#BlogTour The Rules by Kerry Barnes

Today it's my turn on the BlogTour The Rules by Kerry Barnes.  It's a story with a criminal as the one in charge.

About the Author
Kerry Barnes - born in 1964, grew up on a council estate in South-East London. Pushed by her parents to become a doctor, she entered the world of science and became a microbiologist. After studying law and pharmaceuticals, her career turned to medicine. Having dyslexia didn’t deter her from her passion for writing. She began writing when her daughter was born thirty years ago. Once her children had grown up she moved to the Kent coast and now writes full time.

Follow @KerryBarnes1 @HQDigital on Twitter
Visit authorkerrybarnes.co.uk
Buy The Rules

About the book
Do you live by the rules, or die by them?

Holed up in prison, Mike Regan is offered a deal – his freedom in exchange for his firm taking down the gang that is supplying a new dangerous drug that has hit the streets. What starts as a game soon becomes a shocking revelation with devastating consequences.

Meanwhile, Mike’s fiancé, Zara Ezra, has her own firm to run. But when the so-called Governor is out to take her down, she has her own decision to make – either fight, run, or write her own rule book…

Review
Hmm imagine a world where the police force is so ill-equipped to deal with not only the rise in crime, but the types of crime being committed, that they try and rope in the older generation of criminals to help them.

There used to be an unwritten law, which was particularly evident on the streets and inside prison. Even criminals have rules about what they consider to breaching an unspoken rule of conduct, and breakers of said rules were treated accordingly. Even today criminals want a line to be drawn between themselves and deviants, especially any deviancy involving children. That's still a big no-no.

The problem is the world has moved beyond those romanticised versions of the Kray twins and other old-school criminal types. Just to be clear the Krays were ruthless monsters, the world just likes to paint them as something akin to Hollywood or mob royalty.

The police of today are dealing with unimaginably cruel and inhumane crimes. There are no boundaries to what some people will do to make money or to cause pain. How do you fight people who are monsters when you, the police in this instance, are given no respect from the majority of the public and no appropriate way to combat said monsters. Perhaps turning to the old guard doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Barnes takes it up a notch in this book, which is violent, graphic and fast-paced. The reader needs to keep their eye on the ball in order to keep up with who the bad and the good guys are. To be fair I think those lines are well and truly skewed by the end of the book.

It's perhaps a wee bit too fast in some places, which gives the plot a disjointed feel at times, but also in equal measures a way to represent the chaos of modern crime on our streets at the moment. It's an eye for an eye kind of justice with no attempt to hide the brutality of that thought process. It's a story with a criminal as the one in charge.

Buy The Rules (The Hunted #2) at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer.

Read my review of Deceit by Kerry Barnes