Blog Tour: The Playing Card Killer by Russell James

Hello and welcome to the RandomThingsTours Blog Tour for The Playing Card Killer by Russell James.

Thanks to Anne and FlameTreePress for having me on this tour.

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: FLAME TREE PRESS; New edition (14 Feb. 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1787581225
ISBN-13: 978-1787581227

About The Book

“Brian Sheridan may be losing his mind.
Asleep, he’s plagued by dreams of murder, women strangled with a red velvet rope then left with a playing card tucked in the corpse. While awake, he’s hallucinating that he’s being stalked by a man painted like a skeleton. It’s getting hard to know what’s real. He hopes all this is driven by his cold turkey withdrawal from a lifetime of anti-anxiety medications.
But when one of his nightmare’s victims shows up on the news, dead, Brian fears he himself may be the unwitting killer…”

About The Author

Russell R. James was raised on Long Island, New York and spent too much time watching late night horror on TV, despite his parents’ warnings. Bookshelves full of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe didn’t make things better. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of Central Florida.
After a tour flying helicopters with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, he became a technical writer by day and spins twisted tales by night.
His wife reads what he writes, rolls her eyes, and says “There is something seriously wrong with you.”

Visit his website at http://www.russellrjames.com/and read some free short stories.

Twitter @RRJames14

What I Thought

I really enjoyed this book. Is Brian having a complete breakdown or are his dreams really becoming a reality? Having an anxiety disorder myself I thought Russell handled Brian’s symptoms and withdrawals from the medications really well. Going cold turkey the way Brian did was never going to end well and the hallucinations proved that, you can understand then when the dreams started he found it hard to tell what was real and what was reality.

This is such an intriguing book and so very well done that its hard for me to say much without giving anything away. I did like the Detective Weissbard, loved the relationship between him and his wife, it added another layer of realness to it all. His determination to catch the killer and get one over on his arrogant sergeant pushed him in the right direction.

A really good thriller it will keep you intrigued.

Many thanks again to Anne and FlameTreePress for a copy of the book to review for this tour, all opinions are my own and I am not paid to give them.