Returning to the rocky shores of Massachusetts, Bill Robinson has to solve a string of murders if he wants to save his inn. Murder House, The Beach House, Honeymoon –James Patterson is the master of thrills on the water.

The Inn at Gloucester is the lone structure on a rocky Massachusetts shoreline. Former Boston police detective Bill Robinson runs the place as a refuge from life’s cruel disappointments. When two strangers arrive for a temporary stay among the permanent residents, they’re welcomed with no questions asked by Sheriff Clayton Spears, who lives on the second floor. 

There’s another new resident in town. A crime boss. And he doesn’t like the close watch Robinson and Spears keep over Gloucester.  

Local criminals are turning up dead. The Inn is under surveillance. Teaming up with Sheriff Spears and three fearless residents—Army veteran Nick Jones; former FBI agent Susan Solie; and mysterious groundskeeper Effie Johnson—Robinson begins a risky defense of his town, his chosen family, and his home.

My Review

Book Two in the Bill Robinson series by James Patterson and Candice Fox is again exciting and entertaining. However, it’s so far fetched that when I told a couple of friends about the ‘old woman’ shooting an intruder’s head off, putting her headless body in a plastic bag, and then in a suitcase which she loads into her truck, we all laughed.

Just to recap, Bill Robinson was thrown out of the police force in Boston and is starting again in a small town called Gloucester not too far away. But tragedy strikes when his wife Siobhan is killed and he finds himself running The Inn – a b & b that appears to attract the type of people who are also running away from something.

Bill is now in a relationship with retired FBI agent Susan, and most of the same people are still living at the Inn. Then a mysterious woman arrives with her young son Joe, and Sheriff Clayton Spears is smitten. But ex-gangster Vinny is suspicious that they are not who they say they are.

In the meantime, we have a new crime boss called Driver, who is linked to a historical murder, and he doesn’t like Robinson and Spears. In another thread, Nick reveals what really happened in Afghanistan a number of years ago and decides to take matters into his own hands.

I once again listened on Borrowbox and enjoyed the lively narration. But why oh why did you kill my favourite character?

About the Authors

Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs composed of half-adopted and pseudo siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

As a cynical and trouble-making teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia’s wealth of true crime writers.

Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia, and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.

James Patterson is the most popular storyteller of our time and the creator of such unforgettable characters and series as Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Jane Smith, and Maximum Ride. He has coauthored #1 bestselling novels with Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton, and Michael Crichton, as well as collaborated on #1 bestselling nonfiction, including The Idaho Four, Walk in My Combat Boots, and Filthy Rich. Patterson has told the story of his own life in the #1 bestselling autobiography James Patterson by James Patterson. He is the recipient of an Edgar Award, ten Emmy Awards, the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and the National Humanities Medal.