Review, Excerpt & Giveaway - January Justice by Athol Dickson

January Justice by Athol Dickson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kindle Edition, 307 pages

Published December 1st 2012 by Author Author Inc. (first published November 30th 2012)

Source: Blog Tour

Synopsis:
'Reeling from his wife's unsolved murder, Malcolm Cutter is just going through the motions as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Hollywood's rich and famous. Then a pair of Guatemalan tough guys offer him a job. It's an open question whether they're patriotic revolutionaries or vicious terrorists. Either way, Cutter doesn't much care until he gets a bomb through his window, a gangland beating on the streets of L.A., and three bullets in the chest. Now there's another murder on Cutter's Mind. His own.'

My Thoughts:
January Justice has to be one of the better books I have read this year so far and I am so glad to have joined in as a participant in the tour for this book.
January Justice is your typical mystery/crime book that slowly builds itself up into an intriguing story that I ended up finding hard to put down after I was about halfway through.
The main character is Malcolm Cutter, a chauffeur and part-time private investigator who seems to be a very hard but still fairly interesting person when you first meet him. Gradually, as the story goes on you learn quite a lot about Malcolm's background and what has shaped him to be the person he is today and I really found myself liking him immensely as a lead character by the end. He's tough and headstrong when it's needed but can also be very kind-hearted when necessary as well.
The story is based around Malcolm's struggle with losing his movie star wife a few months earlier and the fact that he gets engaged in a complex investigation to clear up the details of an old kidnapping case. It soon becomes clear that there are people out there who don't want him snooping around old business and will stop at nothing to get him to stop his investigation.
What I loved the most about this book was the complex and intriguing characters it was full to the brim with. No-one was who they seemed and even the humble butler and gardener who live on the same estate with Malcolm end up being more than first meets the eye.
This is the first book I have read by Athol Dickson and certainly won't be my last. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading January Justice and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in mystery or crime novels.

Excerpt:

ONE OF THE STRANGEST THINGS ABOUT THE CITY was the sudden way it disappeared around the edges. One minute you were down on Sunset Boulevard surrounded by glass and concrete, and the next thing you knew you were up on Mulholland Drive, alone in the rough country. From a high window or a rooftop almost anywhere in Los Angeles you could see the mountains, and there was always something ravenous up there looking down. I was up among the hungry creatures, standing at the edge of a cliff, with Hollywood and Santa Monica far below me in the distance. One step forward and I would be in midair. I was looking down and wondering if Haley had considered how suddenly you could go from city to wilderness. Then I wondered if it was a distinction without a difference, if the city might be the wilderness and the wilderness the city, and maybe Los Angeles’s edges seemed to disappear so suddenly because there really was no separation between sidewalks and mountain paths, buildings and boulders. Up in the mountains or down in the city, either way the carnivores were in control. I imagined Haley, out of her mind, running full speed off the cliff. I wondered what it had been like, that final second or two before she hit. Had she realized what was happening? Did she recognize the city lights below for what they were, or did she really think she was flying toward the stars? And did she think of me? Stepping closer to the edge, I slid the toes of my shoes into the air. I looked down two hundred feet, toward the spot where she had broken on the rocks. I stood one inch from eternity and tried to imagine life without her. I could not summon up a single reason why I shouldn’t take that final step, except for one. I thought about the kind of animal who would drive someone to do what my wife had done. Predators like that were everywhere. I should know. I had trained for half my life to be one of them. I was hungry, looking down on the city. If I was going to live, the hunger would have to be enough, for now. But I would sink my teeth into him, sooner or later. I would do that for Haley, and for myself, and then maybe it would be my turn to see if I could fly. I stepped back from the edge.

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Author Bio:

A master of profound suspense. Athol Dickson's mystery, suspense, and literary novels have won three Christy Awards and an Audie Award. Suspense fans who enjoyed Athol's They Shall See God will love his latest novel, January Justice, the first instalment in a new mystery series called The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs. The second and third novels in the series, Free Fall in February, and A March Murder, are coming in 2013. Critics have favourably compared Athol's work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher's Weekly), Hermann Hesse (The New York Journal of Books) and Flannery O'Connor (The New York Times). Athol lives with his wife in southern California. Please visit his website at www.AtholDickson.com, and like his Facebook fan page. Praise for Athol Dickson's novels: "Atmospheric, well-paced and powerfully imagined . . . a highly entertaining nail-biter." (Publishers Weekly) ". . . richly imagined . . . lyrically written . . . artfully constructed." (Bookwire) ". . . well-written . . . intelligent . . . suspenseful . . . engrossing." (Library Journal) ". . . elegant prose . . . very well written." (The New York Review of Books )

Websites & Links:

 

Thank you to Athol Dickson and Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours for generously offering this book to me for review. If you'd like to join in on an upcoming tour just stop by their sites and sign up today!