The Secrets Of Strangers - Charity Norman || Blog Tour

Five hostages, one café - and the moment that changed everything. 

'A compelling and fresh premise leads to a tense, humane, and touching novel'. Claire McGowan 

A regular weekday morning veers drastically off-course for five strangers whose paths cross in a London café - their lives never to be the same again when an apparently crazed gunman holds them hostage. But there is more to the situation than first meets the eye and as the captives grapple with their own inner demons, the line between right and wrong starts to blur.

Will the secrets they keep stop them from escaping with their lives?

Another tense, multi-dimensional drama from the writer of the Richard & Judy bestseller After the Fall.

I read After The Fall many moons ago & it's a book that still sticks with me. So when this blog tour came along, i knew i was in for a treat. I was right, this had me hooked from the very first page.

It's a regular morning for all our characters who as we meet them are all heading about their days and Charity introduces us to that, so we meet them all and where they are going, for example Neil who is going for a warm drink with the four pound that was put in his cup that morning. What none of them expected was that morning they would end up held hostage in a cafe.

It boils down to five hostages and a long game as we and they sit and await the outcome, with one dead already, it makes us question - why? We also meet the negotiator who is trying to bring this to a close. We start to discover the gunmans motive and why, he chose that morning to go into Tuckbox (the cafe) and shoot the owner, and hold all these strangers hostage.

This book was fast paced from the get - go with high speed impact i wondered how Charity would keep it so gripping all the way through as once the initial impact had happened it was really how it was going to end.  Charity did a fantastic job of keeping the reader hooked.

She allows the reader to go on the journey with the gunman as we discover him, we also discover slightly more about all the hostages and their own personal lives. Charity writes in a way that allows the reader to feel emphatic despite the horrible situation. I even may of lost a few tears towards the last few pages of this. She writes in a way that gives you attachment to all the characters.

I really really enjoyed this, it was stressful, dramatic and moving. I felt like it hit on some deep topics but handled them in a way the reader could handle and understand them. The atmosphere was kept throughout the whole book and changed as the situation developed which i really appreciated. Charity managed to match the tone of the mood with the setting and reflect it in the characters and their individual personalities.

Overall, a thrilling, gripping and moving read that keeps the reader hooked from the very first pages.
If you want to pick up your copy then you can do so from amazon here
I was gifted an e-arc for the blog tour.

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Charity Norman was born in Uganda and brought up in successive draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham. After several years' travel she became a barrister, specialising in crime and family law. In 2002, realising that her three children had barely met her, she took a break from the law and moved with her family to New Zealand. THE SECRETS OF STRANGERS is her sixth novel.