I have just received the first professional review for my upcoming book. This one is from Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review and Editor of Donovan’s Literary Services. I’m very pleased! Here it is:

All the Bodies Do is a novel about ghosts, secrets, and murder that is based on true crime events: in 2022, drought exposed skeletons at Lake Mead.

Investigative journalist Kate Temperance here seeks to link these bodies to crime lord Giancarlo Gemelli, but the threat doesn’t stem directly from him alone. His ruthless daughter Sofia Gemelli is the real challenge, confronting Kate’s every effort to reveal the truth with her determination to keep these secrets buried in the lake.

This might include Kate herself, if she’s not careful.

William J. Cook evolves a cat-and-mouse game that embraces not just these two characters, but bigger-picture thinking revolving around a situation that dovetails with Kate’s confrontations in her own circle of supporters:

“It’s just that I feel terrible for abandoning you like that. That’s not what friends do.”
“You did what you had to do to protect your family. I understand.”

Kate changes plans, changes locks, and changes the values in her life as her case reveals new threats from directions she never saw coming.

Readers might not expect the setting to move around as quickly as Kate does, but as she journeys between Las Vegas and Oregon to tackle threads of underlying influences and deceptions, the wine industry also becomes a spark point of contention as the murder probe becomes complicated.

Cook’s ability to weave these seemingly disparate threads of connection into a bigger-picture feel creates a vivid thriller that proves thoroughly engrossing not just for its perhaps-predictable confrontations between reporter and crime family, but for its satisfyingly less predictable revelations about life values and what it takes to absorb the truth about lies, spies, and threats.

Libraries seeking thrillers that sizzle with action and psychological twists will find both qualities make All the Bodies Do thoroughly engrossing—perhaps because its roots lie in real-world events.