| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Doll Makers for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backwards glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendour. Rather they remain as hard as gems. --Anna Rice, Blood and Gold
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
PI Annie Raymond's dreams of being a successful insurance fraud investigator start to look precarious when she is accused of corruption. She decides that it is time to come clean, both to her aunt who raised her as her own, and to her estranged father, a police sergeant in rural Argyle. However, neither wants to listen. Her father is swamped by a murder enquiry and her aunt is full of conspiracy theories and gossip. Suddenly, news from London has Annie racing south, but the case is not the lifeline she hoped for...Or is it? After all, it wouldn't take much to fake the evidence and deliver the miracle...Annie knows she has to clear her head and concentrate, yet echoes from Scotland resonate, and when a witness in London provides a horrifying revelation, the loose ends in her case become entangled with events hundreds of miles north. All at once, Annie realises that she must get back to her father before it is too late...
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Annie Raymond's London P. I. business seems to be going down the pan, taking her old maiden aunt's life savings with it, and Annie owes her aunt in more ways than one. She travels to rural Argyll to come clean, both to her aunt and to her father, a police sergeant. There she finds Aunt Marian boasting to all her friends about her niece's successful business, and her father embroiled in a murder enquiry that has some nasty echoes of Annie's mother's death, years ago.
News of a lifeline for her business has Annie racing down south before she manages to break her bad tidings, but Argyll hasn't finished with her yet, and her unhappy past begins to cast a long and terrifying shadow over Annie...
I found this book gripping, and read it over two days, mostly curled up in an armchair next to the fire, with the rain pelting down outside. Brilliant. Can't wait for the next Penny Grubb.
News of a lifeline for her business has Annie racing down south before she manages to break her bad tidings, but Argyll hasn't finished with her yet, and her unhappy past begins to cast a long and terrifying shadow over Annie...
I found this book gripping, and read it over two days, mostly curled up in an armchair next to the fire, with the rain pelting down outside. Brilliant. Can't wait for the next Penny Grubb.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I met the wonderfully idiosyncratic heroine, Annie Raymond, in Penny's first detective novel, Like False Money, and enjoyed her doubts, courage and intelligence there. In The Doll Makers, Annie travels from her new post in London to visit her father in Scotland and Penny Grubb highlights the contrasts between the noise and claustrophobia of the capital and the space and relative peace of a small Scottish loch-side town.
The story holds the reader's interest from the start and keeps a tight grip on it to the last word. Penny has a way of getting inside the heads and hearts of her characters to bring them to life. Even her villains carry characteristics that make the reader care what happens. But it is Annie who we really empathise with, in spite of her faults, irritabilities, occasional snap judgements and chaotic domestic lifestyle, or maybe because of these. Her quick wits, intelligence, bravery and determination drive the story, with its multiple threads, racing us from chapter to chapter, anxious to know what happens next and eager to identify the real villains amongst the panoply of potential candidates.
There are surprises, shocks and moments of sudden illumination in the twists and turns of the plot so that it becomes difficult to put the book down. I was forced by circumstances to read the book in two sessions but would have read from beginning to end without interruption had it been possible. Such is the developing pace of the story that the reader becomes emotionally engaged in the ever more complex puzzles that lead Annie into great peril. The reader is given clues denied the detective and this makes for tension as we see her stepping toward dangers we know of but to which she is blind. Clues are scattered throughout the narrative for the reader to solve the puzzles, but the solution is not easy and I was surprised by the denouement, though it was, in the end, the only possible outcome.
Penny handles scenes of danger particularly well, injecting feelings of fear, anxiety and doubt into the story so that the reader is drawn into the created world. Her meticulous research takes us inside real buildings with Annie, along real streets and into real woodland with her, to perilous drops where we hold our breath and into peaceful glades, where we rest for a while as she ruminates.
The Doll Makers is not simply a damned good read, it is an experience shared with the indomitable Annie as she moves through curiosity, incomprehension, disappointment, betrayal and growing enlightenment to a conclusion that is scary, intense and inevitable. If you enjoy your crime spiced with a mixture of gritty realism, humour, human failings and intelligence, this is definitely a book for you. I don't generally read crime fiction, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it.
The story holds the reader's interest from the start and keeps a tight grip on it to the last word. Penny has a way of getting inside the heads and hearts of her characters to bring them to life. Even her villains carry characteristics that make the reader care what happens. But it is Annie who we really empathise with, in spite of her faults, irritabilities, occasional snap judgements and chaotic domestic lifestyle, or maybe because of these. Her quick wits, intelligence, bravery and determination drive the story, with its multiple threads, racing us from chapter to chapter, anxious to know what happens next and eager to identify the real villains amongst the panoply of potential candidates.
There are surprises, shocks and moments of sudden illumination in the twists and turns of the plot so that it becomes difficult to put the book down. I was forced by circumstances to read the book in two sessions but would have read from beginning to end without interruption had it been possible. Such is the developing pace of the story that the reader becomes emotionally engaged in the ever more complex puzzles that lead Annie into great peril. The reader is given clues denied the detective and this makes for tension as we see her stepping toward dangers we know of but to which she is blind. Clues are scattered throughout the narrative for the reader to solve the puzzles, but the solution is not easy and I was surprised by the denouement, though it was, in the end, the only possible outcome.
Penny handles scenes of danger particularly well, injecting feelings of fear, anxiety and doubt into the story so that the reader is drawn into the created world. Her meticulous research takes us inside real buildings with Annie, along real streets and into real woodland with her, to perilous drops where we hold our breath and into peaceful glades, where we rest for a while as she ruminates.
The Doll Makers is not simply a damned good read, it is an experience shared with the indomitable Annie as she moves through curiosity, incomprehension, disappointment, betrayal and growing enlightenment to a conclusion that is scary, intense and inevitable. If you enjoy your crime spiced with a mixture of gritty realism, humour, human failings and intelligence, this is definitely a book for you. I don't generally read crime fiction, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This action-packed story races along with as many twists and turns as the perilous mountain road which insurance investigator Annie must navigate with a killer on her tail. Fragments of childhood memory torment Annie and tease the reader. The threat of a faceless enemy who anticipates her moves, combined with Annie's inner journey, kept me turning the pages until the grisly denouement.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Riveting
This is the second in the Annie Raymond PI series. Time has moved on and so has the depth of writing. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Linda Acaster
Sometimes dark, sometimes funny, always fast moving.
Annie Raymond is a very interesting character and I have been watching out for this second book in the series since I read the first one, Like False Money. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Danuta Reah
If you have never thought that you might like crime fiction . . .
I once tried to read an Agatha Christie, having enjoyed Margaret Rutherford in Murder, She Said. Alas, it was not the book of the film I was expecting. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Mr. R. Harris
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
