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Mike Thomas
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Unforgivable: A gritty new police drama for fans of Stuart MacBride (Dc Will Macready 2) Kindle Edition

by Mike Thomas (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 70 ratings
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A dark slice of Cardiff crime for fans of TONY PARSONS, JAMES OSWALD and LUCA VESTE. There isn't always a welcome in the valleys . . .

Bombs detonate in a busy souk, causing massive devastation.
An explosion rips apart a mosque, killing and injuring those inside.
But this isn't the Middle East - this is Cardiff . . .

In a city where tensions are already running high, DC Will MacReady and his colleagues begin the desperate hunt for the attacker. If they knew the 'why', then surely they can find the 'who'? But that isn't so easy, and time is fast running out . . .

MacReady is still trying to prove himself after the horrific events of the previous year, which left his sergeant injured and his job in jeopardy, so he feels sidelined when he's asked to investigate a vicious knife attack on a young woman.

But all is not as it seems with his new case, and soon MacReady must put everything on the line in order to do what is right.
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  1. Print length
    340 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Zaffre
  5. Publication date
    July 27, 2017
  6. File size
    4468 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mike Thomas has served with the Cardiff police for more than two decades. He is the author of Ash and Bones, Pocket Notebook, and Ugly Bus, which is being developed for a six-part series for the BBC.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01N16TP6G
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zaffre (July 27, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 27, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4468 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 340 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 70 ratings

About the author

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Mike Thomas

Mike Thomas

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Mike Thomas was born in Wales in 1971. For more than two decades he served in the police, working some of Cardiff ’s busiest neighbourhoods in uniform, public order units, drugs teams and CID. He left the force in 2015 to write full time.

His debut novel, 'Pocket Notebook', was published by William Heinemann (Penguin Random House) and longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year. The author was also named as one of Waterstones' 'New Voices' for 2010. His second novel, 'Ugly Bus', is currently in development for a six part television series with the BBC.

The first in the MacReady series of novels, 'Ash and Bones', was released August 2016 by Bonnier Zaffre. 'Unforgivable', the second in the series, is released in July 2017.

He lives in the wilds of Portugal with his wife and two children.

Follow the author on Twitter at @ItDaFiveOh. More details can be found on the website www.mikethomasauthor.co.uk

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
70 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

damppebbles
5.0 out of 5 stars FOUR AND A HALF STARS
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2017
I have had the first book in the DC Will MacReady series, Ash and Bones on my TBR since it was published. I remember thinking at the time how drawn I was to the book, how gritty and real the blurb felt. Unfortunately time has not been on my side and I have (so far) completely failed to read it. So when I was given the opportunity to read the second book, Unforgivable it was a no-brainer for me. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t read the first in the series, I wanted to be a part of the launch tour. And oh wow, I wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed.

This book opens with a catastrophic bang and I was immediately hooked. The scenes of chaos, the terror…my heart ached for the families, the normal everyday people caught up in a cataclysmic event. The author has expertly created an incredibly tense opening to what proves to be a terrifying yet realistic story, one I thoroughly enjoyed.

I’m still unsure exactly how I feel about DC Will MacReady. I do like him, but there are certain aspects that left me feeling cold. I loved his determination, his work ethic, his budding relationship with his newborn son and his utter distaste towards his thuggish, wife-beating brother. What left me feeling was cold was his extra-marital affair with a television journalist and his frostiness towards his wife. However (and it’s a big however) MacReady has been through some emotionally traumatic times, that’s clear for the reader to see. But whether these painful incidents permit him to pursue his affair…well, I don’t know. The author has put MacReady in a marital situation that would test the most devoted of couples. And it’s an interesting one. Really, really interesting.

There were several mentions of an event which occurred in the first book. At certain points, I wish I had been able to read Ash and Bones before Unforgivable so I could find out the intricacies of the previous investigation and exactly how it had played out, as it spills over ever so slightly into Unforgivable. Saying that, the author has done a great job of ensuring you have just enough of the back story for the book to make perfect sense. I would say, if anything, I now want to read the first book in the series more than ever!

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely! You can tell from early on that the author is ex-police. There is no messing around in Unforgivable, you’re thrown head first into the melee and it is BRILLIANT! A terrifying tale of revenge and bitterness expertly narrated by an author who has lived life on the front line. A must read for crime thriller fans!

Four and a half out of five stars.

I chose to read and review an ARC of Unforgivable. The above review is my own unbiased opinion.
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sharon
4.0 out of 5 stars intense and intelligent thriller
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2017
#KillerHook Alert! What a killer hook of a start! With the description of the market in full flow – could almost hear, see and smell the riot of colours, tastes and vibrancy before #BANG it exploded into one of the most explosive starts ever! I can tell you it did not let up at all right until the very last page!

DC Will MacReady and the team are thrown into the midst of what appears to be racially motivated attacks in Cardiff City Centre. While Will wants to be in the thick of the investigation his superiors sideline him to investigate the attack on a young girl around the same time of the bombings. Tensions are running high across the force and it is soon clear that the team might be entering a race against time that they just do not have!

I was slightly hesitant to start when reading the book, I hadn’t read the first in the series and I definitely did miss out on a bit of the back story as to why MacReady was in disgrace and just how complex his personal life really was. However, enough information was given to ensure that I could still follow the plot and not feel like I was missing out.

MacReady has obviously been a bit of a naughty boy in the past and his personal relationships take the Facebook Status “It’s Complicated” to a whole new level. This meant that not only was MacReady investigating an attack which involved liaising with devastated parents: trying to get in on the action on the bombing investigation, he was also caught smack bang in the middle of a massive relationship crisis and this whole tangled affair made for an intense reading experience! (and made me want to go and read the first in the series to find out even more!) As a reader, I could feel MacReady’s anguish as he worked alongside the family and how this invoked conflicting emotions in him in relation to his own family dynamics.

He is a bit of an enigma, is MacReady, there is something raw inside of him and his own turbulent background clearly plays a significant part in how he deals with things. His dad is in prison for murder and his brother is in court following domestic assault charges, I can just imagine the station tongues wagging at his colourful past!

It’s a harrowing novel which uncovers some of the most disturbing scenes in the aftermath of the bombings; it feels all too real reading this given what is happening in our world today. The plot is bang up to date with reference to social media reporting on events, the way in which the media collates and presents the news to the world were all covered with great detail and accuracy.

As the plot uncovered it soon became clear that there was more to this story than first met the eye. I was impressed at the level of detail and accuracy in this book and I was soon caught up in the storyline to the point where I was unable to put the book down until I had finished.

Unforgivable is a tightly crafted explosive and intense thriller that twists and weaves its way throughout the connected plots and bringing together a killer of a conclusion. Plenty of twists and turns kept me guessing all the way through and left me desperate to find out what happens next! I only wish I had read the first in the series before this one!
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Top reviews from other countries

Sheenagh Pugh
5.0 out of 5 stars Anger in a hot summer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2017
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He smiles. Calmer than he thought he would be. Shrugs off his rucksack and places it on the ground. Reaches inside and pulls them out. One, two, three. Enough for now. Digs out his lighter, sparks it. Watches the dancing women, the happy families. Taps his foot and nods his head in time to the beat from a nearby sound system.
Lights one of the fuses and tosses the IED into the crowd.

An IED is an Improvised Explosive Device (until fairly recently, Thomas was a policeman and still speaks the lingo). The question haunting this book - quite apart from whodunit and will the police catch them before they do it again – is what sort of person attacks a crowd of innocent strangers with such a deadly thing, and the answer is more various and more complicated than the police initially think. The usual Twitter assumptions – racist, extremist, loner, loser – crop up and some have a degree of truth in them, but none, in this novel, is a full answer. One could point to likely motivations, yet these very factors also exist for other characters in the novel who do not react in the same way. This is the sort of novel where a reviewer really does not want to commit spoilers, because not only is it a page-turner, it has at least two genuinely surprising twists midway when we, in the person of DC Will MacReady, realise something that wasn't obvious at first. So I'll go no further down that road except to say that anger, and the various possible causes of anger and reactions to it, are key, and that in this respect, as in others, it is a very contemporary novel.

DC MacReady first appeared in Thomas's last novel, Ash and Bones, and though it is perfectly possible to read this one as a stand-alone, myself I would recommend reading Ash and Bones first (it's no hardship; I reviewed it here) because you'll then be more immediately au fait with our Will's complicated personal life. His wry, jaundiced attitude to his life, job, senior officers and fellow humans in general provides the trademark humour Thomas's fans already know:

Penarth didn't do sink estates. The closest it ever had – the Billy Banks flats, a failed sixties development of dog-turd-encrusted grass patches and pebble-dash the colour of smog – had been demolished at the tail end of the noughties to make way for stratospherically expensive apartments and townhouses. replete with private security patrols and a propensity amongst the occupants to wear sailor hats and shorts, possibly because at least three of the buildings offered a glimpse of the Bristol Channel.

This brings me to one of the stand-out features of this novel, its sense of place and time. I lived many years in Cardiff, and it may be that I reacted more strongly to it because of that. But I honestly think that even to readers who don't know the city, a sense of its vibrant multiculturalism, its consumerism, the contrast between its rich and poor areas and above all the effect of a hot summer on its mood, would come over. Thomas's re-creation of it has the vividness and detail of someone who has not just walked and driven its streets, but done so with real observation.

In Ash and Bones, children and people's attitudes to them were extremely important and potentially redemptive. They figure in this novel too, but in Unforgivable it becomes clear that no factor in life – the presence or absence of children, being in a relationship or steering clear, getting on with one's parents or avoiding them – is a guaranteed panacea for anything. The frequent parallels between the habits, pursuits and problems of the law-abiding and the ungodly raise, again and again, the question of why people go one way and how easily they might go another. The novel's ending illustrates this quite graphically, and in a way that may well raise a laugh, albeit a wry one.

The book's title might be taken to refer to the crimes it describes, but that depends on your viewpoint. For most of the time, we are in Will's point of view, but every so often – four times, to be precise – we go into another, and it is then that we see how things that most of us might put down to bad luck or our own fault become, in more damaged or twisted minds, "unforgivable", with dire consequences. I found this point-of-view shift really effective and convincing.

This taut, pacy, atmospheric account of events over five hectic days is as engaging and convincing as has become usual for this author. No doubt his police background is what makes him sound so in control of his material, but he is not content just to write what he knows; in this novel he is interested in what we can never wholly know, the inside of others' heads, and if we first read the novel as a page-turner, wanting to know "what happens next" (which I certainly did), it is the "why" that will be more in our minds when we re-read.
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Andrew Webber
5.0 out of 5 stars A gritty and intense rollercoaster of a novel
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2017
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A rollicking rollercoaster of a novel. Fast-paced, gritty, dark and intensely believable from the get-go,
I raced through it in a day and a half.

The frequent switching of points of view between terrorist and police adds to the drama, and for an ex-police, Thomas shows a powerful ability to get inside the head of the bad guys, making the story all the more realistic as a result.

I'm a big fan of the author (his second novel Ugly Bus remains one of my favourites) and was anxiously anticipating this second instalment to the series
- I loved that this had a darker feeling than the first. Unfortunately I know face a frustrating wait for the next now face can't wait for the next!
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DWANNY
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic read, can't wait for next instalment.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2018
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Absolutely loved this book. Even better than the first. You can tell by the detail that goes into these books that the author was a serving police officer as he gives you a more realistic view of the job, from the mundane everyday tasks to the more serious aspects of the job, whilst also having a humorous dig at the hierarchy and politicians. The story itself was so current and fast paced I couldn't put it down. This series is a must read for those who enjoy British crime novels especially if you are a fan of Peter James, M.J.Arlidge, Paul Finch, Angela Marsens & Simon Kernick. Can't wait for the next book in the Will Macready series.
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Chris
5.0 out of 5 stars Very impressive
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 19, 2017
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I absolutely adored Ash and Bones, the first in the series, so I had very high hopes for the follow-up, and Mike Thomas has more than delivered.
Unforgivable is a mesmerising, pacy, beautifully written journey to the dark side of humanity. We follow MacReady as he's sidelined from the hunt to stop a bomber in a highly charged Cardiff, and instead given the task of looking into a seemingly unrelated knife attack. What follows is five days of twisting, turning, almost frightening relevant story. The characters are so deeply, thoughtfully drawn, that I found myself utterly immersed in the plot, and, as always, Thomas writes with an air of authenticity and detail that places him at the very top of British crime writers. Brilliant stuff.
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H. Hill
5.0 out of 5 stars Intense crime thriller, the attention to detail on the ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2017
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Intense crime thriller, the attention to detail on the the pressures and process of modern policing coming from the experiences of the author give a believable narrative. Fast paced and powerful. Waiting for the next DC Will MacReady book!
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