Catherine Raynes: Beautiful Ugly and A Dangerous Game

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney  

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life. 
 
Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared. 
 
A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible — a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife. 

 

A Dangerous Game by Mandy Robotham  

Seven years after the chaotic aftermath of World War II, London has is coming alive again, with jazz clubs and flickering cinema awnings lighting up the night sky. But for widowed Helen 'Dexie' Dexter, she's still a woman in a man's world. She longs to prove herself as an officer in the London Metropolitan Police, yet she's stuck intervening in domestics and making tea for her male colleagues.  

Then Harri Schroder arrives, seconded from Hamburg to the Met. Haunted by the loss of his wife and child, Harri is unlike any man Dexie has ever known. Compassionate and sharp-witted, he sees her not as a threat, but as an intelligent, canny officer full of potential. And when Harri is tasked with hunting down a Nazi war criminal-turned-respected-businessman, with connections to the upper echelons of British society, it's Dexie he turns to for help. But as their bond deepens, a deadly fog engulfs London. Dexie and Harri must expose the fugitive before he vanishes, risking everything for justice - and each other. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to this Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks atb Well.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Alice Feeney, New York Times best selling author However Many
Times Over, is back with a brand new book. It's
called Beautiful Ugly, and our book reviewer Katherine Rains has
been reading it and there is with us this morning
counter Catherine, Good morning Jack, So tell her us about
Beautiful Ugly.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
So this is you open with this struggling author, a
guy called Grady Green, and he's talking about his wife's disappearance,
which happened over a year ago. And a year ago
while she was on the phone to him, she saw
a woman lying on the side of the road and
she got out to help her and she hasn't been
seen since, and her car was found abandoned at the roadside.

(00:49):
And he's really tortured by what happened to her. He
can't sleep, he can't write. And then out of the blue,
his agent offers him an opportunity to live in this
remote writing cabin and on this very strange little Scottish island,
and this cabin was who an old deceased author had
lived there, and he kind of seems thinks it's kind
of worth it if you can rescue his career and

(01:11):
give himself some headspace and think about it, and without
giving any of the story away. There's lots of twists.
There's some very eccentric characters, there's dual timelines and point
of views and some very odd behavior. But this whole
underlying feel of the novel and on the Islands just
sort of adds to the sinister level of foreboding and

(01:32):
you get twisted after twist, and this tension and suspense
is excellent and you honestly keep flipping the pages because
you just need to know what happens next.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Okay, it sounds sounds gripping, Yes, it sounds. Yeah, sounds fantastic,
it is. It is, okay cool. So that's beautiful Ugly
by Alice Feenie. You've also read A Dangerous Game by
Mandy Robotam.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
So this is set in nineteen fifty two and in London,
and it's during the Great Smock where it's estimated that
about four thousand people died. So this adds the sort
of level of I don't know, undercover suspense to everything
you know. London is still struggling after the end of
the war, and you meet this young war widow. Her
name's Helen Dexter and she's called Dexi most of the time.

(02:14):
And she was in the midst of the action during
the war, even putting herself in danger. And now that
the war's over and she's joined the police force, but
she finds herself being given very manual work that pre
Warschauvinism is back in force, and she's almost just the
tea lady, and she rarely wants to fulfill her dreams
of becoming a detective. And there's this guy, Harry Schroeder,
and he's a police detective in Hamburg, and despite being

(02:39):
pretty anti Nazi in Germany, he survived World War II,
although his wife and daughter didn't, and he's haunted by
this and he's sent to London on assignment. And Dexi's
life really changes when she meets him, because they both
end up being tasked with hunting down a Nazi war
criminal that Harry had studied with. But this war criminal
has had a total face reconstruction, and so they now

(02:59):
have to prove who he is and who he was,
and so there's secret negotiations and the injustice of this
person whose manipulation the system, and there's just really good
sequence of events that keeps you really engaged. It's kind
of that almost old school Cat and Mouse thriller. Fel
into it.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, brilliant. Okay, that's a Dangerous Game by Mandy Robotham.
That sounds like a better me. I reckon that one.
Thanks Catherine. Thanks both of those books. A Dangerous Game
and Beautiful Ugly will be up on the Newstalk's He'd
Be website. Everything from our show, our recipes, our screen time, recommendations,
film reviews, all the good stuff goes up at Newstalks, dB,
dot co dot nz Ford slash Jack. That's the easiest,

(03:37):
fastest way to get to everything from our show.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to news Talks 'DB from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio