Today it is my pleasure to welcome author Holly LeRoy and his Mystery/thriller novel You Kill Me.

Author’s description of the book:

LIEUTENANT EVE SHARPE should have seen the avalanche of trouble headed her way but events had dulled her edge and crumbled her foundation of toughness. With the press and politicians all coming for her, Eve begins to question whether she is really a cold blooded murderer or simply losing her mind. Was it an officer involved shooting gone wrong? An honest mistake? Or, something much, much worse?

There’s one thing for sure, it has turned the Chicago Police Department upside down, and Lieutenant Eve Sharpe’s life along with it.

My Review:

In You Kill Me, Holly LeRoy has written an exciting thriller with a wonderful protagonist, unexpected characters, and a page turner of an ending. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

What I liked best:

1. The writing is quite good. The pacing is flawless. The plot is exciting. I know that should be three different things, but I don’t want this list to get too long.

2. In particular, LeRoy takes several characters out of Central Casting and uses them in ways I didn’t expect (and you probably won’t either.) The annoying boss. The sleazy ex-partner. His stripper girlfriend. And more. The whole story is a wonderful reminder of how surprising people can be.

3. I often struggle with stories that mix a first person tale with additional third-person POVs. LeRoy not only makes it work, he makes it seem natural. Part way into the story, I stopped noticing it.

4. Ditto for his descriptions of people and surroundings. Over and over he gives just enough details to put you in the scene and never so much that you start to skip over it. Well done.

What I liked least:

1. It’s obvious I liked a lot about this book. However, I prefer to read on my Kindle and when the author didn’t offer Kindle formatted copies for review, I bought the book and was surprised by the number and kind of typos in the copy for sale. Every book has a few, but this not only had more than its share, many of them were things any good proofreader (or even spell check program) would have caught. This book is too good for those kinds of mistakes.

2. I like my endings (that is, the part after everyone is finally safe) to be longer than a page or two. I’ve come to care about these people and I want to know more after many of them barely make it out alive. Perhaps there is more tying up of loose ends in the next novel?

Well, whether there is or not, I’ll be seeking out more by Holly LeRoy, and wishing him and his detective Lt. Sharpe both long and healthy careers,

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good story.

About the Author:

HOLLY LEROY has been an actor, amateur boxer, NASCAR journalist, expert witness, Santa County Substance Abuse Commissioner, and patrolled with the Drug Enforcement Unit of the San Jose Police Department.

He lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains with his wife, four cats and two dogs.

Find him on Facebook, Goodreads, or on Twitter. 

Visit him on his website, or on his Amazon author page.

Buy You Kill Me on Amazon.

Yes, there is a giveaway.

Holly LeRoy will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift certificate to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Enter here to win.

This post is part of a tour sponsored by Goddess Fish. Check out all the other tour stops.

My Favorite Excerpt:

It was well known that police officers, even those with seniority could, for disciplinary reasons, be temporarily assigned to other units. Usually someplace working with non-sworn civilians like personnel or records. Or, if you really screwed up, they’d stick you on stakeout. That’s what really bothered me. Sure, I’d always been a pain-in-the-ass, but lately, I’d been a good girl, not screwing up at all in the past couple of months. Well, maybe a month. Yet here I was, heading to a blisteringly cold stakeout at a South Side crack house instead of doing data entry at a nice warm records desk.

Poor Walt. Guilt by association probably did him in. He actually got the worst end of the deal. He’d be at the crack house until after three.

Every ten minutes, the all-news station, Magic 66, cheerfully announced what I had to look forward to:

‘Subzero temperatures have moved into the Chicago area and are expected to stay for the remainder of the week. Lake effect snow continues to hammer the south and east of the city and plows are trying to . . .’

Shit. I flicked off the radio and hunched over the steering wheel trying to see the road ahead. The smells of antifreeze and water steaming on the exhaust and burned oil coming up through the floorboards all served to remind me that a few months earlier, I’d wrecked my Buick in a snowstorm just like this one.

Insurance had repaired it instead of totaling the damn thing, so now it was more of a rolling wreck than ever. My ex-partner Clark kept telling me that since the accident it went down the road like a fiddler crab. Kind of sideways.

Crazies kept passing me and throwing salted slush over my windshield, and I finally chickened out and moved over to the slow lane behind a Safeway big rig. I found myself staring up at a huge T-bone steak, sun-faded to a light purple.

The off ramp was slick with black ice, and I took it at a crawl, easing into the neighborhood shown on Isaacson’s map. I slowed down even more, threading my way through the narrow streets. It was a ghost neighborhood where half the houses had been torn down and only half of what remained seemed to be occupied. Built after World War II, these were the homes our GI’s came home to in 1945. Now, they were homes for crack whores and junkies ready to die, teenagers ready to screw, and apparently, if Isaacson were correct, our drug lord. The target was a small single-story house, one of the few that didn’t have its windows boarded up.

I sat in my cramped little Buick, staring at it through a pair of binoculars. After an hour, I stuck a Santana cassette into the radio and poured a cup of squad room coffee. When my teeth began to chatter, I began to run the car fifteen minutes on and fifteen minutes off. Even at that, the car’s heater struggled against the cold, my breath fogged over the windows, and a plume of steam from the exhaust filled the air behind. After mopping at the windshield with a handful of napkins from Walt’s last trip to Mr. Moo’s Burger Shack, I sat watching the strings of red taillights headed south on the I-55.