Title: Five
Athor: Ursula P. Archer
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Age Group: Adult
Rating: 4 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
EVERY CORPSE IS A CLUE
N47° 46.605 E013° 21.718. A dismembered hand
N47° 48.022 E013° 10.910 Two severed ears
N47° 26.195 E013° 12.523 A mutilated corpse
A woman is found murdered. Tattooed on her feet is a strange combination of numbers and letters.
Map co-ordinates. The start of a sinister treasure hunt by a twisted killer.
Detective Beatrice Kaspary must risk all she has to uncover the killer in a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse
THANKS FOR THE HUNT
Five is an interesting crime novel combining geocaching with a mystery and murder. For those who don’t know geocaching, you enter GPS coordinates into your cell phone, and then go searching for “treasure” hidden by others. The item could’ve been there for years. Usually it’s something small, but in the case of “Five”, things are a little more gruesome. Think along the line of body parts. Yep, that gruesome.
The writing is excellent. I started this one at eleven thirty at night, hoping to read about half an hour before heading to back. Yeah…that didn’t work. I had to read this book in one sitting, even if it was two o’clock by the time I was finished. Main character, detective Beatrice Kaspary, is an intriguing protagonist. She’s a bit of a cliché character – the angry ex-husband, living for the job – but she makes it work. She’s so genuine, she could be a real person. Florin was a great sidekick, and the underlying attraction between both of them made for an interesting turn of events.
But it’s the murdering itself, the killing, and the killer, that really make the book shine. The geocaching elements screams originality (heck, at least to me, it’s the first I’d heard of it) and the killer himself is elusive. This isn’t a madman, which makes it all the more exciting. I kept on reading, even though my eyes were half-closed and I could barely reach the end of a page without yawning, because I simply had to find out who the killer was. In the dead of night, that’s quite a feat.
All in all, an intriguing mystery / thriller, and I’m confident we’ll see much more from this author. She has a great talent for describing characters and scenery.
P.S. Yes, I did go geocaching afterward. It was a blast! And no, I didn’t find any body parts. Thank God.
[…] I Heart Reading – ★★★★ […]