During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot. Unable to pinpoint where the shot came from, as the storm rapidly wipes out evidence, the agent-in-charge Brett Kehoe turns to the one man who might be able to help them–former FBI agent Lucas Page. Page, a university professor and bestselling author, left the FBI years ago after a tragic event robbed him of a leg, an arm, an eye, and the willingness to continue. But he has an amazing ability to read a crime scene, figure out angles and trajectories in his head, and he might be the only one to be able to find the sniper’s nest. With a new wife and family, Lucas Page has no interest in helping the FBI–except for the fact that the victim was his former partner. Agreeing to help for his partner’s sake, Page finds himself hunting a killer with an unknown agenda and amazing sniper skills in the worst of conditions. And his partner’s murder is only the first in a series of meticulously planned murders carried out with all-but-impossible sniper shots. The only thing connecting…

Greg Rask, a dying tech billionaire, has invested millions chasing miracle cures. None of them are worth a damn, but he refuses to give up. Now, he’s gathering a team willing to go to the ends of the earth chasing life. Each of Rask’s crew has beaten incredible odds to rise from the ashes of their old lives to where they are now. Together, their next task is to retrieve a painting that is believed to hide a map which, if genuine, marks it as a treasure of the Ahnenerbe, the occult wing of the SS, who had devoted dozens of expeditions in search of the three cintamani stones for their combined properties, and the lost city where they were rumored to lay hidden: Shambhala. But a mystical brotherhood sworn to protect the secrets of the ancients—the same secrets that allow its members to defy death—will stop at nothing to ensure that Rask’s crew fail. In an adrenalin-pumping quest through some of the most savage terrains known to man, the crew will be pushed to the limits of endurance and beyond. One of the things that delights me most about being a fiction reviewer is that I get to jump…

Plotters are just pawns like us. A request comes in and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the very top, that’ll fix everything. But no-one’s there. It’s just an empty chair. Reseng was raised by cantankerous Old Raccoon in the Library of Dogs. To anyone asking, it’s just an ordinary library. To anyone in the know, it’s a hub for Seoul’s organised crime, and a place where contract killings are plotted and planned. So it’s no surprise that Reseng has grown up to become one of the best hitmen in Seoul. He takes orders from the plotters, carries out his grim duties, and comforts himself afterwards with copious quantities of beer and his two cats, Desk and Lampshade. But after he takes pity on a target and lets her die how she chooses, he finds his every move is being watched. Is he finally about to fall victim to his own game? And why does that new female librarian at the library act…

In the ring, Cameron King is known as The Hunter. A celebrated champion. A warrior. But when her brother, science genius Nate, deliberately crashes the car they’re in and vanishes without trace Cameron is left with a career in ruins, a reconstructed body and one burning question: why? 18 months later, working to find bail-jumping fugitives, Cameron discovers a dead body – apparently killed with her gun. As a detective comes through the door, she receives a panicked call from her missing brother: ‘They’re coming, Cam. Get out.’ Sucked into a lethal and sinister conspiracy hidden in the darkest shadows of power, Cameron is forced to fight her toughest, bloodiest battle yet – not only to survive, but to uncover the terrifying truth. In my experience, action thrillers fall into one of two camps. First you have those wonderfully insane big budget affairs that dance between the realms of action and sci fi. You know the sort of thing, Matthew Reilly’s novels are a perfect example. Unstoppable heroes halo jumping out of exploding airplanes straight into a dastardly ego-maniac’s underground secret lair made from a hollowed-out volcano. Great fun and hugely enjoyable but, let’s be 100% honest, utterly bonkers. This…

Please note Consequence is the fifth book in the ongoing series The Race. If you haven’t read books one to four then the following review will no doubt feature some minor spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya! Joanna survived another brutal race and the Runner rebellion. But now she must work with Von Zimmer to try and save a village on an Ethiopian coffee plantation from annihilation. Can they face their personal issues and survive their cruellest adversary yet? Time for another episode from The Race series by Joan De La Haye. Regular readers of The Eloquent Page will know I have looked at all the other books so far, feel free to check them out via this link. It would be remiss of me if I didn’t include a quick review of the latest tale that’s available. We’re on to book five, Consequence, and Joanna finds herself knee deep in trouble once again. She does have a real knack for getting into all manner of scrapes. Just as well she is more than able to look after herself. The action picks up in the aftermath of the last race. Though Joanna is still recuperating from her last traumatic…

Please note, The Three Secret Cities is the fifth book in an ongoing series. If you haven’t read books one to four then it is highly likely that the following review is going to contain some minor spoilery type elements. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! A shadow world behind the real world When Jack West, Jr. won the Great Games, he threw the four legendary kingdoms into turmoil. A world with its own history, rules and prisons Now these dark forces are coming after Jack…in ruthless fashion. That is reaching into our world…explosively With the end of all things rapidly approaching, Jack must find the Three Secret Cities, three incredible lost cities of legend. It’s an impossible task by any reckoning, but Jack must do it while he is being hunted…by the greatest hunters in history. I suspect each time Matthew Reilly sits down to write a new book he asks himself the same question. “How can I push the action quotient further than I did last time?” The good news, from our perspective at least, is that he keeps managing it. I can sum up each new Matthew Reilly novel in four simple words – Bigger, Better, Faster,…

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean’s deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he’s sure he saw but still can’t prove exists-Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a PhD in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he’s never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time. Occasionally I get lucky and my two main hobbies intersect. It will come as…

Welcome to the Freemee lifestyle app: They can give you confidence, power, fame and all the friends in the world. But what will they take in return? When a teenager is shot dead after chasing a criminal in the street, investigating journalist Cynthia Bonsant is led to the popular social media platform Freemee, a competitor to Facebook whose lifestyle app claims to give you everything you need to succeed in life. But there is someone who warns against its evils: Zero, the world’s most-wanted activist, known for exposing the toxic truths behind social media giants and their pursuit of total control. As Cynthia gets closer to unravelling the evil mastermind behind the Freemee site, she herself becomes a target. But in this world of hidden cameras, data glasses and hyper-smart phones there is nowhere to hide . . . Currently, it feels like a day can’t go by without a new technology related scandal appearing in our headlines. Everyone from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, to corrupt foreign governments are having a go at manipulating data to further their own ends. We live in an information age, where data is collateral, and every aspect of our lives is available for analysis….

As a child he was smuggled to the Middle East from his London home, to be trained as one of the most elite insurgent soldiers of his generation. For years he was forced to do things no child should do, for a cause he couldn’t believe in. But while his brothers were preparing to kill, he was looking for a way out. Now, on the eve of the deadliest coordinated terrorist attacks Europe has ever seen, he’ll finally get his chance. He will break free and hunt down those responsible for making him a monster. He must draw on all his training, all of his deadly skills to survive. He is Sleeper 13. When it comes reading action thrillers, I have a few criteria that the story needs to meet. Firstly, the plot has to capture and hold my attention. A well-judged sense of pace is also key, and if the story manages to pull off a cinematic feel, so much the better. Rob Sinclair’s latest novel, Sleeper 13, ticks all these boxes and then some. At its heart, Sleeper 13 has a fascinating premise. The central protagonist has been trained for years as a terrorist, and it is what…

The Long Autumn is coming to an end. For almost a century after the coming of The Sisters, the surviving peoples of rainswept England have huddled in small communities and on isolated farms, scavenging the remains of the old society. But now society, of a kind, is starting to rebuild itself. In Kent, a brutal tyranny is starting to look West. In the Cotswolds, something terrible and only vaguely-glimpsed is happening. And in a little corner of Berkshire two families are at war with each other. After decades of simply trying to survive, the battle to inherit this brutal new world is beginning. A couple of years ago I picked up Europe in Autumn on a whim. I was travelling and needed something to divert my attention while on a flight (don’t get me started on how much I loathe flying). In the departure lounge I purchased the novel with absolutely no expectations. Something about the blurb captured my attention, but I had never heard of the author and had no idea what was in store. A couple of hours later the plane landed and I don’t think I had blinked during the entire flight. Dave Hutchison’s Fractured Europe novels…

Freya has a new virtual assistant. It knows what she likes, knows what she wants and knows whose voice she most needs to hear: her missing sister’s. It adopts her sister’s personality, recreating her through a life lived online. But this virtual version of her knows things it shouldn’t be possible to know. It’s almost as if the missing girl is still out there somewhere, feeding fresh updates into the cloud. But that’s impossible. Isn’t it? I’m sure many of you have a digital assistant in your home. It doesn’t matter if you use Siri or Cortana, Google or Alexa* it’s all still a bit of a novelty isn’t it? Flash forward five or ten years from now, and it will be commonplace. We’ll all have our own assistants that are with us twenty-four seven. A virtual presence that knows you better than you know yourself and caters for you every whim. Sounds blissful doesn’t it? Heather Child’s debut novel, Everything About You, uses this as a jumping off point.  The big question it ponders – what if this most intimate of relationships wasn’t all it appeared to be.  Many of us live big chunk of our lives online. Who…