#PaperbackPublicationDay! The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts

Today it's Paperback Publication Day for The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts. To celebrate Bloomsbury Raven has given me two copies of this spectacular book to give to two lucky readers!

To enter the Giveaway just leave a comment below. Trust me you don't want to miss this cracking read.

About the Author
Alice is a former human rights lawyer who used to work for the UK Government. As a litigator, she worked on cases involving Winnie Mandela and the rapper Snoop Dogg. She re-located to the tropics and now lives in wonderful Singapore.

She also writes short stories which have been published in various anthologies. And when she's not writing, she is running The Singapore Writers’ Group which she founded in 2012. This is a fantastic group of both professional and amateur writers who meet monthly and attend workshops and critique sessions.

Follow @aclarkplatts @BloomsburyRaven on Twitter, on Goodreads, on Facebook, Visit aliceclarkplatts.com, Buy The Flower Girls

About the book
The Flower Girls. Laurel and Primrose.

One convicted of murder, the other given a new identity.

Now, nineteen years later, another child has gone missing.

And The Flower Girls are about to hit the headlines all over again...

Review
Laurel and Primrose are little girls who like to play in the woods. Two little girls who take a baby with them into the woods and only two of the three little girls come back out again. The world despises them, the nation spends years hunting them, but only one of them spends time behind bars,

Even after so many years the public believes Laurel and Primrose deserve to be punished until they themselves take their last breath.

Laurel, the elder of the two, is seen as the main perpetrator and locked up. The youngest girl is renamed Rosie and is raised normally in society as if the events had never taken place at all. The public and the family members of the victim keep finding out where she lives, so she feels like a hunted animal.

When another young child goes missing where Rosie happens to be spending the night she becomes an instant suspect, thanks to the help of a writer, who is hungry for a sensational story. She is then forced to reconsider her attitude towards Laurel and whether or not she should help her get parole.

There are definitely parallels that can be drawn between the Bulger case and the fictional Flower Girls, and it invites the reader to ponder and perhaps even debate what happens when a child kills another child. When children commit a heinous crime, it's perhaps worse than the horror of any adult on child crime, because it is so hard to fathom how a child can do such a terrible thing.

The author goes for the more hard-nosed approach with this plot, so you might think it is going a specific way, but it doesn't. Clark-Platts allows the story to hover over the dark abyss and takes the reader on the steep decline into the desolate landscape of a cruel and calculated mind.

The Flower Girls is a tense psychological thriller, which takes the reader on a difficult journey of justice and morality. Is there any right or wrong in such tragic circumstances? Then just when you think, as a reader, you have come to a conclusion you feel comfortable with, the author blindsides the reader with the truth. Not a read you should miss.

Buy The Flower Girls at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Raven Books; Hardcover release 24 January 2019

Don't forget to comment below to enter the Giveaway to win a copy of The Flower Girls!!

The Anarchists' Club by Alex Reeve

This is the second book in the Leo Stanhope series, and if you haven't read the first one yet, The House on Half Moon Street, then please do, because you are missing out on a great book.

Leo gets called to identify the body of a woman who has been buried in the midst of a burrow of rooms and hallways that harbour a group of anarchists. His first instinct is to lie and his second one is to worry about who wasn't found with the corpse.

Leo and Rosie end up as a sleuthing duo again in this story, although their relationship is quite rocky. Leo finds it difficult to forgive Rosie for what happened to Leo in that room. They need to have clarification on why Leo feels so betrayed. Not that it was her fault that they ended up there, but perhaps it has more to do with seeing his vulnerable side and being a witness to the worst thing that could possibly happen to Leo or Rosie. She has seen his shame, but then wasn't she the one who opened that door?

The premise is absolutely refreshing. Reeve wants the reader to understand the limitations for transgender people in this particular era, which can't really be compared to those in the 21st century. Although, to be completely fair there are still plenty of countries with laws comparable to those in the dark ages.

It's historical crime fiction with a compelling main character. Reeve has a natural flair for crime and for telling a story. This isn't a writer who has decided to throw in a transgender character to shake a genre up or be in vogue. He has created a main character with longevity and potential, and it certainly wouldn't work if he wasn't such a talented scribe. Luckily he is, which hopefully means we will be hearing a lot more from Reeve in the future.

Buy The Anarchists' Club (Leo Stanhope 2) at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Raven Books; pub date 2 May 2019. Buy at Amazon com.

Read my review of Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve.

Follow Alex Reeves @storyjoy or @BloomsburyRaven onTwitter

The House on Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve

I really enjoyed this intriguing crime mystery, perhaps because the main character is trying to live their best life, despite the many obstacles in their way.

Charlotte takes the brave step into independence and severs the ties between herself and her family in an attempt to live how she wants and love whom she wants. That life is being Leo, because for all intent and purposes he is a man waiting to walk free from the physical constraints of his female body. Free to love. Free to partake in the pleasures of a physical and sexual relationship. And this is where the story becomes a tale of crime, murder, unrequited passion and jealousy.

What Reeve captures really well is the inequality of gender in that particular time period, although to be fair some things haven't changed much. He describes the privilege Leo enjoys as a man and then the oppression Charlotte has to endure in equal measures as a woman.

Although in our day and age it is considered more politically correct to assign the correct personal pronoun to Leo, I believe to do the story justice one has to speak of both Charlotte as a woman and Leo as the man Charlotte lives as and is on the inside. It's important to acknowledge the difficulty, struggle and opposition Charlotte experiences because of her brave choice to live as the man she knows herself to be on the inside. The other side of the coin is the constant fear Leo lives with, because he fears he will be discovered. It would mean prison.

I'm a little disappointed this has been put under the genre of erotic transgender fiction on at least one major retailer. First of all any eroticism is only hinted at and secondly it means a lot of potential readers may not even consider reading this really well-written historical crime fiction story. It's a cracking read.

I sincerely hope this is the first of many Leo Stanhope books and I'm looking forward to the second in the series, The Anarchist's Club, in May.

Buy The House on Half Moon Street (Leo Stanhope #1) at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Raven Books; pub date Dec. 2018

Preorder/Buy The Anarchist's Club (Leo Stanhope #2) at Amazon Uk (pub date 2 May 2019)

Read my review of The Anarchists' Club by Alex Reeve.

Follow Alex Reeves @storyjoy or @BloomsburyRaven onTwitter

The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts

Laurel and Primrose are little girls who like to play in the woods. Two little girls who take a baby with them into the woods and only two of the three little girls come back out again. The world despises them, the nation spends years hunting them, but only one of them spends time behind bars,

Even after so many years the public believes Laurel and Primrose deserve to be punished until they themselves take their last breath.

Laurel, the elder of the two, is seen as the main perpetrator and locked up. The youngest girl is renamed Rosie and is raised normally in society as if the events had never taken place at all. The public and the family members of the victim keep finding out where she lives, so she feels like a hunted animal.

When another young child goes missing where Rosie happens to be spending the night she becomes an instant suspect, thanks to the help of a writer, who is hungry for a sensational story. She is then forced to reconsider her attitude towards Laurel and whether or not she should help her get parole.

There are definitely parallels that can be drawn between the Bulger case and the fictional Flower Girls, and it invites the reader to ponder and perhaps even debate what happens when a child kills another child. When children commit a heinous crime, it's perhaps worse than the horror of any adult on child crime, because it is so hard to fathom how a child can do such a terrible thing.

The author goes for the more hard-nosed approach with this plot, so you might think it is going a specific way, but it doesn't. Clark-Platts allows the story to hover over the dark abyss and takes the reader on the steep decline into the desolate landscape of a cruel and calculated mind.

The Flower Girls is a tense psychological thriller, which takes the reader on a difficult journey of justice and morality. Is there any right or wrong in such tragic circumstances? Then just when you think, as a reader, you have come to a conclusion you feel comfortable with, the author blindsides the reader with the truth. Not a read you should miss.

Buy The Flower Girls at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Raven Books; Hardcover release 24 January 2019
Follow @aclarkplatts @BloomsburyRaven
Visit aliceclarkplatts.com

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

It is has a gothic spooky feel to it mixed with a wee bit of horror.

The reader follows the story of two women in the same grand house. One in the distant past and the other in the more recent past. Elsie's story starts in an insane asylum charged with quite a few murders. The doctor in charge is trying to get her to communicate, because he is convinced there must be more to the story. Why would a well situated woman suddenly go off the deep end and cause such brutal mayhem?

Before ending up in the asylum Elsie is pregnant, has just recently lost her husband and is returning to his childhood home accompanied by her husband's impoverished cousin. This isn't exactly her choice, as her decisions are being made by her much younger brother. Her brother is more concerned about the way it looks to society and any possible scandals.

Women weren't allowed to own anything per se in that era and any property, inherited or otherwise would always fall to the men. This includes husbands, brothers, fathers and cousins.

It isn't long before the women in the household start experiencing strange events. Footprints and messages in the dust, empty rooms suddenly become fully furnished clean ones, and peculiar wooden statues start appearing throughout the house.

A peaceful retreat turns into a fight for sanity and a fight to survive. Elsie finds herself drawn into the dark abyss of the past and the personal tragedies of the previous inhabitants of the house.

It's a decent premise, however the execution could have been better. The companions are an excellent idea, they give the whole story a creepy vibe, and the ending is wonderfully macabre. Purcell is creative enough to pull off a great story, this one just needs a bit of a polish.

Buy The Silent Companions at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer.

Follow @spookypurcell @BloomsburyRaven

Visit laurapurcell.com