BLOG TOUR: His Favourite Graves by Paul Cleave

Published November 9th, 2023 by Orenda
Thriller, Mystery, Psychological Thriller, Hardboiled, Police Procedural

Today is my stop on the blog tour for the outstanding His Favourite Graves. Thank you to Anne at Random Things Tours for the invitation to take part and Orenda Books for the proof copy of the book.

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SYNOPSIS:

Desperate for reward money – and to rescue his marriage – an embattled sheriff takes incalculable risks to find a missing boy. An edge-of-your-seat, twisted and twisty thriller from New Zealand’s King of Crime.

To catch a killer…
Maybe you’ve got to be one…

Acacia Pines, USA. Sheriff Cohen’s life is falling apart – his father accidentally burned down the retirement home, his wife has moved out, and his son is bullying other kids at school.

When high-school student, Lucas Connor, is abducted, Cohen sees a chance to get his life back on track – to win back his wife and scoop the reward money offered for Lucas’s safe return.

But as the body count rises, it becomes clear that Cohen’s going to have to make the kind of decision from which there’s no coming back … a decision with deadly consequences…

A furiously paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller exposing the dark underbelly of small-town life, His Favourite Graves is also a twisted and twisty story of father-and-son relationships, and the one last gamble of a desperate man to save everything…

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MY REVIEW:

OMG. What on earth did I just read?! All the stars for this intense, menacing and mind-blowing thriller. Utterly addictive and unputdownable, His Favourite Graves is a cocktail of pure nerves and adrenaline that I can still feel coursing through my veins. So buckle up and hold on tight, because Paul Cleave is about to take you on one of the bumpiest roller-coasters you’ve ever ridden.

This is one of those books I think is best read without knowing too much about the plot, so I won’t go into too much detail. But I will tell you that there’s kidnapping, murder, desperate people taking desperate measures, and a whole lot of crazy goings on. It starts out with a standard thriller formula: a teenage boy gets abducted by a school janitor who is hiding a dark and deadly secret, and the race is on to find them before it’s too late. But that’s when Cleave puts the cat among the pigeons and deviates from what we’re expecting with a twist that proves to be only the first of many surprises he has in store. Nothing is as it seems in this book.

Cleverly plotted, deftly spun and wickedly twisty, this is a deceptively layered and nuanced thriller that has teenage angst and family drama woven into the story. Cleave shows us the shades of grey that exist in the shadows by exploring the monsters that lurk inside us, the masks some of us wear, and forcing us to look at the assumptions we make – sometimes unwittingly – about the people around us. The characters are flawed, fractured, tortured, and conflicted, but also vividly real. There is no clear hero or villain; just a murky, blurred line where ordinary people make bad or misguided choices out of desperation, fear, and delusion. They could be any one of us, and that makes them all the more terrifying.

Paul Cleave just keeps getting better. He is the king of misdirection, lulling me into a false sense of security where I *think* I’ve got things figured out and then: BAM! He drops another shocking twist that hits me like a freight train. Meanwhile, he’s intricately interweaving the many threads in unexpected ways and dropping subtle clues that slip under the radar until much later. He put me off kilter, twisted me up in knots and gave me book whiplash. And it is so freaking good!

Dark, devious, suspenseful and surprising, His Favourite Graves is one of the most outstanding and unsettling thrillers you’ll read this year. Go and read this book!

Rating: ✮✮✮✮✮

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MEET THE AUTHOR:

Paul is an award winning author who often divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where most of his novels are set, and Europe. He’s won the New Zealand Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur book festival’s crime novel of the year award in France, and has been shortlisted for the Edgar and the Barry in the US and the Ned Kelly in Australia. HIs books have been translated into over twenty languages. He’s thrown his Frisbee in over forty countries, plays tennis badly, golf even worse, and has two cats – which is often two too many.

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BUY THE BOOK:

Orenda Books | Waterstones* | Bookshop.org* | Amazon*

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Thanks for reading Bibliophiles xxxx