Shelli Rosewarne

Hi all,

Hope you had a good weekend. It’s sadly Monday again (they do come around quick!) but I’m sharing my review of new release ‘A Taste for Killing’ from talented fellow Breathless Press author H.K.Sterling. This is a great mix of mystery and romance, and just what you need to beat the Monday blues!

Blurb:

Mystery and Romance blend together when competing detectives Carolyn Woods and Jack Heart find they are surrounded by murder on every side.

Review: 4 Stars

Carolyn and Jack are fellow private investigators who seem to have an interesting and complicated relationship; sometimes allies, sometimes competitors, sometimes lovers. When they are both hired by different parties to investigate the same murder they find themselves in competition.

I found the dynamics and interchange between them interesting and compelling. Initially you feel for Carolyn as she seems to be the more emotionally invested, and in danger of getting her heart broken, but as the story goes on things shift back and forth and I found Jack becoming a more interesting and in-depth character. He had a great feel of the ‘anti-hero’ style hard-boiled detective from classic film noir, and it’s perhaps personal preference but I do love the more complex kind of hero 🙂

Then, of course there’s Evan. Although he’s a suspect on the murder case, Carolyn can’t help herself being drawn to him. He seems perfect in pretty much every way, but is he too good to be true? Out of the characters he did seem the least well-developed for me. He did seem a little ‘too’ perfect, though I’m willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt on this one as that very fact did have me questioning all the way through whether this was all an act and he was hiding something. (I won’t give away whether I was right or not!)

This story was very well written; the style in particular had echoes of the hardboiled/noir style crime stories which I really enjoyed and fit the storyline well. I’m also not normally a great fan of first person narrative but it did work for this. The romance and crime elements were well-balanced. I find sometimes in romantic suspense that the crime/suspense storyline can be a little weak and just fade away or not make sense in the end, but this was well-planned and drew to a good conclusion.

I also really liked the love triangle element, I found myself switching between which of the two I was rooting for and it kept me guessing right up to the end. This is the first book I have read by this author, but it won’t be the last and I will be definitely looking out for book 2 in this series. Overall would highly recommend for a well-written and compelling short read.

If you’d like to see for yourself, you can buy ‘A Taste for Killing’ at the following places:

Breathless Press

Amazon

Amazon UK

Or you can catch up with H.K.Sterling (and keep an eye out for book 2!) at:

Twitter: @HKSterling

Facebook

or via her ‘Undercover Blog‘

Hope you enjoy! x