No Turning Back: The new thriller from the #1 bestselling author

Sam Blake

May 2018 · The Cathy Connolly Series Book 3 · Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.

About this ebook

FOR FANS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN AND ANGELA MARSONS, NO TURNING BACK IS A GRIPPING READ THAT HAS ENOUGH TWISTS AND TURNS TO KEEP READERS GUESSING UNTIL THE VERY END.

Even perfect families have secrets . . .

Orla and Conor Quinn are the perfect power couple: smart, successful and glamorous. But then the unthinkable happens. Their only son, Tom, is the victim of a deliberate hit-and-run.

Detective Garda Cathy Connolly has just left Tom's parents when she is called to the discovery of another body, this time in Dillon's Park, not far from where Tom Quinn was found. What led shy student Lauren O'Reilly to apparently take her own life? She was a friend of Tom's and they both died on the same night - are their deaths connected and if so, how?

As Cathy delves deeper, she uncovers links to the Dark Web and a catalogue of cold cases, realising that those involved each have their own reasons for hiding things from the police. But events are about to get a lot more frightening . . .

Ratings and reviews

Set in Dublin, No Turning Back, attempts to give us an insight in to the working of the Garda from the perspective of a very determined young officer - Cat Connolly. Nothing wrong with that except the nicknames they have for each other and the details of interpersonal relationships all feels a little superficial. This may be because this is clearly a few books in to a series (I checked - this is the third book chronicling the events in the life and career of Cat Connolly) and so we are expected to already know the important people in her life. It does work as a stand alone book though, even if the events of previous cases do seep in on a fairly regular basis. There are a couple of intertwined tales going on here. You have the hit and run murder of a young man with distinguished parents, the discovery of a young girls body on the cliffe which may or may not be misadventure and a nice slice of cyber crime and a devolution on to the Dark Web. Unfortunately this does lead to things becoming very muddy with no real separation of the threads and I did find myself becoming a little confused as to how all the characters linked together and how this was supposed to gel together in to one tale. Couple this with regular asides in to Cat's private life and her emotional attachment to a superior officer. Then the seemingly pointless introduction of a professor at Trinity College - I am still not entirely sure what point this character served apart from to link the Garda to the CIA to expose the cybercimes being perpetrated under their noses. Quite a lot of page space is devoted to this character as well so I think that their may have been editing decisions made with the overall plot trajectory that now make her feel superfluous to some extent. There is a decent plot buried amongst some of the faff and flannel in the narrative. Certainly the ultimate denouement was fairly unexpected and the way at which the reveal is made shows that it is the slow plodding of procedure that gets results and not maverick intuition. Tension, however, is hard to come by. Just as it starts to build in one area of the investigation the next chapter will sidle off in to Cat's private life or to one of the other strands of the crimes being explained and it all fizzles out. Not one of my favourite books of the genre but certainly not one of the worst I have read. It is pretty much middle of the road and does provide a modicum of entertainment; just not enough to make me want to read Cat Connolly's back story or be too invested in where she moves on to next.

About the author

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the hugely popular national writing resources website Writing.ie. Little Bones, her debut, was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book of the Year award.