Thank you Netgalley, Allison & Busby Publishers and Martine Bailey for the eArc of Sharp Scratch.

This is a great mystery/ psychological thriller set in late 80s Manchester. Having loved the music in that era, I had plenty of music filtrating through my head as I read this one! There are a lot of characters and even though they were nicely fleshed out, it did take a while to make sure I had their voices straight in my head. The plot was well written and with a great pace. Reflects the NHS and work ethics in that time very well.

3.75 rounded up to 4 for Netgalley

Loved this book. A mix of psychological thriller and throwback to the 1980's NHS, hospitals and work culture.

I loved the premise here: 80s Manchester, murder, young women in the music scene. However, the story never quite grabbed me: it's quite slow-moving and complicated at the start, with a lot of characters and locations. I've love the author's historical mysteries, which all immediately swept me up in the world, with characters who leapt from the page, so getting bogged down so early was a disappointment.

Martine Bailey is a new author for me, I definitely haven’t been disappointed and will be looking out for more from Bailey.

This is a book that had me intrigued from the very title. This is a book which is very well plotted. I have found the characters very mixed in this one. This is outside of my comfort zone but I have found this completely enjoyable.

I love how Bailey writes, it becomes easy to lose yourself in the pages of this book. I found I was transported and felt as though I was watching the events of this play out in front of me.

Sharp Scratch is slower paced than I usually prefer. I have enjoyed the psychological or personality bits at the start of each chapter. This is something I’ve not come across before.

This is a book I have devoured in just one sitting with no regrets. This has been everything I hoped it would be and more. Sharp Scratch is enjoyable and entertaining. I can’t wait to read more by this author.

I have no hesitation in recommending this book. Happy publication day @martinebaileywriter @allisonandbusby

Set in an NHS hospital in 1980s Salford and Personnel officer and single mum Lorraine Quick is juggling a busy life. As well as trying to find a comfortable home for herself and her daughter and fitting in gigs with her punk band, she is also faced with a potential killer among the short list for the newly introduced general manager role. With a newly acquired skill in psychometric testing, she tries to use this knowledge to unveil the potential killer before she herself becomes their target. The descriptions of 1980’s NHS hospitals feels authentic and I enjoyed the psychometric “test questions” at the start of each chapter. My main criticism is that the title didn’t really do the book justice.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

Five candidates. One job. A killer prepared to murder their way to the top.

Salford, 1983. Lorraine Quick is a single mother, a member of a band going nowhere fast, and personnel officer at the grim Memorial Hospital.

A new general manager position is being introduced, and Lorraine's recent training in the cutting-edge science of psychometric testing will be pivotal. As the profiles start to emerge, a chilling light is cast on the candidates.

When a lethal dose of anaesthetic is deliberately substituted for a flu vaccine, and a second suspicious death quickly follows, it's clear a killer is at work in the hospital. Can Lorraine's personality tests lead her to the murderer?

A dark, twisty thriller of murder, psychology/psychopath. Mysterious but rather slow storyline. Strong FMC role. Was quite an analytical read that kept you thinking right the way through, although there was no real direction to the storyline. I wanted to not finish this book but carried on just to see how it ended

Have no idea whether I have had an off week but reading this book has been like wading through treacle! An interesting plot, which is why I requested it to read, but I am halfway through and have no clue as to what is going on. To take four days to read a fiction book is quite a long time for me but to take four days to read only half is unheard of. I am therefore moving on to something new.

It's a good mystery but the blurb made me think of Kind Hearts and Coronets even if there's not a lot of humour and Alec Guiness.
It's dark, twisty and a good representation of how carreer dynamics can push someone to the border and lose any moral.
I enjoyed it as it''s well plotted and well written.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This was a difficult one to read. I didn't like any of the characters, although I'm not sure you're supposed to. I found it hard going and finished it feeling underwhelmed.

'Sharp Scratch' is the debut crime novel form Martine Bailey after her series of historical novels

Set in 1980s Salford, where Lorraine Quick is a working class single mother living in a condemned council flat in the middle of a rundown part of town with her young daughter Jasmine. Lorraine works as personnel officer in Memorial Hospital, a large city establishment, and also in a punk band in her spare time. She is keen to embrace new technologies of psychometric testing to help with her role. The results of the psychometric tests will be used by senior staff to find a new hospital manager to lead the hospital in a radical new direction so she is being rushed to pass her exams in order to help the hospital out. The five department heads are all being considered for this prestigious new role; Lorraine's insights into their personality style and management traits will be a key part of the decision making.

When a key member of the hospital staff is found murdered following a routine inoculation, all five candidates are potential suspects; can Lorraine use her knowledge from the psychometric tests to find out the killer.

Each chapter starts with a psychometric question at the outset, which I enjoyed thinking about, and as you learn more about each of the five candidates, you can guess what they might have put. Its interesting to think of a time when tests like these were seen as new fangled and unwelcome as they are so common now, but the sense of distrust and disgruntlement is palpable. 'Sharp Scratch' captures the clash of old world attitudes against new approaches, both in the NHS reform and with the varying approaches of the police officers investigating the murder.

There's a real sense of time and place, with the streets and rundown town centre of Salford being brilliantly described, as well as the hospital itself. It does feel like another world, with the characters using communal pay phones to contact their friends, cooking food on a fire inside a range, as well as the working styles so remote from what we take for granted now, with endless paper records for everything that are stored all over the country. I liked the background detail of the hospital redesign being as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s decision to review the NHS and how this was meant to move the service in a more modern direction..

The book does some concentration and I actually started again after 30 pages as I was losing my way: but I’m really glad that I did, it merits the effort and attention taken to read it and is well worth sticking with.

An interesting debut with an unusual format. Each chapter starts with a psychometric testing question and result, then the content of the following chapter has some relationship to the question. Set in Salford in 1983 the main character is personnel officer and single Mum Lorraine Quick who works in Salford Memorial Hospital and in her spare time is member of a not very successful girl band. I was an HR manager myself in 1983 so am very aware of the psychometric tools in use at that time. However, I did find reading these, before each chapter, broke up the fluidity of the story and I stopped reading them about 20% in and it was so much smoother.

Briefly, it’s the Thatcher era and the hospital has a number of internal candidates in line for the new top job being created as part of Thatcher’s vision for change in the NHS. Lorraine is expected to facilitate and mark the tests but she hasn’t completed her training yet! However, before the testing date a member of staff is killed with a lethal injection and Lorraine is convinced that one of the candidates is responsible.

This was a bit confusing at the beginning but it’s definitely worth continuing with it. Detective Sergeant Diaz is investigating the murder and he is also interested in psychometric testing which is being used effectively in criminal investigations by the FBI. The twists and turns were excellent and I changed my mind about the killer a number of times and the big reveal was a complete shock. An enjoyable read.

DNF at 20%. I struggled to follow the plot and get into the story. I loved the way each chapter started with a psychological or personality type question. Some real signs of promise but a little slower than your typical thriller

I am afraid I did not enjoy reading this book. I was very confused by the beginning and the actions of the main character, Lorraine. I felt the plot lacked depth in order to become understandable. It was a difficult book to read in my opinion, or perhaps I just regretably didn't engage with the characters and the plot.

The plot of this novel is cryptic, but moves very slowly, making it a dark and twisty thriller about a psychopathic murder. I appreciated that the main character was a powerful female. was a really analytical book that had you thinking the entire time, even if the plot had no clear direction.

I really wanted to enjoy this as it’s set in the area where I live in a time when I was growing up. However, I struggled with the writing and just didn’t find it engaging.

I loved this murder mystery. Set in 1980’s Salford, the author took you right there with plenty of appropriate references to set the scene. These were born either of good research or personal experience. The plot was suitably tortuous, with plenty of red herrings and twists and turns. The main characters were easy to identify with and realistic. There was a love interest, but there were no rose tinted lenses here, they liked each other but it wouldn’t work out. There was plenty here to describe the state of the nhs in an inner city hospital, an institution that needed modernising but with many dedicated staff. It was interesting to see the start of psychometric testing, something that we now take for granted in many parts of industry. All in all, an enjoyable read with much to take from it.

Dnf @ 30%
This is a very boring story. I tried reading more and actually finishing the story because I received this as an ARC, but I can't bear the boredom. It has a psychometric question every chapter and the chapter revolves around that trait.
It is the 80s and they just found out about personality tests. So the head detective in the murder case has decided to ask a suspect of the case (she's the protagonist but that doesn't mean she's not an unreliable narrator) to give all suspects a personality test and find out the killer. She is just learning about the tests in college. She is not an expert. But somehow, she's qualified to find out the killer by handing out a bunch of questions. Smart detective (insert eye roll).
At this point, I had given up on the novel. It failed to draw my attention to it so far. I didn't have high hopes for the future.

An enjoyable hospital based thriller,for me even better as was set in the 80’s
Good characters and plot and all in all am enjoyable thriller

Tucked within this book is quite a good story - a hospital personnel officer dealing with difficult colleagues and then several murders, trying to unravel if the culprit is walking among them. However the whole thing is totally spoiled by the author's belief that she should use the book to air her knowledge of psychmetric testing. We are 'treated' to sample questions and answers at the beginning of every chapter, which immediately break the flow of the story. Even worse, the author has chosen to make all the chapters short (presumably to fit in as many tests as she can) so the whole story becomes disjointed - you are just following one set of events when it abruptly ends and the reader is catapulted into something else, totally unrelated.

The story itself is quite interesting, seeing hospital life in the 80s and the attitudes and prejudices of that time, particularly over the appointment of a new general manager. Because of the need to keep the identity of some characters a secret, in order to work the plot, I didn't feel any actually became flesh and blood other than Lorraine. She was an interesting person, torn between her life on stage and her work life, as well as caring for her daughter.

Thank you to NetGalley and Allison & Busby for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I so wanted to enjoy this debut novel more than I did. Set in Salford in 1983, it follows Lorraine, a single mother and part-time musician who works as a personnel manager at Memorial Hospital. Lorraine is being trained in psychometric testing to select the successful candidate for the new General Manager position, introduced as part of Thatcherite reforms to the NHS. But when one of her colleagues is murdered, she wonders if the information she gathers will be useful for more than just recruitment. Martine Bailey writes very well, and Sharp Scratch feels completely authentic; drawing on her own personal experience, Bailey brings to life the NHS of the 1980s and the grim world that Lorraine inhabits. Indeed, this feels almost as if it could have been written in the 1980s, reminding me of early crime novels by greats such as Val McDermid and PD James, and that might be the problem: it's dated, despite not even being out yet. Despite all there is to admire about Sharp Scratch, I struggled with its lack of direction and pace, and found that I simply didn't care who the murderer was. This may be a matter of taste, but I just didn't want to spend any longer in this world than I had to. It's a shame to see Bailey is writing a sequel, as I'd love to see her try something completely different; she's clearly a talented writer. 2.5 stars.