*** Click on book covers to find out more about each of these exciting books, where you can buy them and more about author Chris Longmuir***
Some of the Five Star Reviews for Chris’s novels-
Romance and Darkness WJS Kirton – “Chris Longmuir’s books so far have been mysterious, suspenseful stories concerned with some of the darker depths of human nature. So it’s surprising to learn that this latest (although it was apparently written before the others) is a romance. But fans won’t be disappointed. Yes, it’s a romance but the murkier motives and actions are still in evidence.
It’s set in a fishing community on Scotland’s north-east coast in the 19th century and the author’s familiarity with the setting and her research into the customs and attitudes of the time give it genuine authenticity. She’s recreated a time and place in which men and women have their roles, their own moralities and a fierce strength born of living lives dependent on both the sea’s bounty and its cruelties. She writes of its rhythms, of how men and women alike respond to its voice and its demands, and of the hard lives they live beside it.
The characters are varied and complex, none more so than Belle, the dangerous woman at the narrative’s centre. This is no straightforward, old-style heroine. She has strengths, weaknesses, needs and a beguiling mixture of sexual magnetism and insecurity. She belongs to this community and yet is apart from it and, as the threads of the story weave around her, her stature grows and she learns, among other things, how to say no.
A Salt Splashed Cradle carries more than one love story as well as others from which love is missing. Ms Longmuir’s control of her material is as sure here as it is in her dark modern novels and she makes you care about what happens to her people.”
J Fleming – “If you live in a town or a city, read Chris Longmuir’s Night Watcher – and be afraid, be very afraid. That doesn’t mean to say that country-dwellers can relax. Night Watcher will increase your heart rate right from the beginning, and keep you turning pages until you reach the end. It is one of those books that you finish with a mixture of emotions: satisfaction at the outcome (did you see it coming?) but disappointment that there are no more pages to turn. Chris Longmuir had once again displayed her ability to create characters we can believe in and set them in a tension-filled background.”
Myra Duffy - “Night Watcher is a roller coaster of a read that keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next.
The setting of Dundee is a convincing backdrop to the action and the city has a character of its own that lends to the overall creepy atmosphere.
Looking forward to the next one!”
A tight, gripping tale from an expert in the genre – WJS Kirton – “Another book which proves that Chris Longmuir, who wrote the prize-winning Dead Wood, knows the ingredients you need for a tense, satisfying crime novel and can put them together in a way that keeps multiplying the cliff-hangers and keeps you asking what will happen next. The story is set in an atmospherically-conveyed Dundee, the people and their contacts are created with those little touches of `ordinary’ behaviour that enhance their reality. Behind them all, creeping through the book’s shadows, there’s an anonymous figure determined to complete the `missions’ set by the voice he hears in his head. He’s introduced in the opening paragraphs as, already responsible for at least one murder, he arrives in the city with his next victim already chosen and an absolute certainty that he’s doing the right thing.
Cleverly, though, some of the `normal’, ordinary people who make up the small cast of central characters, are equally driven – by power, lust, revenge – and equally capable (or so it seems) of extreme actions to achieve their aims. Although there are clearly goodies and baddies, trust is in short supply. In their cases, there’s no inner voice urging them to destroy the lives of others, but their motives and impulses are potentially just as deadly. Love is transactional, infidelity is the norm and Longmuir keeps the focus tightly on them as the night watcher observes them from his shadows. The resolution is delayed up to the final pages with not just one twist, but two.
It’s a very enjoyable read from a writer who knows what she’s doing.”
