The Contraband Killing

Genre: Mystery, Adult

Style: Physical (Paperback)

Page Count: 266 pages

Trigger Warnings: mention of death, mention of smuggling, mention of a gang, hints at a possible inappropriate relationship (they are more like background characters)

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Summary:

This follows Principal Officer Dan Foster of the Bow Street Runners and his interpreter and assistant, Constable Evans as they are sent to collect a smuggler from Wales who is set to go on trial in London. If there is anything that Dan Foster is happy about it’s that this is a routine assignment and shouldn’t take more than a few days so that way he can get back home to his family.

But things don’t go to plan. So when a prison escort is ambushed and the smuggler escapes, it is up to Dan Foster to catch him before anyone else dies. What starts as a straightforward transfer turns into a manhunt. One that can cause people, particularly the smuggler’s enemies, their lives.

Dan’s search for the killer brings him face to face with a ruthless smuggler gang — and his chances of getting off the island alive begin to look far from promising. So can Dan catch the killer and get home to his family alive?

Thoughts:

I do think that this book started slowly in my opinion. But I liked the fact that if you didn’t read the three books before this one, then you get an idea of who Dan Foster is, the kind of man when he is at work and at home as well as a sense of what he does work-wise.

If you know me then you know I am a sucker for short chapters. It just helps me get into the story as a whole. And I loved the fact that there were short chapters in this book because I think that I got more out of it as a whole. After all, I became invested in the story.

I think that I would love to go and read the books before this one. Because I think I would get a lot more out of this one and like it a lot more if I had read the ones before this one. Even though this can be read as a stand-alone, I think that as a reader, I would have gotten a lot more out of it if this wasn’t the first book that I read in the series.

I do think mysteries are very hit-or-miss with me. I either find myself loving it and just wanting more of the world and more by the author or finding them extremely meh. And I don’t mind a mystery behind slow but I do think that if it starts slow it does take me out of the story just a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, when it got going I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to see if Dan would catch the killer and get home alive but I can’t get over the fact that it did take a while to get to that point where I couldn’t put it down and couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.

About The Author:

Lucienne Boyce writes historical fiction, non-fiction, and biography. After gaining an MA in English Literature, specializing in eighteenth-century fiction, she published her first historical novel, To The Fair Land (2012, reissued 2021), an eighteenth-century thriller set in Bristol and the South Seas.

Her second historical novel, Bloodie Bones: A Dan Foster Mystery (2015, reissued 2022) is the first of the Dan Foster Mysteries and follows the fortunes of a Bow Street Runner who is also an amateur pugilist. Bloodie Bones was joint winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and was also a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction 2016. The second Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s Block (2017, reissued 2022), was awarded an IndieBrag Medallion in 2018. The third in the series, Death Makes No Distinction (2019, reissued 2022), is also an IndieBrag Medallion honoree, recipient of the Chill With a Book Premium Readers’ Award, and a joint Discovering Diamonds book of the month. In 2017 an e-book Dan Foster’s novella, The Fatal Coin, was published by S-Books. The Fatal Coin is now available in paperback.

The Bristol Suffragettes, a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the South West of England was published in 2013. In 2017 Lucienne published a collection of short essays, The Road to Representation: Essays on the Women’s Suffrage Campaign.

Other Publications:

‘Not So Militant Browne’ in Suffrage Stories: Tales from Knebworth, Stevenage, Hitchin, and Letchworth (Stevenage Museum, 2019)
‘Victoria Lidiard’ in The Women Who Built Bristol, Jane Duffus (Tangent Books, 2018)
‘Tramgirls, Tommies and the Vote’ in Bristol and the First World War: The Great Reading Adventure 2014 (Bristol Cultural Development Partnership/Bristol Festival of Ideas, 2014)

Rating:

3.5