Sixteen Horses

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Het eerste hoofdstuk schetst de toon van het hele boek: wie vermoordt 16 paarden en begraaft de hoofden op een andere plek dan de lichamen? Mensen die niet van dierenmishandeling houden raad ik aan het boek voorbij te lopen. His hunger outlives him. His teeming gut, his microbiome aflame with all the bacteria and symbiotic juices, they carry on. All that life within him continues consuming and breathing until it can breathe no more. He digests himself.' As the police start their investigations into the sixteen horses heads that were buried in a field, darl secrets start to emerge around the local community. The story is not easy to follow. The timeline and narratives jump around. The characters are well developed and believable. The pace is steady but the storyline is hard to read due to the frequent references to animal abuse. But there's something intriguing that keeps you reading. There's plenty of twists to keep you guessing. The story covers: animal abuse, revenge, guilt, punishment and trauma. The writing technique used by the author is unique. There’s no gradual unfolding of the events in the story, it is more or less like watching a film with one scene cutting to the next with no rhyme or reason. In here, it works in obscuring the story and literally muddles the already muddy water. However, it may seem problematic for those readers who take frequent breaks in between their reading, in which case this jumping from one scene to the next, sometimes, leaving no clues to the narrator of the POV we are reading, may break the flow in the story and make it feel disjointed. That also could be the primary reason why the story and its characters never leave a mark but the town definitely does. Neither Cooper nor Alec induces any warm feeling and made it difficult to connect to them as a reader.

The instigation of the action in Sixteen Horses is the grizzly discovery of sixteen horses heads found half buried, each with one eye staring at the sky, together with a knot of tails on a farm outside of the coastal British town of Ilmarsh. The act had taken place on Guy Fawkes Night when the horses from various places around town had been sedated so as not to be spooked by the fireworks and everyone in town was at the pyre. Local detective Alex Nicholls, a man with deep secrets who himself is barely holding things together, is out of his depth and a forensic vet, Cooper Allen, is called in to help with the investigation. But just as it seems they are getting somewhere the story and the narrative takes a wild swerve, the town put in quarantine following the long term consequences of the World War 2 testing of anthrax spores and Alec’s eighteen year old son goes missing. Cooper is asked to stay on to investigate. Or the film Se7en. Remember that? The atmosphere of that film. Every outdoor shot it was raining, every indoor shot lowly lit, that is this book. That same feeling. tell me again what the point of the contaminants were? Was it just some slow way for Simon to kill his dad. How would he know his dad was even gonna get the case? Nearly all Saturday’s drama happened early on during the first circuit with eight either falling or unseating at the first two fences. In the previous nine years there were a total of 17 who fell or were unseated over the first two fences. Then why all the unnecessary details about “1 eye facing the winter sun” huh? You know how many times the author mentioned that detail. Why try to put in creepy edgy details when they’ll have 0 significance to anything in the end?Set in the English seaside town of IImarsh, a town that is well past its sell by date and falling apart(as much the star of this book as the characters),when a farmer and his daughter discover the heads of sixteen horses buried in a circle on their land one early morning, Alec, the local detective goes out to investigate. The heads are buried on their sides, all with one eye above ground, the tails in a bundle near by. Many thanks to Net Galley, Pan Macmillan, and the author for a chance to read and review this book. All opinions are expressed voluntarily. Alec is not a particularly good detective, so I was more and more fascinated to see his side of the story play out. Cooper is the big-hearted vet with an eye for crime so she was much more switched on. That being said, there never seemed to be a huge amount of progress made in the case. A lot of the secrets just came out all at once at the end. Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself. Similar to other rural crime novels, the strength lies in the setting. The dry, desolate, stretched town where nothing really happens but everyone manages to possess some dark secret.

Original, beautifully written, terrifying and haunting' - Sophie Hannah, author of Haven't They GrownAuthors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. I had read this book incredibly fast as it was just so good. It's a thriller about a dying town and then something even more horrible happens that just makes things worse. Someone had stole and killed sixteen horses, leaving the heads & tails in a farmer's muddy field. But that is actually just the beginning of the problems, because an unknown killer is out there: someone really twisted and demented. But who? Why? The horses had been stolen from numerous owners. The story also includes many cryptic notes that the Detective has to try and figure out. And why sixteen? Why sixteen horses and not only one or two? Why horses? The story is not really fast paced but a slow burn at a steady pace. And it does rise to a climax at the end too. There were also a few unexpected developments in the plot as well.

WARNING TO READERS WHO CANNOT ABIDE ANIMAL ABUSE, the scenes are not cruelly graphic but imagination can sometimes be our worst enemy. Alle personages in het dorp hebben zo hun geheimen. In het echt weet je ook niet altijd wat er achter iemands voordeur gebeurt, maar hier wordt alles uitvergroot en benadrukt. In response to criticism of their actions, Animal Rising told Telegraph Sport: “Firstly, we want to offer our deepest condolences to anyone connected to Hill Sixteen or who has been impacted by the death. Animal Rising’s actions at the Grand National aimed to prevent exactly that from happening... The only way to prevent more harm from coming to these beautiful creatures is by completely re-evaluating our connection to them and finding a way of loving them that doesn’t put them in harm’s way.”Police detective Alec Nichols is called to the scene and is unprepared for the sight. In a short while, other officials join him, among them veterinary pathologist Cooper Allen.

Cooper verifies that the heads are of sixteen horses. The animals belong to various residents of Ilmarsh, and most were stabled at Elton’s Riding Academy and Livery. Several others were independents, like Michael Stafford’s Annie, who pulled a carriage at the local seaside arcade. All the animals had been sedated at the request of their owners because of the Guy Fawkes celebration and fireworks. I will say I like being confused by a book - at first. I like watching a detective or forensic specialist sort things out - because I get to do it alongside them as I read. Red herrings. Unreliable witnesses. Confusing evidence. Creepy circumstances. I eat THAT up! But here? Everyone in this book is terribly damaged, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise and it just bleeds so much into the book you can't see what's going on. (So the transparent gel is really kind of murky.) And in the end... he has this way of writing that leaves you so confused as to what’s going on. That climax scene was so convoluted. Who spotted who, who was fighting who, who’s Theres who’s not there? And I realize all of this is just smoke and mirrors to make you think you’re reading something so sinister and interesting when it’s really not. Greg Buchanan is a BAFTA-longlisted writer for interactive and screen. His acclaimed debut novel SIXTEEN HORSES was selected for BBC Two's Between The Covers and was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. A TV adaptation produced by Gaumont Television is on the way. His second novel CONSUMED is out summer 2023. Sixteen Horses, Greg Buchanan’s debut novel is affecting, challenging, haunting and compelling and I can tell you now that he is an author to watch out for. Set in a fictional town named Ilmarsh on the English coast, Sixteen Horses is a novel about harrowing events, decay and trauma and it got firmly under my skin.

Met 14 andere enthousiaste mensen start ik aan de Hebban Leesclub van Zestien Paarden van Greg Buchanan uitgegeven door HarperCollins. Op de omslag zie je een stuk grasland met in de verte een gebouw. De oranjerode kleuren geven de insinuatie van een zonsopgang of zonsondergang. In de lucht cirkelt een groot aantal vogels; aaseters? De ondertitel is "Het verleden is niet begraven. Het haalt je binnenkort in.... ("This was a crime like no other..."). Onderaan staat een aanprijzende quote van schrijver Alex Michaelides. Daar heb ik zelf niet zo veel mee. Ik bepaal zelf of ik een boek wel of niet lees. Meestal omdat ik al meer van de schrijver gelezen heb of omdat de flaptekst/preview me aanspreekt (hetgeen in dit geval zo is). Het ontwerp van de omslag is gemaakt door Pan MacMillan, een van de grootste uitgeverijen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. De vertaling is van Erica Disco. Zij vertaalde ook boeken van Lucinda Riley, Karin Slaughter, Robyn Carr en Christina Lauren. De BBC heeft na twee jaar onderhandelen de rechten van het verhaal gekocht om er een serie van te maken. Sandy Thomson, trainer of first-fence fatality Hill Sixteen, is adamant the 15-minute delay caused by protesters to the start of the 175th Randox Grand National at Aintree was the major contributory factor to the horse’s fall. Investigation reveals a large number of pets have also disappeared. “A number of dead birds were discovered in the night. We found copies of a letter in their beaks. Folded down their throats, wrapped in plastic.” it was such a chore to read these povs I swear. Obviously this crime turned personal but the actual people at the heart of this story are so. Damn. Boring. All of them are sad and edgy but not in an interesting way that makes you more curious. Alec is weird. Why do u think you’re in love with cooper? He’s so boring. He’s as interesting as toilet paper. Cooper? Oh god she’s like an android. Is she even human? Simon is the most lamest “villain” I’ve ever read good god.