Bloq - Alan Jones

OH MY DAYS! Where am I supposed to start with this review? I started this book late one night and by lunchtime the next day I was finished!

Bloq opens up with a disturbing prologue involving an illegal burial, but we don't find out anymore about this until later on in the book.

We then meet Bill Ingram, a recent widower, who is waiting at Glasgow train station for his daughter Carol to arrive from London. It soon becomes clear that Carol isn't on the train and despite numerous calls to both her mobile and home phone Bill can't contact her so he decides to drive to London to see if he can find any clues to her whereabouts.

The police aren't interested when he tries to file a missing person's report so Bill sets off on his own and slowly builds up a picture of Carol's life in London and it's not long before he hears about Bloq, a nightclub run by a charming but unsavoury Albanian named Aleksander. Carol and her friends were frequent visitors to the club but things start to turn nasty when Bill is spotted hanging around asking customers if they've seen his daughter.

Bill's journey is fraught with danger but he's determined to find his daughter at whatever cost.

Every single character in this book feels so real and I found myself living every page with them. At times it was disturbing to read but this story could be and probably is an issue facing real life people today. There were many occasions where I found that I was holding my breath as I was reading and the tension was mounting but that only prompted me to turn the pages faster and faster. For me, Alan Jones has an incredilbe way of drawing you into his books right from the outset, he then throws you around for a bit and then spits you out at the end and I love every minute of it. If you've read either of his previous books (The Cabinetmaker or Blue Wicked) you might think like I did in that he surely can't write any better. . . . . .think again as Bloq is the proof!

This is a tense book that will have you literally chewing your fingernails and I highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy.

With kind thanks to author Alan Jones for the review copy.