The Girl In The Ice by Robert Bryndza

I love the cover to this book! The publishers, Bookouture, have to be the best publishing company out there at the moment for new and exciting authors, and great crime books.

“The Girl in the Ice has quite a bit of pre-release buzz about it and so it was bumped to the top of my tbr pile so that I could see what everyone was on about.

At first I really wasn’t sure about this book and mainly the writing style. I don’t think that I’ve ever quoted a book in a review before but I will give two examples now:

‘snow had spattered against its smooth yellow sandstone bricks, sticking like clumps of wet toilet tissue.’

‘The road stretched away behind, a slick of treacle bathed in sodium orange with the train station at its base, which was shuttered in darkness. The silence and the cold pressed down on her. The only movement was the stream of vapour as her breath hit the freezing air. ‘

The opening chapter is full of examples like this, I guess that you could call the writing style very descriptive. I have to admit that I wondered whether I’d be able to continue reading, but then suddenly I was sucked into the story and taken along for the ride. I think that the writing style settled, it stopped feeling like the author was trying too hard, or maybe I was just so immersed in the story that I stopped noticing.

This is Robert Bryndza’s first foray into crime writing, and it is the first book of his that I have read. It will not be the last. I am excited to see where he will go next with his main character DCI Erika Foster.

There seems to be a lot of books at the moment about female lead detectives racing to solve the crime, pissing off their boss while following their impressive gut instinct. With so many about I think that it is becoming hard to create a character that doesn’t start to feel just a little bit stereotypical, or obvious. DCI Foster does have a lot of differences to other female detectives with current book series about them, and she is a likeable character and one that you find yourself routing for, even though some of her actions are pushing the limits of believability.

Overall The Girl in the Ice was an enjoyable read, I think that despite the at times excessive descriptiveness that it is a very well written crime story. The publishers, Bookouture, are one of my favourite and I have yet to read a bad book of theirs, with The Girl in the Ice they have not let me down.

I was given an ARC of The Girl in the Ice by Bookouture via Netgalley in return for an honest review.”

While The Girl in the Ice didn’t quite meet my expectations given the buzz around it it is still a very good crime read. It is released on February 12th 2016.