latest release, are the first two books in the Chastity Riley series by Simone Buchholz. I will be reviewing the latest release, Mexico Street, tomorrow, so let’s see what we’ve missed so far, shall we?

‘The hair stands up on the back of my neck and I get an age-old feeling in my belly. Like there’s a fight ahead. Like something’s really about to go off…’

After convicting a superior for corruption and shooting off a gangster’s crown jewels, the career of Hamburg’s most hard-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been transferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble.

However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under police guard in hospital almost every bone in his body broken, a finger cut off, and refusing to speak in anything other than riddles Chastity’s instinct for the big, exciting case kicks in.

Fresh, fiendishly fast-paced and full of devious twists and all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the best noir, Blue Night marks the stunning start of a brilliant new crime series.

When you first jump in to this novel, you can be forgiven for thinking it is the second or third book in a series and go off hunting for books one and two so you can catch up on the back story. But you won’t find them, certainly not in an English translation anyway, so you must just get to grips with the nature of the narrative construct that the author has used, disjointed and non-linear, jumping back and forth in time, bobbing between different characters’ viewpoints and using a mixture of straight forward narrative, snippets of memories and random thoughts. It is a very unique approach, and one that takes a little getting used to but, once you get in to the rhythm of the writing, it is pacy and gripping, but also poetic and lyrical and strangely effecting, given the genre.

So, we meet Chastity Riley, a state prosecutor for the city of Hamburg, following some kind of fall from grace which we discover more details about as the book unfolds but never really discover the whole story. She has been consigned to what basically amounts to babysitting a victim of a crime as her recovers in hospital, waiting for him to divulge evidence that made lead to them catching the perpetrator. Inevitably things turn out to be more complicated than anticipated and the simple assault opens onto a world of drug running and gang warfare.

The crime investigation is fascinating and brilliantly portrayed but fairly straight forward and the less interesting part of the book for me. What really stood out and made this a really startling and noteworthy read was the character of Chastity herself and the people with whom she surrounds herself. She is a flawed and complicated person with some kind of darkness driving her that is compelling but never fully uncovered in this book. She is obviously tormented, has unwise attachments and is someone we long to know better but know we have barely scratched the surface of what there is to understand about her in this book. The author reveals some of her innermost thoughts, while keeping so much still concealed and making us care for her deeply, whilst maintaining her hard veneer, all at the same time. It is some of the most skilful writing I have read in a long time. You get the feeling that the reason we can’t fully understand what drives Chastity is that she isn’t quite sure herself.

On top of the fascinating characterisation, I was really drawn to the dark and gritty portrayal of the Hamburg underworld, a setting I have not read about before. Despite the fact that the author is describing some of the seediest and least attractive parts of the city and its inhabitants, there is still a sense of life and affection and kinship here, perhaps more so than Chastity now feels with some of her law enforcement colleagues. The book blurs the lines between good and bad, wrong and right and light and dark in an intriguing way.

This is a book that takes you places you’ve probably never been before, and leaves as many questions as it answers, but with a deep affinity for Chastity and an urge to discover more about her, to help her figure out her life whilst she herself perhaps doesn’t feel the drive to do so. It is a relationship different to any I think I have had with a fictional character before.

I just have to mention the translation of this book, which is seamless and impressive. All of the nuance and sensation of the book has been maintained, the poetry and lyricism of what is, in places, sparse language. Not an easy feat, I wouldn’t have thought, especially to leave the reader without any inkling that they are reading a piece of translated fiction.

Delightful, in a deeply noir-ish way.

You can buy a copy of Blue Night here.

On a warm September morning, an unconscious man is found in a cage at the entrance to the offices of one of the biggest German newspapers. Closer inspection shows he is a manager of the company, and he’s been tortured. Three days later, another manager appears in similar circumstances.

Chastity Riley and her new colleague Ivo Stepanovic are tasked with uncovering the truth behind the attacks, an investigation that goes far beyond the revenge they first suspect…to the dubious past shared by both victims.

Travelling to the south of Germany, they step into the elite world of boarding schools, where secrets are currency, and monsters are bred…monsters who will stop at nothing to protect themselves.

On to book two and this book is a horse of a slightly different, but equally unusual colour, to the last one. Beton Rouge has a much more straight forward narrative that Blue Night, less of the disjointed skipping around and back and forth. As we are now fully conversant with the main characters, there is less back story to be woven in and we can focus more on the current situation, and the new characters the author throws in to stir up the mix. And stir it up they do, particularly Chastity’s new partner on the case, Ivo Stepanovic, who is more than a match for Chastity. Even a soulmate, perhaps?

The story switches to and reveals different aspects of the Hamburg social hierarchy from the first book, as we move from the night time streets of St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn to some of Hamburg’s most powerful men and the world of elite boarding schools. The plot even ventures out of Hamburg to a small village in Southern Germany and secrets hidden behind ancient school walls. And, as things are switching up in Chastity’s work, so drastic change is rippling through her social group at the same time. Everything is changing, and we follow Chastity as she tries to work out how all of these things are affecting her.

The book is written in short, sharp, snappy chapters which bowl the plot along at a riveting pace and the criminal investigation is again deliciously twisted and captivating. However, it was Chastity herself and her life and relationships that fascinated me once more, and formed the more absorbing part of the book. Her acid humour cuts through the narrative like a whiplash and makes it a joy to read, her developing relationship with Ivo, the way they bounce off each other, the new side of Hamburg that both Chastity and the reader see with his guidance were all great aspects that hooked me in to the plot. At the same time, her other deteriorating relationships bit deep, and I could feel her conflict and her pain. I think I’ve become a little obsessed with her, to be honest, and the way the author has achieved this in a couple of books with less than two hundred pages in each and pared back, not-a-word-wasted text is an admirable skill.

The more I read of this series, the more invested I have become in the character and her life. The more I get to know her, the more I want to know, and to burrow through the layers of complexity and defence she has built around herself and understand what makes her tick. The author has created a wonderful character and world in this series, and I have a feeling it is just going to get better and better.

Fresh, quick and surprisingly moving, whilst being dark and dirty. I absolutely loved it.

Beton Rouge is also available now and you can find it by following this link.

If this has whetted your appetite for this crime series, I hope you will head back over here on 13 March to read my review of the third title in the series, Mexico Street. I’ll see you then.

About the Author