Fatal Blow

By Brian Price https://www.brianpriceauthor.co.uk/ @crimewritersci

Published by Hobeck Books https://www.hobeck.net @HobeckBooks

408 pages ISBN 9781915817242

Publication date 17 October 2023

Fatal Blow is the fourth instalment in the Mel Cotton series, click on the links to see my reviews of book 2 Fatal Hate and book 3 Fatal Dose.

I was sent an electronic copy in exchange for a fair review.  I would like to thank Rebecca at Hobeck Books and the Author for the invitation to participate in the Blog Tour.

The Cover

A nice bottle of champagne, now what is the context for that?

From the blurb

A shattering revenge attack

Mexton’s Major Crimes team is targeted by an Albanian crime gang as an explosion rips through the unit’s base. 

For DC Mel Cotton – the attack is all too personal

DC Tom Ferris is seriously injured in the blast. His fiancée, Mel, maybe physically unharmed but she’s dealing with wounds you can’t see. She’s determined to return to work, but is she ready?

Death on her doorstep

Mel’s latest case is close to home – investigating a body found in her and Tom’s garden, the body of someone last heard of in Australia. Can she catch the murderer? And can anyone stop the Albanian crime gang on their ruthless campaign of revenge?

My thoughts

He’s only gone and done it again; I am running out of ways to describe how the author manages to fit so much into a single novel. It puts me in mind of the old beer advert of the 70s and 80s; “Whitbread Big Head Trophy Bitter, the pint that thinks it’s a quart.” So once again we have what would be two books worth of incident for most authors crammed into one action packed novel that is easier to consume than that said beer (which was not a favourite of mine). As if that were not enough amongst the text, he has manged to conceal fourteen references to Sherlock Holmes stories for readers to discover! If you read with a notebook by your side, it may well get some use.

Following on from Fatal Dose where an Albanian crime gang were starting to get a foothold into the small town of Mexton, now we can see them starting to flex their muscles and things progress from ugly and brutal to fatal. If you haven’t read the earlier novel it doesn’t matter this can easily be read as a standalone, but reading Fatal Dose prior will give you a taste of the sheer breadth of his coverage and very individual style.

The story doesn’t so much start as explode onto the page as the sandwich van is blown up outside the police station, causing carnage. What a way to announce the Albanian are back and looking for revenge. From then on, like an out-of-control rollercoaster its breathless, relentless and at times hair-raising stuff, that might just leave the reader exhausted. At times I wish he would explore a situation deeper, but then he has another brilliant idea and grabs it with both hands and off he goes haring away. I guess this is his individual USP, his unique style and because he excels at it, why change.

The plot follows two strands, the investigation into a body unearthed in Mel and Tom’s garden and the revenge of the Albanian crime gang. Two very different stories but equally enthralling for different reasons.

 Mel is the heroine of the series and I have concluded that the author doesn’t really like her, or if he does, he has an odd way of showing it. With each new instalment Mel is put through the wringer in the crime fiction equivalent of Tom putting Jerry through a mangle in the classic cartoon. The danger she finds herself in is such that she barely gets chance to sit down between episodes and within the dialogue a colleague observes that she must surely have used up her nine lives by now. She seems to thrive on the danger, almost enjoying it as much as the reader will, it’s refreshing to have a fearless heroine. She really does need promotion and a move to relative safety. The serious injury her boyfriend Tom suffers will inevitably lead to changes for both of them and is a bold move by Mr Price bringing a new dimension to be explored later in the series.

The attention to detail and accuracy with the scientific bits are second to none. Here the author writes with genuine authority, such that I suspect that he had to check himself from providing the recipe for making the ANFO bomb at the start. He is one of the few authors I have read who can include these scientific facts seamlessly within the prose so that it just flows naturally rather than being obvious research. It is no wonder he is advising other authors on technical matters.

The Albanians are suitably villainous and the Polish shop keeper’s threat of summary justice keeps us on our toes, but the mystery woman proves to be the real attention grabber and the product of an unfettered imagination. I for one hope her cameo isn’t a one off appearance. The other strand is a wonderful counter point with Mel digging into the lives of a surprising and strangely dysfunctional family.

There is quirky humour too, naming a prog rock band Pentose Phosphate Shunt (a scientific process) sounding all too pretentious and accurate, will appeal to male readers of a certain vintage. The police banter itself is of the facetious and silly kind, albeit less blue than the real thing I suspect, and defuses some of the tension.

Fatal Blow provides what we can come to expect, action and thrills delivered at breakneck speed from the first to last pages.

Fatal Blow can be purchased direct from the publisher here

The author

Brian Price is a chemist and biologist who retired from the Environment Agency in 2016. He is the author of Crime Writing: How to write the science and runs a website offering tips on science for crime writers (www.crimewriterscience.co.uk). He taught science and technology courses for the Open University for 26 years. He has advised number of leading crime writers on scientific aspects of crime.

Brian’s first crime novel, Fatal Trade, was published, as an ebook and paperback, by Hobeck Books on 14th September 2021. A free novella, Fatal Beginnings, is available from Hobeck Books at http://www.hobeck.net. The sequel, Fatal Hate, was published in April 2022 and third novel in the series, Fatal Dose, is due out on 31st January 2023.

Several of his short stories appear in the anthologies Cuckoo and Seventy Three, produced by the writing group Writers in Stone, and he has had stories published in the charity anthologies, The Dark Side of Christmas and Cooking the Books (published by Hobeck). His short story The Scent of an Ending appeared in the Crime Writers Association collection Music of the Night.

Source: Author’s Amazon profile

Don’t forget to check out the other reviews on this Blog Tour: