fuonlyknew

I love the cover art for The Sham.

It makes you curious.

Is her hair blowing in the wind?

Is she under the water?

And what is The Sham?

Come on in and find out.

And don’t forget to enter the giveaway!

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The Sham

by Ellen Allen

Release Date: 09/07/14

238 pages

MY REVIEW

The story starts near the end and then flashes back to the beginning, six months prior. When the killings first began

Many of you may want to stop reading when you get to the second part. The past six months. The argument or How “Muzzling a Sparrow” can kill a friendship.

What happens in the park when four teenage girls gang up on a small boy defies comprehension. They are brutal to the extreme, hardly human. And one girl, Emily(Em for short), is no match for them. If it weren’t for a stranger, Jack, she couldn’t have stopped them.

Don’t let this stop you from continuing. I won’t tell you there isn’t more blood shed. There is a serial killer preying on the teenagers. And one by one they disappear,  later to be found dead.

The small town of Clevesham in southern England is in an uproar. All fear to be out at night. And no one knows who will be next.

Surreal is a good word to describe how I felt while reading The Sham. Most of the time I felt like Emily was trying to describe a dream.

You know how hard that is. No matter what you try, words can’t describe the disjointed, out of body, out of mind, feel of a dream.

I pictured the town as nestled in a hollow, dreary and dank, as it’s winter. Kind of sets the mood for what happens next.

One by one the people in the park that night turn up dead. Dogs howl in the dark. Strange words are written all over town. As their numbers dwindle, I have no clue who will be next.

I was hoping Emily would be a survivor. That she’d make it to graduation and hightail it out of there. With or without Jack.

Where to begin about Jack. He had no memories before arriving in The Sham. He seemed to have to eat constantly to refuel. He appeared to feel what others are feeling. And he spoke in half sentences, his mind jumping all over the place. I figured he was either nuts, a liar, or something else. Maybe something not human.

I don’t think I’ve read a more disquieting story. I felt ill at ease through most of it. Like I stepped out of ordinary into strange, lacking need to know information.

When I finally got my answers I was floored. Not once, but twice. I finally knew who was doing the killing. And I finally knew what was up with Jack.

Looking back, there are a couple of clues I missed. I didn’t pick up on them because of how distorted the story was. The author did an excellent job of camouflaging them.

I’m left wondering where the story goes from here. I’d sure like to know.

4 Stars

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Summary from Goodreads:

When love leads to death, be careful who you trust…

Eighteen-year-old Emily Heath would love to leave her dead-end town, known locally as “The Sham”, with her boyfriend, Jack, but he’s very, very sick; his body is failing and his brain is shutting down. He’s also in hiding, under suspicion of murder. Six months’ ago, strange signs were painted across town in a dialect no one has spoken for decades and one of Emily’s classmates washed up in the local floods.

Emily has never trusted her instincts and now they’re pulling her towards Jack, who the police think is a sham himself, someone else entirely. As the town wakes to discover new signs plastered across its walls, Emily must decide who and what she trusts, and fast: local vigilantes are hunting Jack; the floods, the police, and her parents are blocking her path; and the town doesn’t need another dead body.

WARNING: THIS BOOK IS UNSUITABLE FOR YOUNGER TEENAGE READERS. IT DEPICTS ADULT SITUATIONS, MURDER SCENES, CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SEX AND PROFANITY.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The idea for this book came to me in a nightmare… It was so vivid that I imagined I was 17 again, at school, in the same group of 4 friends that I used to hang around with. We were involved in a murder and cover-up. I started writing partly as a way to get it out of my head and then the characters turned into real people… and Emily and Jack were born.

As some of the early reviewers have stated, it is quite extreme in chapter one, and necessarily so. This is the incident that sets up the whole book; something awful happens that sets off a train of events for the characters. This book is a mystery in two ways in that we’re: 1) trying to find out who killed Emily’s classmate; and 2) trying to work out who Jack is. I hope you enjoy it!

Buy Links:

Amazon│Barnes & Noble│iBooks│Amazon UK

 

About the Author

I’ve just finished writing my first book, so I’ve been busy trying to work out how all the pieces fit together – the planning, the plot, the rules, the imagination, the characters, the grammar, the structure, the endgame… there’s too much stuff to remember and a lot of the information that I’ve discovered online about how to write isn’t that good or even well written (the irony in reading advice on writing that isn’t well written…)

 

So I decided I needed to find somewhere to store the good stuff. Then it occurred to me that other people might find it useful too. So here it is. My online reference tool of all the useful (i.e. good) advice for writers-to-be. I only post here when I have something really useful to say about the craft (Twitter is for daily musings, Goodreads to review and Amazon to buy my work); it’s all about the quality here, folks, not the quantity… Enjoy!

 

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook

 

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