Turn The Other Way – by Stuart James
Page Count (ebook) – 412
The Blurb:
Sometimes revenge is the deadliest game of all.A derelict farmhouse in the Essex countryside. A deranged family. Innocent victims picked at random. If you’re chosen, Turn The Other Way.
Simon Bairstow is a top London surgeon. He’s performed dozens of life-saving operations. But something goes horribly wrong. The machine Eve Johnson is attached to flatlines, and suddenly her parent’s world has collapsed.They’re hellbent on revenge, someone to answer for the horrific error that’s been made.
Noah and Jess are driving home on a busy dual carriageway and stuck in traffic. They hear thumping coming from the back doors of the transit van in front of them. When Noah steps out onto the road, he hears muffled screams. He opens the back doors and what he sees shocks him to the core. The van pulls off, spilling Noah onto the road. Ignoring his wife’s plea to leave it, he hits the accelerator in pursuit of the van.
Chloe’s parents are missing. She hasn’t seen them since they left the party in Hampstead on Friday night. She needs answers, deciding to take matters into her own hands.
A serial killer is stalking the streets of Islington in North London late at night leaving his victims in a horrific way. The press have dubbed him the Angel Attacker.
My Review:
My usual reading genres are historical crime, thrillers and, every now and then, some ladies fiction. Horror NEVER comes into the reading equation. As a child, I was very much into my horror stories and films but reading ‘The Lair’ by James Herbert in the 1980’s put me off for life!
Or so I thought…
I saw this book being mentioned within a number of book clubs and on several occasions and something about it appealed to me. I can’t say what exactly but I decided to high-jump over my usual boundaries and give it a whirl.
I can tell you now that I was not disappointed. I found myself gripped by the story from the start and it took great willpower not to speed-read ahead to see what was coming next.
The story is told from a variety of view points and also in past and present tense. It is never, however, confusing. Apart from, maybe, trying to work out how everything slots together. As with any book of this nature, half of the fun is trying to work out how it’s all going to end. Well, let me tell you now, don’t bother! Don’t even go there – as they say! There are more twists and turns in this book than you’d find in a mountain of spaghetti. Every page sends you spinning off in a completely different direction. It was wonderful and wholly gripping.
All that aside, I think the author does himself a disservice by placing this in the Horror genre for I would personally describe as a dark, a very dark, an exceptionally dark, psychological thriller. To my mind, Horror should have more gore and be far more graphic than the detail given in this book. Don’t get me wrong, Mr James doesn’t hold back in his descriptions but he always stops at that sweet point where the imagination takes over and the reader finds they are conjuring up thoughts which are far more horrific than any description could do justice to.
If you like your books to have you on the edge of your seat and gripping your favourite tipple to you tightly, then this book will not disappoint for it gives you that – in spades! I’m off now to download Mr James’ debut novel, ready to read once my heart rate has settled back into its pre-Stuart James state.
About the Author:
My name is Stuart James and I write psychological thrillers. I’m 46, married and have two children.
My writing day usually starts at around 5.30 AM when I get up, shower and then get going with my ideas. I have a couple of hours before the school run and find that early morning is the best time to write
I’m always looking for ideas and inspiration for new, fresh stories and I got the idea for my ‘Turn the Other Way’ while driving along the motorway one evening.
A truck passed me, speeding when the back shutter rolled up, and I saw a load of pallets. I thought to myself, what if someone was in the back of the truck? How would they feel? What would their story be exactly? The more I thought about it, I wondered how I could make it scary -maybe put someone in the middle of finding something unexpected, something out of the ordinary, needing to make a decision there and then…
That’s where Jake and Kate come into the story. They’re driving home from visiting family, stuck in traffic behind an old transit van and hear thumping on the back doors. Jake investigates and realises it’s one of the worse decisions he’s ever made.
I wanted a terrifying protagonist, someone from your worse nightmares – Freddy Krueger meets The Bogeyman.
I’ve loved scary stories since I was a child – tales that makes you check under your bed before going to sleep or peer out of your window at the shadows in your back garden. There’s something about being frightened, it’s a buzz you just can’t describe.
That’s exactly what I’ve gone for in Turn The Other Way. A story from your worse nightmare…
It makes my day when people email, message or contact me on social media, telling me how much my new book scared them and how they enjoyed reading it under the covers or with the light on. I know then that I have achieved exactly what I have set out to do and it’s the biggest compliment I could receive.
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