The Hidden Island by Angela Corner #BlogTour #BookReview @Bloodhoundbook

Today I’m delighted to be on the blog tour for a new book and author for Bloodhound Book and that is The Hidden Island by Angela Corner.

About this book…

Sex. Drugs. Murder.

Hidden behind the crystal seas and beautiful beaches of a Greek Island dark and dangerous secrets lurk. Beckett has had his fill of adrenaline fuelled criminal investigation and with a broken body and damaged career goes to the Greek Island of Farou to head up the Criminal Investigation Bureau. Serious crime is rare, the weather is great and the beer is cold but his ‘retirement’ is cut short when a pagan cult resurrects and bodies start showing up.

With doubts about his mental and physical ability to do the job, a British police detective is sent to help with the investigation. DI Lee Harper is everything Beckett is not – young, ambitious and by the book.

As well as tackling the new case Beckett must overcome the demons from his past.

Family loyalty, power and money are at the source of the investigation where appearance is everything and nothing is what is seems.

Can Beckett and Harper work together to find justice for the victims?

Will the idyllic island ever be the same again?

Sometimes paradise can be hell.

My review…

I actually received a review copy of this book without having any idea about its setting or plot so it was a fantastic surprise to find that the hidden island of the title was actually in Greece my most favourite place in the world. This is a Greek set crime thriller with two of the most interesting and intriguing police characters I’ve come across for a while! They have to investigate the death of a young woman but does it have any connection to a past crime that shocked the island community?

When we first meet Greek based Beckett though it did take me a while to get into his character-he seemed very closed off and I would have liked more in the way of depth to him much earlier on. Harper, the UK based detective I actually took to straight away. I found the way he interacted with his father, while they are watching the proceedings outside court on tv after he has helped put away a serial killer, very interesting and wanted to find out more of his backstory.   And once Harper is in Greece and there are further revelations that makes that scene becomes much more understandable. His character came as a surprise to me as I had expected Beckett to be on his own solving the murder of a girl on his home island of Farou. But once these two came together I really felt the chemistry of their work relationship coming together and from there on I actually enjoyed the storyline much more as well.

The setting in Greece was also rather cleverly done as it felt much darker than the usual sunny and warm environment that I was expecting! It was obviously a tourist destination for those gangs of girls/boys holiday (I imagined it in my head to be similar to Laganas in Zante!) but the author seemed to make it feel so much more mysterious with an brooding, evil undercurrent.

The second half of the book really upped the pace and I found myself enjoying it more the further I got into it. It’s definitely got a different vibe to the other crime thrillers around at the moment so it was a refreshing change to not know what direction the author was planning to take us. I did find the ending a little abrupt though which surprised me but on the whole I found it a satisfactory conclusion to The Hidden Island.

The Hidden Island: an edge of your seat crime thriller was published by Bloodhound Books on 26th November. Thank you to Bloodhound for my review copy of The Hidden Island.

Meet the author…

Angela Corner was born and bred in Lancashire but has moved ever further south in search of better weather. She currently lives in cider and strawberry country in the Wye Valley in South Herefordshire with her dogs, horses and a very understanding partner.

Angela’s writing life began after being made redundant from a career pretending to know about tax law. She did a Master’s Degree in Radio & TV Scriptwriting at Salford University and then spent eight years writing scripts for Channel 4’s Hollyoaks followed by a stint on Eastenders. But Angela’s writing ambition was always to become a novelist so the lives of beautiful teenagers and angry cockneys were swapped for the murder and skulduggery of crime fiction.

Angela is a serial reader of crime fiction and historical novels and is an avid watcher of TV crime drama, particularly anything Scandinavian and everything dark.

When she is not writing or doing internet research on how best to dispose of dead bodies she can be found riding her horses, walking her dogs or attempting to cook something edible for the understanding partner.