Many thanks to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for my spot on this Blog Tour.

Oh my god!! It is true… It is so freaking true… Good things come in small packages. And there cannot be anything better than DC Samantha Shephard. She was fiesty, bold, sensitive, and vulnerable. She was just perfect.

My first book by author Vanda Symon saw me chuckling and smirking at the irreverent dialogues that Sam could come up with. Her banter with partner Smithy was the most fun I’d had the whole day. Yes, there was a ship adrift on the beach with a container open where looters could scavenge as much as they wanted. Yes, there was a skull in one of them followed by assault on Sam. Yes, there was a body found in the waters. And yes, the investigation started amidst all this cacophony of subplots.

But Samantha stood as the shining beacon, guiding me to keep turning the pages. Being a police procedural, it did have the interrogation, breaking into a house and discovering illegal stuff. Suspects were abound and bosses were horrid. But nothing could deter my favourite cop. She was on a roll. Hot and happening was how she came across to me. Not sure if her best friend Maggie or boyfriend Paul would agree to it.

Being at the crossroads in her personal life, her professional one too seemed to be filled with perils. Going against your bosses was never a good idea, unless it was Sam doing it. So it was quite entertaining to see her try to dodge the commitment bullet and hide a few impertinent truths from her superior. I just had to keep saying – You go, girl.

The writing was absolutely brilliant, the humor in it forced me to keep reading, despite the late hour. The setting of the town Dunedin, the characters both good and bad, and the short, snappy chapters pulled me into its swirling mist. I actually didn’t want to leave the most that was Samantha’s life and end the story. Gosh, I sound like a propah fan girl, gushing away like that.

A crime thriller set in a small town of New Zealand, I loved how the investigation took me down its winding lanes. And the ending managed to make me gasp inspite of expecting it to be unexpected. Ah well it was so far left that I hadn’t seen hints of it at all.

A brilliant book. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Karen and Orenda.

I received a free ARC from Anne and the publisher, and this is my journey into its pages, straight from the heart!! STRICTLY HONEST AND UNBIASED.

All my reviews can be read here

Dunedin’s favourite young police officer Sam Shephard is drawn into a perplexing investigation when a series of shipping containers wash up on a sleepy New Zealand beach, and a spate of unexplained deaths ensues…

Chaos reigns in the sleepy village of Aramoana on the New Zealand coast, when a series of shipping containers wash up on the beach and looting begins.

Detective Constable Sam Shephard experiences the desperation of the scavengers first-hand, and ends up in an ambulance, nursing her wounds and puzzling over an assault that left her assailant for dead.

What appears to be a clear-cut case of a cargo ship running aground soon takes a more sinister turn when a skull is found in the sand, and the body of a diver is pulled from the sea … a diver who didn’t die of drowning…

As first officer at the scene, Sam is handed the case, much to the displeasure of her superiors, and she must put together an increasingly confusing series of clues to get to the bottom of a mystery that may still have more victims…

Publication Date: 5th January 2020