Category: Book reviews – fiction

Kyle Robertson, The Platinum Receiver (‎PIMI eBooks, 2017)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36290808-the-platinum-retriever

Orphaned before his parents even had a chance to give him a name, Daedalus Platinum is a Retriever, chasing the deadbeat parents of the world. Parents should be obligated, he believes, and when he finds them he makes them pay, with their lives. But he has people chasing him, too—the Obliterators. They just cancel you from the planet, remove your existence.

The Obliterators are aliens, but ‘not from a different planet, they just have a mixture of otherworldly DNA in their system’—in other words, ‘mutts’. Daedalus’ mother’s undead body has been used for xenomorphic procreation. The monsters are his half-siblings. He has some strange power; he’s the only one on Earth who can obliterate them.

Loved: ‘Nature was my mother’s executioner; I was just nature’s axe’, ‘they came at us like cheetahs on the Serengeti’. I loved the fighting in the finale using moves from the various different martial arts schools.

This novel’s Concept is highly innovative. The voice is colloquial, almost gangster, short, sharp sentences, cop-talk-like clichés. The narrator addresses the audience as ‘you’, in daily journal entries, full of sassy 4^th wall asides like ‘That was cathartic. All right, back to the story’.

Verb tenses are all over the place, which is distracting, though it lends a feel of breathlessness. It either needs the grammar sorted out or crafted into a deliberate style choice.

Tony Bassett, Voices from the Dead (‎The Book Folks crime thrillers, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244102463-voices-from-the-dead-an-unputdownable-british-crime-thriller-packed-with

DS Sunita Roy and her boyfriend and colleague DI Tom Vickers happen to be attending a wedding at a Queensbridge hotel, when a guest reports witnessing a murder from her balcony, through one of the windows in the opposite building. The victim is successful beauty expert Candy Goodhope.

Who could have murdered her in her hotel room? The boyfriend? The husband? The business rival?

In another case, Miranda Higley is waiting for her ex-husband to lay a new floor for her when she is brutally attacked.

It helps that there is an eyewitness, and the police also have CCTV evidence and numerous people to interview who were with Candy on the day. These characters, as we meet them, are interesting and colourful. Even the perps are sympathetic. Sunita is often accompanied by Tom or DC Brett Dawson, so we hear her thought processes though dialogue.

The Plot is exciting, with enough surprises to keep us hooked, and the Pace is just right. We learn the clues at just the same time that the police do, so there’s plenty of time to assimilate it all.

Bassett’s crime novels feature very realistic (it seems to me) police procedures, meaning we get right down into the story. He takes us through the investigation process, as day by day new clues are discovered. It never turns out to be who you suspect, and the boss always gets it wrong at first. Sunita’s uncanny ability for lateral thinking saves the day. And though we get all the clues, it always takes a bit of a stretch of Sunita’s ingenuity to solve the crime.

I loved how we didn’t understand the rationale behind the title until the very end, making it a kind of punchline.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I leave this review voluntarily.

Vicki Regan, Timeline Dissonance (2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234118263-timeline-dissonance

We left Sarah and Eleanor from Book 2 in a world of truly nightmarish ‘temporal dysphoria’, people and objects popping in and out of different timelines. Now, they are captive under fascistic martial law, labelled as ‘Primary Dissonants’ by baddie time bandits still bent on destroying all free will. ‘Temporal alignment’ has become outright thought control and even ‘total reality manipulation’. The confused population accepts the new regime as better than the chaos that went before.

Sarah, her voice across the airwaves, is a constant throughout all timelines, but she still sees the nightmares of disastrous futures she lived. She reads a forbidden book, which teaches strategy to the resistance. Eleanor secretly develops new technology to disrupt the system. She and Sarah know that ‘consciousness itself resists determinism’. It’s ‘quantum resonance feedback’, and Eleanor knows how to exploit it.

The end is no utopia; democracy is messy, but human, full of the possibilities of all the timelines.

The ‘optimised society’ of New Philadelphia is described chillingly. The techy stuff is great, highly detailed and sounds plausible. The techy workarounds the resistance fighters come up with to thwart the techy oppression are ingenious.

The excellent writing of Books 1 and 2 continues. Fantastic suspense and pace, but interspersed with enough human relationship stuff to give us a breather from all the sci-fi jargon. We would have benefited from some layman’s explanation of the real science—quantum, entanglement, dissonance.