Tastes Like Fear by Sarah Hilary

review by Maryom

DI Marnie Rome and her team have been searching for missing teenager, May Beswick, for twelve weeks, so when a girl is spotted leaving the site of a car crash, their first hope is that it might be her. But this girl, covered in scratches and dressed only in a man's shirt, has disappeared too, seemingly walking on auto-pilot, into the path of traffic but away again without harm. Following the trail of this unknown girl leads Rome and her DS, Noah Jake, into the world of homeless teens living rough on the streets and a sinister man who offers help and shelter but only on his increasingly controlling terms.

I've been saying this here and there on social media since I first read this, but it's worth saying again - I think Tastes Like Fear is Sarah Hilary's best book yet! It's written in a way to entice the reader in - alternating the investigation from Rome and Jake's point of view with first person insights into the world of the 'rescued' girls, using dialogue to set the scene, forward the plot and reveal character, and, of course, delivering a tense, tightly-plotted story-line.

With a mystery girl appearing and vanishing like a figment of imagination, not quite on page one but nearly, I was hooked immediately. Following the twists and turns of the team's investigation I was variously chilled, intrigued, shocked, and frequently surprised - for the shadowy world where runaways live almost in plain sight is one in which people are rarely what they seem to be; not only the man known as 'Harm', who is menacing and believable enough for the reader to feel the fear he radiates, but other characters as well. (I'm not going to list the others for fear of spoilers, though most parents won't be surprised to know that their teens keep all sorts of secrets from them)

Hilary's special knack has always been to get inside the head of her, frequently warped, characters, and she does that again here, entering the mindset of the teenage runaways, looking for somewhere to belong and call 'home', and 'Harm' who offers this to the girls; she presents even the villain as a believable complex person, for whom at times, it's possible to feel understanding if not quite sympathy.

As you'd expect, the villain's true identity is kept a closely guarded secret till the end, although, in retrospect, the clues leading to it were there all along, so it doesn't spring out as a total, unbelievable, surprise.

This is most definitely a series that goes from strength to strength, so I'm definitely looking  forward to what the author has in store for Marnie Rome and Noah Jake on their next appearance.

Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Headline Publishing
Genre - adult, crime, police procedural,

Sarah Hilary - guest post

Today, as the latest stop-over in her blog tour, we're delighted to welcome crime writer Sarah Hilary to talk about why we all love crime fiction so much.....

Dear Reader
by Sarah Hilary


Dear Reader,

I’ve been asked to write about why so many of you love crime fiction. Lots of writers have been invited to tackle this subject including, perversely, several who loathe crime fiction. (Although it’s rather fun watching them wrestle their dictionaries to the ground in pursuit of credible reasons as to why so many smart people cannot aspire to their own contempt for the genre.)

Is it that you love to see justice done? That the detective is your secular priest?

Or is it that you delight in solving a puzzle?

Could it simply be that crime fiction respects the first rule of writing—to entertain?

Should I attempt to unpack the reasons why I became a reader of crime when I was ten? What it was about the stories of Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith that hooked my pre- and post-adolescent brain?

I’m not sure I should, in fact. Any more than I should attempt to analyse your reasons for reading my books or any other crime writer’s. Other than to say this—

Crime fiction, at its best, is uniquely two things. Firstly, it is subversive. It asks the questions no one else likes to ask. It has a social conscience which is active in the here and now, without recourse to nostalgia (a fetish of so much literary fiction) and unafraid of ambiguity.

The second way in which crime fiction is unique is all about you. More than any other genre, ours depends on the pact between writer and reader. Never will you hear a crime writer bemoan or belittle the role of the reader, or make lofty claims of how little we think about our readers when we write. We think about you all-the-time. About the questions you’ll ask of our characters and what makes you turn our pages, whether our red herrings are too red or our subtle clues too clunky. You’re in our heads the whole time. We want to scare you and thrill you—and outwit you, if we can (knowing how damn hard that will be). Writing, they say, is a lonely business. But thanks to you, dear crime reader, we are never alone.

So join me if you will (I won’t say if you dare) in No Other Darkness as I twist and turn, and try to keep you guessing right up until the final page. Then tweet me or drop a line to my website or Facebook page to tell me what you liked, what you didn’t, what I should be doing differently.

Until next time.

BIO: Sarah Hilary has worked as a bookseller, and with the Royal Navy. Her debut novel, SOMEONE ELSE'S SKIN, won the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year 2015. It was the Observer's Book of the Month ("superbly disturbing”), a Richard & Judy Book Club bestseller, and has been published worldwide. NO OTHER DARKNESS, the second in the series is out now. The Marnie Rome series is being developed for television. 

Follow Sarah on Twitter at @Sarah_Hilary

Sarah's second thriller No Other Darkness is out in paperback on 13the August.
Maryom's reviews of No Other Darkness and Someone Else's Skin

No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary

review by Maryom

Digging away in his back garden, preparing the ground so his children can grow vegetables, Terry Doyle discovers a gruesome secret - a bunker left over from the cold war, and in it the remains of two small boys. So starts one of DI Marnie Rome's most distressing cases.....
The boys appear to have starved to death, having been deliberately incarcerated and left to die, maybe as long as five years ago. The first task for Rome and her sergeant Noah Jake is to identify the bodies, then begins the search for what appears to be a very cold-blooded killer. After all, who else would condemn two small children to such a terrifying ordeal.....

No Other Darkness is another great thriller from Sarah Hilary. Starting with the hidden bunker, a lot of the story seems set in claustrophobic underground spaces - enough on its own to terrify anyone like me with a dread of such places! Hilary's talent seems to be to discover the darker side of human nature and bring it to life - I found her first book Someone Else's Skin really disturbing because of this. This time the reader is slipping inside the mind of a very troubled woman receiving psychiatric help in prison for her past crimes - her anguish and despair is palpable to the reader, even though the prison psychiatrist believes her to be 'cured'. For me this aspect is something that makes Sarah Hilary books re-readable - although there are the usual number of twists and turns in the plot, the novel as a whole is more than a mere whodunnit.

As this is a second outing for Rome and Jake, we get to hear more about them and their troubled families - I'm not going to disclose anything here, but I think there's a lot more to surface for both detectives.

Just one quibble - does every strong woman HAVE to have an irresistible bad-boy in her past?

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Headline Publishing
Genre - adult, crime, police procedural,

Someone Else's Skin by Sarah Hilary

review by Maryom

DI Marnie Rome and DS Noah Jake were only calling at the women's refuge to ask one of the residents to stand as witness against one of her family but walked in on a blood bath! Against all the refuge's rules, Leo Proctor called round to see his wife - and got stabbed. It seems like an open and shut case - wife taking revenge on her brutal, sadistic husband - but, as they investigate further, Rome and Noah discover things are not as simple and straightforward as they first assumed.

Someone Else's Skin is a stunning debut crime novel - but I'm not sure it's quite my kind of book. It's well written and excellently plotted - I loved the big reversal even though I picked up on some clues before DI Rome so the big reveal wasn't that great a surprise......but..... Despite being a police procedural in format, the author takes the reader inside the head and under the skin of some very disturbed people. I know some readers like to get inside the perp's mind, to see how they think, what spurs them on - but not me. I should really have been prepared - after all the title is a warning of sorts; getting under someone's skin is all very well if they're kind and loving but NOT when they're a perverted, abusive thug. I came away with too much of a creepy feeling for it to be a pleasant read but I'm sure some of you will love it. If you're a fan of Val McDermid, check this out!

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Headline Publishing
Genre - adult, crime, police procedural,