Review: Stay Alive

by Simon Kernick (Century, R270)

A woman arrives home to find her husband murdered on their bed, with an unknown woman. While trying to take in the bloody mess, the woman, Amanda Rowan, hears a noise. A strange man appears in a doorway and runs towards her.

Wisely, she runs like hell.

This scenario has played out three weeks before and as chapter two gets under way, Amanda, battered and bruised, has moved, far away from home, to Scotland, and is now under police protection.

This is my first Simon Kernick novel, and as such my first encounter with two of his familiar characters, DCI Bolt and the complicated Scope. The latter is an intrepid bloke who, here, dives head first into conflict. This might well be the likeable Scope’s usual modus operandi.

Very little is as it seems. One minute you think you have a character pegged, then they are straying into opposite territory. Here certainly be many dragons and many complicated souls with various axes to grind.

As the action flows back and forth in time and across rural Scotland, a family having a fun afternoon canoeing, also find themselves drawn into the fray and at the wrong end of shotguns. A hellish, bloody chase across rural Scotland is only part of the plot..

An all-action, fast-paced crime drama, where nearly everyone seems to be dogged by violence and on the run from something or someone.

Excellent. – Sally Scott