I haven't read any of Katerina Diamond's novels before, so was very pleased to be introduced to her writing. Felicity returns to the town she was brought up in, but left in mysterious circumstances 16 years ago. What prompts her is news of a missing girl. Throughout the book we are teased with more information about why she is connected to this disappearance and how she could find the girl. This is a real page turner with twists and turns to the plot even through to the last page. I really enjoyed the book, although one or two points were rather farfetched. A good read and highly recommended.

The story starts out when Felicity hears a news story about a missing girl in the town she fled from sixteen years previously. She is distraught and feels compelled to go back home straight away. Another girl went missing just before Felicity left home all those years ago and she feels responsible and has to go back to help, only she can help.

The story alternates between the POV of Felicity in the present and Jasmine in the past. The plot is extremely slow, particularly when we are hearing from Felicity as she doesn’t seem to make any progress other than wandering around her home town and getting drunk. I did enjoy reading about what happened in the past from Jasmine. She was the only character that I felt anything for.

I didn’t see the twists coming at the end and it was almost worth the wait. However I was still left disappointed and felt that more tension should have been injected into the big reveal and the closing scenes, especially after sticking with the story to get there. The ending felt rushed and I was left feeling flat rather than satisfied.

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this

I was a little disappointed when I realised that this was a stand alone.

I was so WRONG!

This book is absolutely brilliant. Going from the past to the present day we learn about Flick and her teenage years.

I was gripped from
The first paragraph and did not see the twists and turns coming. I tried to guess what was going on, but was far from the mark.

Another fantastic read from Katerina Diamond.

Thank you for letting me review this title

Rates this book over a few days it was so good . Highly recommend this book to all . Defiantly worth a read .

Wow what a fantastic book with a brilliant twist . I loved the characters and the great friendship with the 2 different lives of the friends . Just goes to show you never know what goes on behind closed doors and the perfect looking families are rarely that at all . I will be looking for more from this author,I highly recommend this book

A girl Felicity reads about the disappearance of a girl from her hometown which she had left many years previously . This leads to her going back home for the first time since she left . Her childhood had appeared happy , with her parents being well thought of and spending their holidays going around the world helping out with charitable projects . The family moved into a new home and allowed a young man , who had been homeless and sleeping in his car move into an annexe ., in exchange for help in doing work on the property .
At first this seems to be going well until the daughter suspects he is up to something strange. A teacher at her school gets fired for sexually assaulting her and later appears to have committed suicide . Her best friend has a drunken mother and it appears and is jealous of her supposedly happy family life . All is not as it seems as this exciting story unfolds with catastrophic discoveries from before and the present .

This was a slow-burner of a read. It took me quite a while to get into it. However, once it gets going, it is a killer of a book and certainly worth persevering through the start!
We are alternating between now and then chapters. In the ‘now’ chapters, we are following Felicity, a very troubled character. She has seen something on the news that has set the hairs on the back of her neck off. She knows this means she is going to have to revisit her past but will she get all the answers?
The ‘then’ chapters are following Jasmine, another morose character, telling us the story of both hers and Felicity’s past. What happened that summer that changed everything?
I really didn’t know what direction the book was going to take. I guessed one of the surprises, but the reasons for this I had no clue and they came out of left field and hit me over the head. I just didn’t see them coming at all. At this point, I was devouring the book so fast to get all the answers I think I finished it in record time.
It was brilliantly written. It gets you hooked slowly and builds up the story, so you are getting to know the characters. At one point with all the school friends, I was getting a bit lost of who was who but the main characters were easy to keep up with. The ’then’ and ‘now’ was clearly marked and wasn’t confusing at all.
Overall, a brilliant and engaging read that I’m glad I requested on NetGalley after only having read one other book by this author. I will certainly be reading more.

This is a must summer read!!!! A brilliant whodunnit which got me tapping my kindle faster and faster. Full of tension and suspense. In places my heart was racing and I just had to keep on reading I HAD TO KNOW THE TRUTH!!!! This read gave my grey matter a real workout, I love the way this author tells a story, gets you well and truly hooked then WHAM you are reeled in. Another fantastic five star read from the Queen of Crime.
Thanks to Avon Books UK and Netgalley for the ARC.

Really enjoyable book with lots to keep you guessing throughout. You often think you know what is going on, but there are plenty of surprises and curveballs right to the very end!

I have read and enjoyed this author’s previous books and this one certainly did not disappoint.

After a fairly slow start, it then drew me in at speed! It was an intriguing story with complicated characters.

I highly recommend.

If you want a book which draws you in with believable characters with whom you can feel at least a little sympathy, and a well thought out plot that moves along at a pace even slightly faster than a snail going backwards, you'll not find it here.

Our heroine, Felicity, returns to her home town after the disappearance of a young girl. Having fled the town some sixteen years earlier following the disappearance of a friend, she feels an obligation to go back. No, I'm not sure either, but there we are, this is the premise of this painfuly slow, rather dull, book. I couldn't connect with any of the characters, the dialogue is, at times, cheesier than a ripe camembert,, and it just didn't hold my interest at all.

Heatwave? Why? What's the relevance? This is possibly the only mystery about this book. It's certainly not the “tense, gripping, shocking” book described by some anonymous fan, or “absorbing and wonderfully twisted” as described by another. I can only think they read a different book, because this one had me falling asleep.

The book starts in an unusual way. There is a kidnap in Sidmouth, Devon. Then it switches to the Lake District to a family who seem to be quite ordinary and well balanced. Suddenly, the mother, Felicity, decides to go to Sidmouth on the spur of the moment. Quite out of character apparently.

We find out that Felicity used to live in Sidmouth and she left when she was 16. From the writing, the reader gets the feeling that Felicity has run away from something dreadful that happened there all those years ago. Felicity hates being back.

The story jumps from the present when Felicity is the narrator to the past, when Jasmine becomes the narrator, Felicity’s best friend. The two storylines come together nicely in the book, in a lovely dramatic fashion.

The only bit I didn’t really like was not understanding why Felicity ran down to Sidmouth when she heard about the disappearance of the young girl. Even though you knew you would find out, it wasn’t written well in my opinion. In order to enjoy the book I just had to forget my feelings and read what was in front of me.

As Jasmine grew up, a lot of bad things happened around her. The links between the characters are unveiled well as is the revealing of secrets. There are plenty of twists, turns and surprises to be revealed. It’s a good read, although I didn’t feel the book related to the title or the beach on its front cover.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Avon books for the opportunity to read.

This review will go live on 29 May. I will copy it to Goodreads and Amazon afterwards:
Hi and welcome to my review of The Heatwave!

I know there’s a bit of a contradictio in terminis going on on my little blog, ‘cause I keep telling everyone who will listen that I’m on a NetGalley ban, yet I keep posting NetGally ARC reviews. I have SUCH a good reason though: books from authors I love keep popping up and I cannot walk away from that, I am not made of steel!

So today I have another review of a book by one of my auto-buy authors, namely Katerina Diamond. Back in 2016 I read Ms Diamond’s debut novel The Teacher and I knew I had a winner on my hands. I haven’t looked back since, Imogen Grey and Adrian Miles – the protagonists of her police procedural series – are two of my favourite people and every time a new Katerina Diamond novel comes out, I’m there to snap it up! Book by book, I have witnessed how much both the author and her characters have grown, and each new book is an absolute treat.

The Heatwave is not a new instalment of that series I love so much, it is Ms Diamond’s first standalone novel and I was fully prepared to miss Miley and Imogen, but before long I was entirely caught up in The Heatwave and there was no time nor space to miss anything or anyone.

The Heatwave goes back and forth between now and then. The past storyline is told from the POV of Jasmine, a teenage girl with a best friend and a bit of a teenage crush, who is about to grow up a whole faster than she bargained for. During a very hot summer, one of Jasmine’s classmates goes missing, forever casting a shadow on their picture-perfect little seaside town. The present storyline is told from the POV of Felicity, who grew up in said town, and fled it. But now, sixteen years later, she has to go back, because another girl has gone missing and she might be the only one who can help. Going back, however, means facing up to what happened sixteen years ago…

The Heatwave starts out as a bit of a slow-burner, building up the tension. One thing is crystal clear from the start: there’s a plethora of juicy secrets to unravel! Both storylines are absolutely shrouded in mystery, not just the missing girls, if anything they melt a little into the background, but also Jasmine and her suspicions and Felicity who is obviously hiding something, or multiple things even, and I couldn’t help but wonder just how reliable a narrator she really is.

I had an inkling about one secret. At times I felt it was blatantly obvious, other times Ms Diamond deftly made me question not only my gut feeling but everything else with it. She made me wait for it, that’s for sure, but in the end I was proven right and it was all I could do not to punch the air and scream HA I KNEW IT from the top of my lungs. Funny how sometimes seeing a reveal coming is a total kill-joy and other times it makes you feel triumphant and on top of the world, only adding to your enjoyment. Having said this, there were many other reveals I had not seen coming AT ALL, one rendering me positively speechless (translation: I was totally blubbing like a goldfish again 😂).

The Heatwave is the perfect summer thriller to read by the pool this summer, or on a pebbly beach, or by the pond like I did, or if this lockdown persists, in your bathtub, wherever you read it is absolutely fine ‘cause odds are you’ll end up forgetting all about your surroundings anyway! Recommended!

Felicity is living a seemingly happy life in the Lake District with her husband and two kids but when she learns about the disappearance of a young girl in her hometown she decides to leave everything inmediately and go there as she suspects that disappearance may be related to another missing girl 16 years ago.

Told in dual lines, we follow Felicity in the present time as she tries to uncover what happened to the missing girl and Jasmine, her best friend, in the past line, when we learn baout everything that happened when the girls were teenagers.

From the beginning it's made clear that Felicity has many demons and is hiding lots of things. While both lines held my attention I think the past one dragged along a bit around the middle part. It's not till the last 20% that everything starts to unravel and then we got twist after twist after twist (some of them I guessed, some I didn't). One of the problems I found was that the resolution, although answered all the questions, felt little credible (that confession conversation sounded anything but heartfelt and come one, I'm sure the author could find a better motivation than a difficult childhood!).

Anyway, in spite of all this, it was a fast and entertaining read so I will check some of the author's previous work.

3,5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Avon Books UK for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have read other books by Katerina Diamond and loved them so I was really excited to have the chance to read “Heatwave”. This book did not disappoint! So full of twists and turns you don’t want to put it down.

After a very slow start, I got to a point in the book where I could not put this down. This was told in 2 POVs - then and now. Several twists at the end left me shaking my head! No spoilers here. Lol The only reason I am giving this 3 stars and not 4 is because of the very slow start. Took me awhile to get into it! Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early release in exchange for my honest review.

First, a thank you to @netgalley and Avon Books UK this ARC!

Well this book hit me like a heatwave! Totally unexpected, nail-biting, gripping, twisted, crazy, keep you guessing who dun it kind of story! I devoured this book in less than a day and a half and loved how I kept wanting more! The story goes back and forth between then and now which I thought was interesting and kept you paying attention as you didn’t want to miss what happens. One day, Felicity, gets up and leaves her family to head back to her home town when she hears about another missing girl 16 years after the first one - when she left the town to start a new life. She is on a mission to figure out if the two killings are related and it is then that she finds out what really happened or didn’t happen. I highly recommend this bad boy if you’re looking for a crime-filled, psychological thriller! Get this book on pre-order ASAP if you are!!

In Sidmouth, Devon, best friends Felicity and Jasmine are typical teens doing what typical teens do – underage drinking, smoking, boys... However, something happened that fateful summer that changed their lives forever. Fast forward 15+ years and Felicity now lives with her husband and two children in the Lake District. Despite moving to the other side of the country, she has not managed to outrun the shadows of her past. When a girl goes missing, Felicity finds the memories of that summer flooding back and she heads back to her hometown to hopefully banish those demons once and for all.

The tale is a dual narrative, see-sawing between past and present. The reader is gradually led to understand what happened all of those years previously and how those events are connected, if indeed they are, to the recent disappearance.

Written in an engaging style, there is an overriding air of menace to the story and the hot, muggy weather described by the narrators adds a sense of heaviness and claustrophobia. I found myself quickly drawn into the tale.

This is a book full of twists and turns, with a shock or a surprise around every corner. Whilst some elements may have seem somewhat farfetched, it certainly makes for a great story! The book is intense, dark and very compelling.

The Heatwave is another great book from Katerina Diamond and I fully expect it to be one of 2020’s top summer reads.

Big thanks to Avon and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced review copy of this book.

Two friends who's youth was intertwined. What happened when they were teenagers will shock you. What happens when one returns to her hometown 16 years later will shock you even further. Gripping.

I loved this book. Katerina Diamond never fails to deliver with her excellent psychological thrillers and this was no exception. I would whole heartedly recommend this book, you definitely won't be disappointed.