Body Language by A. K. Turner #bookreview #blogtour @AnyaLipska @ZaffreBooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n

I’m delighted to be sharing my thoughts on the debut novel by A.K. Turner, Body Language, on my blog today as part of the blog tour. With thanks to Tracy Fenton from Compulsive Readers for inviting me to take part. A.K. Turner will also be appearing at this month’s First Monday Crime. I’ll have all the details on how you can view the event at the end of this post.

BLURB

CASSIE RAVEN BELIEVES THE DEAD CAN TALK. WE JUST NEED TO LISTEN . . .

People think being a mortuary technician is a seriously weird job. They can’t understand why I choose to cut up dead bodies for a living. But they don’t know what I know:

The dead want to tell us what happened to them.

I’ve eviscerated thousands of bodies, but never someone I know before – someone who meant a lot to me; someone I loved.

The pathologist says that her death was an accident.

Her body is telling me differently.

MY THOUGHTS

Body Language by A K Turner is such a unique crime thriller. It’s one of the most original crime novels I’ve read in a long while.

I really liked Cassie, who is the lead protagonist. She works in a mortuary, and she is a character who has a unique interest in dead bodies. It’s something she has been fascinated by since she was a child, from around the time of her mother’s death. Back then, she would bring home dead animals to study.  Even she sometimes looks back on the interests she had as a child and thinks they were strange interests to have. But her grandmother, says otherwise and has never been slightly perturbed by her granddaughter’s interests. I really liked Cassie’s relationship with her grandmother; her grandmother is a straight talker, and she doesn’t appear to be afraid of anything.

I liked how Cassie treated the bodies of the deceased she is working with. Cassie claims that the dead can talk, but people just need to listen. She is really attentive towards them, and she treats them still as if they were living and breathing and with respect as well. But things begin to take an interesting turn when the body of her former teacher turns up at the mortuary. Cassie is concerned that there may be something more to her teacher’s death than first meets the eye. But it will take a lot of convincing on her part to get the police to investigate further. Cassie is determined, however, to make sure that if someone is responsible for the woman’s death, that they do face justice.

The other character who I liked was Detective Flyte. She and Cassie get off on the wrong foot right at the beginning, but throughout the novel, they begin to develop a friendship. I’m interested to see how this will progress in future books. I’m hoping that there are going to be many more books to come in this series.

Although this is quite a dark novel, there are some moments of humour as well. Although it sounds quite macabre, there is one particular scene with a human skull in a bathroom which did make me smile.

Body Language is cleverly plotted, and I’m really excited to read more from this series. If you’re a crime fiction fan, then you definitely need to add this to your to be read pile. I loved it. I’m looking forward to seeing where A K Turner will take Cassie next.

Publisher: Zaffre

Publication date: 26th November 2020

Print length: 384 pages

Body Language is available to buy:

Amazon UK Kobo Waterstones

FOLLOW THE BLOG TOUR

FIRST MONDAY CRIME

If you’d like to tune into this month’s First Monday Crime, you can do so via their Facebook page by clicking here. The event will be live streamed. The authors appearing this month are, Susi Holliday, author of The Last Resort, Sam Carrington author of The Open House, A.K. Turner author of Body Language and Deborah Masson author of Out for Blood. The event begins at 19.30 p.m on Monday, 7th December 2020.