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Will Carver

Good Samaritans Audio CD – Unabridged, 15 November 2018

by Will Carver (Author), Ciaran Saward (Reader), Chatterbox Audio (Producer)

150 ratings

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One crossed wire, three dead bodies and six bottles of bleach. Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phonebook, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans. But a seemingly harmless, late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into day-time meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker, when Seth brings Hadley home… And someone is watching … WARNING: CONTAINS VIOLENT AND GRAPHIC CONTENT

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Product details

Publisher : Bolinda audio; Simultaneous Release edition (15 November 2018)
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 1489465421
ISBN-13 : 978-1489465429
Dimensions : 13.2 x 1.4 x 12.2 cm

Customer Reviews:
150 ratings

Product description

Review

‘There is a vivid – almost cinematic – quality to the writing. It is intense and makes for uncomfortable yet compulsive reading.’ -- News of the World

‘I was blown away by this gripping book. I sense Carver will break out of genre boundaries and become a literary voice to be reckoned with.’ -- Sarah Pinborough

Book Description

Dark, sexy, dangerous and wildly readable, Good Samaritans marks the scorching return of one of crime fiction’s most exceptional voices.

5 star		55%
4 star		23%
3 star		13%
2 star		6%
1 star		4%

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Ted Anxious

Irritating book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2019

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This is a poorly written book, I am amazed there are no other bad reviews. But I suppose it is the usual sort of stuff for this genre. I only really got it because it was cheap, and decent Kindle books are stupidly expensive.
My main problem was the characterisation. I could not tell which of the several narrators were speaking because they all sounded the same. I often had to skip ahead to look for a clue (oh yes, drinking a lot of wine, must be the wife).
Everyone used the same one word "underwear" whether they were talking about kicking them off in a car, dressing, removing them from a lover or a dead body. They all used the same peculiar American expressions like having "a need to excuse himself to the bathroom" in a restaurant. We don't have bathrooms in UK restaurants. Also, why does everyone say "sat" instead of "sitting" all the time? That's more of a northern England colloquialism, but everyone uses it.
The original metaphors were ineffective, completely incorrect words were often used (how do you "eke" yourself up?), and the dialogue was flat. The Detective Sergeant Pace character was ludicrous. This dark, brooding character who moves "like fire"? I found that difficult to picture. I suppose it may have been meant to be comical.
Also, it was not shocking. It was quite predictable, especially the ending. It was not worth finishing.
In short, I didn't like it.

9 people found this helpful

Customer

Great book - a chilling read...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2018

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This was my first Will Carver book, purchased after seeing the promo on Twitter. I didn't read too much about what the story was in advance, I just dove right in due to online excitement about the new release.
I haven't read a lot of crime drama and I have to say I was left a little speechless after reading this! I was reluctant to use bleach in the bathroom, for starters...
A chilling read, intricate but still easy to follow (some books have so many characters I end up making notes to remind me who they all are). It was easy to believe that the likes of Seth, Maeve and Ant are living among us (but hopefully not too near me).
Clearly lots of work from a talented author - if he were my husband I'd sleep with one eye open...

9 people found this helpful

Nicola in South Yorkshire

Dark, naughty, different, surprising and edgy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 November 2018

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I'd heard so much about Good Samaritans before I started reading it, all of it good. I was expecting unusual and a bit quirky and that's exactly what I got.

There are five major characters in this book, anyone else is simply a bit part. Seth is a chronic insomniac, who whiles away the night ringing strangers, asking them if they want to talk. Inevitably most don't, but occasionally he gets lucky. Maeve, his wife, puts up with his late night dalliances, but there's so much more to Maeve than initially meets the eye.

Then there's Hadley, a young and suicidal woman, who rings the Samaritans but somehow gets Seth. And Ant works for The Samaritans and inadvertently ends up speaking to Hadley. See how twisty this is already getting and this is the tip of the iceberg.

Character number five is a policeman investigating the three dead bodies. How they are all linked is clever and cunning, twisty yet never confusing.

There's a lot of dry humour in Good Samaritans. Many times I found I was smiling to myself. Most of this humour came from Seth who is an incredibly well-drawn character. The descriptions of his insomnia and the way it made him feel and behave were so vivid.

The first half of the book concentrates on Seth, Hadley and Ant until wham bam, something sort of unexpected happens. I say sort of because I was expecting it but not exactly how it happened. Surprise number 1. In the second half, the action shifts around and the focus on the characters changes around. As I headed towards the end, again, part of what happens was exactly what I was expecting, but then that curveball was thrown at me again and I had surprise number 2. Will Carver certainly plotted this novel carefully to ensure shock value.

I found Good Samaritans to be a perfectly dark story, naughty, different, surprising and edgy. I can't fail to mention the large amount of detailed sexual activity but it fits well with the characters and the story structure. All I can say is be very careful who you chat to on the phone and keep an eye on anybody buying bleach in the supermarket or petrol station. You never know what's happening behind closed doors!

7 people found this helpful

Joanne Sheppard

Compelling but grubby

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 October 2020

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A while ago another of Will Carver's novels, Nothing Important Happened Today, was recommended to me by a retailer and I bought it because I thought it sounded like something I'd enjoy. I then discovered it was apparently the second in the Detective Sergeant Pace series, and I'm quite picky about reading things in the right order, so I downloaded its predecessor.

I actually now don't know if the order of the series matters at all, because this appears to be a standalone novel and DS Pace himself hardly features as a character - he's a mysterious, shadowy presence in the story, appearing on the evening news as he investigates a series of idiosyncratic murders and looking increasingly haggard and drained, but the investigation doesn't drive the plot at all. In fact, it barely matters.

There are four main characters. Seth Beauman is deeply unhappy in his marriage to his emotionally distant wife Maeve. Every night, when Maeve goes to bed, he spends hours dialling strangers' phone numbers in the desperate hope of making some kind of human connection to alleviate his loneliness. One night, he finds himself talking to Hadley Serf, a woman with a history of suicide attempts who thinks she's on the line to the Samaritans. Then there's Ant, who really does work for the Samaritans, so when Hadley calls again expecting to speak to Seth, it's Ant she gets through to.

While all this going on, someone is killing seemingly unconnected women and sterilising their corpses with bleach, leaving them wrapped in plastic and unceremoniously dumped. DS Pace is increasingly tortured by the case - and also by something else in his own psyche, although it's unclear what.

I think anyone expecting Good Samaritans to be a detective story would be disappointed in that regard. It's not an investigative mystery and I think it's fair to say it isn't strictly speaking a mystery at all, although it's certainly structured in a way that intrigues and unseats the reader enough to keep us turning the pages. It's really a very dark thriller with a pervasive seediness about it. Nobody in it is happy. Nobody in it is likeable. Every relationship, romantic or otherwise, is selfish and dysfunctional and morally compromised. It's one of those books that makes you feel you need a good scrub-down with coal-tar soap. If you've ever had one of those unpleasant dreams that isn't quite a nightmare as such, but in which everyone and everything is bleakly horrible and wrong and off-kilter and evokes feelings of disorientation and disgust, this book feels rather like that. That isn't a bad thing - in fact, I think it takes considerable skill on the part of an author to be able to create that mood in writing and it's a compelling read. But it is also an ultimately depressing one.

There's also a lot of physical violence and brutality, most of which is against women, on some level sexual, and gratuitously detailed. I read and watch a lot of crime (including true crime) and a lot of horror, so I'm not especially sensitive to this sort of thing and didn't them shocking, but I did find a lot of those scenes grubby and unnecessary. They struck me as a cynically calculated attempt to be edgy but to me, it just felt exploitative.

Good Samaritans is a well-plotted thriller with some very original touches, including the odd and yet seemingly barely consequential role of DS Pace, a character somehow both haunting and haunted in a peculiarly unsettling way. This book was good enough to make me want to try the next book in the series, but it is at its best when it's slyly, darkly unnerving and at its worst when it's self-consciously nasty, so I hope the follow-up has more of the former and less of the latter.

One person found this helpful

GraemeCumming

Unsettling Writing About Unsettling Things

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 September 2020

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Good Samaritans is, apparently, the first of the Detective Sergeant Pace novels, though Pace is not, on the face of it, a central character. Indeed, although his appearances are filled with his thoughts and feelings, there is a detached air to his involvement that seems to contradict the apparent intensity of those feelings. It will be interesting to see if this is maintained in future books, or if it will be built on.

The core characters are more elaborately drawn, as we get more of an insight to their personal lives – screwed up as those lives are. And yet Carver writes sparingly, leaving the reader to fill in a lot of gaps for themselves.

There’s also an unevenness to the writing, and that works well with the subject matter, which is unsettling. A growing trend with authors has been to have a mix of first- and third-person narrative in the same book. In this case, there is one person whose story starts out as third person, then becomes first person part way through. I mention this as an example, but it only adds to the effect of not really knowing what the author – and the story – is going to do next.

From a personal point of view, I found the ‘twist’ on the final page a little cliched, but that is a minor issue compared with the twists and turns that came throughout the book. I certainly came away from it with my head buzzing as I reflected on everything I’d just read. It’s probably safe to say that I can’t recall reading a book like this before. Some of the content had been used before, but that’s true of pretty much every other author I’ve read; but the narrative style and the concepts behind the story gave it an originality that took it to a different level.

One person found this helpful

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