So the Doves by Heidi James is a twisty, paranoid thriller that will keep you engaged throughout its reading.

The author wrote a thriller that started with a bang and just kept going! The twists kept coming, so I couldn't put it down. I cannot wait to read more from this author!

So the Doves involves a journalist called back to the area where his mother lives to report on a body that has been discovered. The body’s discovery is initially thought to have some political implications or perhaps be linked to a missing policeman. As Marcus has returned to the scene of his youth, the story alternates between present day, and 1989, when Marcus was a child expelled from his posh school and the disappearance of his friend, Melanie.

The child Marcus and the story line told through his eyes is a little naive or vague, I suppose it is to highlight that our memories from childhood are not exactly as things really were. Perhaps we don’t really understand every thing that was really happening around us and as such our recall was not accurate and our judgement of events can be called into question. The modern day story involves Marcus’s career and his big expose that has been cast into doubt. It also concerns his relationship with his mother and his relationships in general. I don’t really want to say anything more because this is a layered book with the reader needing to make inferences and connections as they go along. The themes explored most obviously throughout are memory, guilt, shame, and secrets.

In the second mystery/thriller by British author Heidi James, "So the Doves," a hotshot journalist returns to his Kent hometown to confront anew the disappearance of his enigmatic teenage female friend twenty years earlier, only to see his life unravel. This is a classic mystery story and the author rattles the pace along for the first three quarters of the book, with some lovely time period descriptions and a sense of capturing the teenage years. But over-lengthy dialogue muddies the otherwise fine prose, and I felt the denouement was quite ho-hum. All in all, an enjoyable read but lacking some flair.