07 September 2018

Severed

Thriller

By Simon Kernick

Paperback 480 pages
Publisher Corgi (12th May 2011)
ASIN B003VPWXA6
ISBN-13 978-0552164344

"Simon Kernick writes with his foot pressed hard on the pedal. Hang on tight!" Harlan Coben




📕My Review

Ex-soldier Sean Tyler wakes up in bed beside his butchered girlfriend, with no memory of the previous 24 hours. Next to the television is a note instructing him to watch a DVD. It shows him committing the murder. Believing it to be a fake, he knows he'll have an uphill struggle convincing the authorities. 

An anonymous phone call tells him to follow a set of instructions if he wants the evidence destroyed. Tyler knows he must act quickly if he's to discover who's blackmailing him and the reason why.

Severed is a fast-paced thriller which takes place over two days. It has a little bit of everything - organised crime, illegal firearms, blackmail, assassinations and shootings galore! Yes, it's a little far-fetched but at the same time immensely enjoyable. 

I'm a huge fan of these sort of thrillers and this one is no exception. The action spills from every page and the short, punchy chapters make for easy reading. It's the ideal book for a few hours of action-packed escapism.

Barnsey's Books Rating 

My other reviews:

📗The Blurb

You wake up in a strange room on a bed covered in blood.

You have no idea how you got there.

Beside you is a dead girl. Your girlfriend.

The phone rings, and a voice tells you to press play on the room's DVD machine.

The film shows you killing your girlfriend. Then you're told to go to an address in East London where you're to deliver a briefcase and await further instructions.

There's no way out.

If you're to survive the next 24 hours, you must find out who killed your girlfriend, and why. Before they come for you too...

📘The Author, Simon Kernick

Well where do I start? I wanted to be a writer ever since I was old enough to pick up a pen. I started with one page stories that I illustrated myself (badly) and, as I grew older, the stories got longer. For a long time I just wrote for myself, enjoying the process of disappearing off to new, imaginative worlds, but eventually, while working as a salesman in London I experienced this desperate desire to get published.

I've always been a huge crime fiction and thriller fan so I wrote a crime novel that, unfortunately, pretty much every literary agent and publisher in the land rejected. So I wrote another one with exactly the same result. I have enough rejection letters to decorate a whole house- three hundred in all-but finally I struck gold with my first novel, The Business of Dying, about a cop who moonlights as a hit man named Dennis Milne. It was released in 2002 (seven years after I first tried to get published!) and was described as 'the crime debut of the year' by The Independent, which was a very nice compliment.

Since then I've written a book a year (fifteen in all now) as well as a total of three novellas. I specialise in very fast-paced thrillers set over a short space of time which I like to think grab the reader from the very first page and don't let go. My fifth novel, Relentless, was a Richard and Judy summer read, and the ninth and tenth, The Last Ten Seconds and The Payback, both reached number 1 in the UK book charts, so they're good, I promise!

I don't have a series as such and most of the books can be read as standalones, but I do have recurring characters. Dennis Milne, my vigilante cop, returns in A Good Day to Die and The Payback, and my female detective, Tina Boyd- a woman who finds herself in dangerous situations seemingly at every turn- appears in the vast majority of the recent books.

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to take a look at one or more of them and please feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Happy reading.

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