Synopsis
The girls are sleeping upstairs. If their parents make one wrong move, their daughters will die.
Emmy and her little sister Dani are sleeping in their bedroom upstairs. Their parents are in the kitchen
A knife is jammed to their mother’s throat. Their father has a stack of kitchen plates balanced on his back.
The intruder rasps, ‘Don’t be breathing too hard now. I reckon smashing plates is the sort of noise that’ll wake a child. Have them coming down to see what’s going on. There can’t be witnesses . . .’
What Detective Maddie Ives will find in that nice family kitchen will horrify even this most hardened cop.
And she knows the victim . . .
My Review
I have been a fan of Charlie and his work for a while now. By no means have I caught up with everything that he has written but that is something that I hope to rectify in the not too distant future. I must admit that I have a particular fondness for the series featuring Detective Maddie Ives. ‘The Girls Upstairs’ is the ninth book in the series and it was released on 11th April 2024. It’s another cracking addition to a cracking series. I really enjoyed reading ‘The Girls Upstairs’ but more about that in a bit.
I initially picked the book up only intending to read a chapter or two but I should have known better. I should have remembered that Charlie’s books are nigh on impossible to put down for any length of time. ‘The Girls Upstairs’ was no exception. It seemed as though the book cast a hold over me and it was a hold that I wasn’t willing to break. I developed my own theories as to how the story was going to pan out and so I had to keep reading to see if I was on the right lines or if I had gone off in the opposite direction. My Kindle wasn’t glued to my hand but it might as well have been because it travelled everywhere with me. I couldn’t bear to miss a single second of the story. The more of the book that I read, the more I wanted to read and the quicker the pages seemed to turn. I was so wrapped up in the story that I lost all track of time and just how quickly I was getting through the book. All too quickly I reached the end of ‘The Girls Upstairs’ and had to say goodbye to Maddie and her team. I found ‘The Girls Upstairs’ to be a gripping, tense and dramatic read, which certainly kept me guessing and kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.
‘The Girls Upstairs’ is superbly written but then I have come to expect nothing less from Charlie Gallagher. Charlie certainly knows how to grab the reader’s attention and draw them into what proves to be one hell of a story. The fact that Charlie is a former police officer himself, makes the story seem that bit more authentic. Charlie clearly cares about his characters and this shines through in the very vivid and realistic way in which he describes them. He describes his characters so well that they seem just as real as you and I. In fact Maddie ended up feeling more like a friend than a character in the book. I love the way in which the author makes the reader feel as though they are part of the story and at the heart of the action. That’s how I felt anyway. Reading ‘The Girls Upstairs’ felt like being on an at times rather scary and unpredictable rollercoaster ride with several twists and turns along the way.
In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘The Girls Upstairs’ and I would definitely recommend this book to other readers. I hope to read much more of Charlie’s work in the future. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.
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