OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Buried Thunder

Tim Bowler is truly a master of the suspense thriller.From the moment you read the first chapter, the characters have made their home inside your head, and you live every moment with them, right to the end of the book.I started the book in the afternoon, just to make myself sit down and relax for an hour. I couldn't put it down. I took it up to bed with me and read until 3am to the very end. I needed to know what happened. It had me hooked and, to me, so real. I likened it to the view from my bedroom window. You see the book, with the fox, the forest, The Rowan Tree hotel, and the Rowan tree was familiar to me. I had become close to the characters, and outside my window (in real life) was a wood, with foxes, and a Rowan tree. The story had wedged in my mind and because of the natural, and clever way that Tim Bowler weaves the storytelling, I needed to finish the book to find out what happened. No spoilers here, but Tim really had me guessing all the way through.

I really enjoyed Buried Thunder by Tim Bowler. I took the book on holiday and raced through it. The story grips you from Page 1 and never lets go. It could be a described as a straight forward exciting mystery thriller, but Buried Thunder is much more than that. There are dark, psychological and disturbing elements to the story. The reader has to decide whether Maya's experiences are real or imagined. There are twists and turns all through the book; just when you are totally sure that there is a clear explanation for the events or a character indentified as the culprit a new revelation causes an immediate reassessment. A wonderfully enjoyable read.

Teenager has unexplained supernatural experience and foils crime.Sound familiar? It should do because it's the synopsis for almost every Tim Bowler novel from now until the end of the world. I don't get this lazy writing. Bowler used to be so good, but he's on total autopilot here.Maya Munro is a new girl in the gossipy village of Hembury. She has visions of dead bodies in the woods (I swear 'the bodies' make up about 50% of the text), visions of a magical fox, feels dread in her new hotel/house, and meets oddball locals who would otherwise be locked-up in the real world. If you've been keeping up with Tim Bowler's novels you ought to know that all of the meta-physical nonsense that he's become overly reliant on is on every page of Buried Thunder (a mostly nonsensical title).I've previously enjoyed Bowler character interactions, but here the dialogue is circular, repetitive, bloated with meaningless filler, and so utterly unnatural and ludicrous. It's like he's never actually heard a real conversation and therefor has no idea how to write them. There's also the last minute 'big reveal' which pulls in an explanation from so far afield you'll be face-palming. Maya is unable to solve any mystery by herself so virtually everything is left for a long speech by a detective in the penultimate chapter. If this is your first Bowler novel you'd be amazing to discover that his previous novels were not this bad.For me, he started on a high with Starseeker and  Storm Catchers . Buried Thunder should have remained under a pile of dirt in the woods. Storm Catchers