I was lucky enough to be gifted a copy of Blood Ties by Peter Taylor-Gooby to review. I was excited to get started on reading this book; I love a good thriller and this one looked particularly interesting. My stop on the blog tour today with Love Books Group, so here it is – Blood Ties – a review.

 

The blurb

Ritchie’s life is shadowed by the death of his wife, Cat, in a car accident twenty-two years previously. He was the driver. He loves his children – Nic, who is bi-polar and often impulsive, and Jack. Both are active in the campaign to welcome asylum-seekers and refugees to Britain. His life comes to a crisis as he realises how much his children despise his trade in advertising and how much the loss of Cat still means to them all.

Ritchie abandons his career but achieves new success in driving Britain’s treatment of refugees up the political agenda. This earns him the respect of his children but brings him to the attention of Makepeace, the populist Home Secretary. Nic, his daughter, strives to show she can overcome her disorder. She infiltrates a people-trafficking gang but is arrested as a criminal. Makepeace uses this to blackmail Ritchie to help him in his political schemes. Ritchie is horrified to discover that his task is to sell the reintroduction of forced labour, modern slavery, to the public. As a result he is once again rejected by his children.

Ritchie has reached rock bottom. He is desolate but believes he can outsmart Makepeace. Blood Ties shows how he finally resolves the situation, embraces the causes his children hold dear and reunites his family.

The author – Peter Taylor-Gooby

I enjoy talking to my children, holidays, hill-walking and riding my bike. I’ve worked on adventure playgrounds, as a teacher, as an antique dealer and in a social security office in Newcastle. Before that I spent a year on a Gandhian Ashram in Vijayawada, supporting myself as assistant editor on a local English-language newspaper. In my day job I’m an academic but I believe that you can only truly understand the issues that matter to people through your feelings, your imagination and your compassion. That’s why I write novels. My first novel, The Baby Auction, 2017, is a love story set in a fantasy world where the only rule is the law of the market. That someone should help another because they care for them simply doesn’t make sense to the citizens of Market World, any more that auctioning babies might to us. My second, Ardent Justice, 2018, is a crime story set in the world of high finance and city fat-cats, where money rules, but greed can trip even the most successful. My third, Blood Ties, 2020, is about the ties of love in a troubled family, and the bonds of debt that chain illegal immigrants to people-traffickers, and how they can be broken through self-sacrifice. I hope you enjoy them.

The review

This book felt very of the moment, of the now. Politically, the western world is a mess and the gulf between rich and poor grows ever wider. This story doesn’t focus on the divide, but the effects of the division. Moreover the wide reaching effect of main stream media, how it twists and influences every day life. Who exactly calls the shots?

The protagonist here, Ritchie is a man with a past who in essence is fighting for his future. There has been tragedy and loss and Ritchie wants to atone for the things he feels he has got wrong.

It’s a fast paced, gripping story – I became immersed deeper and deeper as each chapter progressed.

No spoilers, but as much as this story drew me in, it was also tense and horrifying because I knew the bad bits are actually someone’s reality. People-trafficking is real, it’s brutal and this book doesn’t pull any punches.

To me this book rides a fine line between fact and fiction, with social justice as a theme that runs through. It serves as a warning – with Brexit looming large, the systematic breakdown of the welfare state in the UK, and major unrest during an election year in the US, it would not take long for this book to become a social commentary rather than a work of fiction.

A difficult read in places, but highly recommended. If you want a story that will make you think a bit harder about who is really running the country and who that is benefitting, then this is the book for you.

My thanks to Peter Taylor-Gooby (@PeterT_G) Matador Books (@matadorbooks) and Love Books Tours (@LoveBooksGroup) for gifting me a copy of the book and for inviting me to take part in the tour in exchange for my honest review.

You can buy a copy of Blood Ties here (affiliate link)

Book reviews people trafficking political thriller politics social justice