Blog Tour: From Inside The House by W.D. Jackson-Smart #bookreview #FromInsideTheHouse @wdejackson @PantherPubs

Two victims. Brutally murdered in their own home. Body parts taken.
D.I. Graves is back on the case to face his toughest challenge yet. A case with no motive and no suspect, nothing at all that could explain why someone would kill innocent people in such a way.
Then the next victims are discovered. Another pair of bodies. New body parts taken. Again in their own home.
Someone is breaking into houses across the city at night, leaving horror in their wake. It seems to Graves that this could be two serial killers, working together. But how are they choosing their victims? Is any house in London a target? Is anyone safe?
To make matters worse, a journalist is threatening to cause more harm than good with her obsessive push in covering the story to further her career, and someone is targeting Graves personally, seeking revenge against him in relation to an old case.
Can Graves keep himself safe long enough to stop the serial killers before they strike again?

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Hi and welcome to my stop for the blog tour for From Inside the House! First of all, many thanks to Panther Publishing for inviting me and sending me an eARC of not only From Inside the House, but also of the first book in the D.I. Graves series, The Demons Beneath!

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, “Graves” is a funny name for a homicide detective inspector, but let’s not dwell on that because poor Dan gets teased about his unfortunate last name enough as it is! So moving on, I’m sure that if you’re a regular here, you won’t be surprised at my insistence you read this series in the correct chronological order. Yes, I know I’m rather anal that way, but in this case I think it’s really important that you do, not so much because you won’t be able to follow, or because of previous character-building, but more because From Inside the House gives away spoilers about The Demons Beneath. D.I. Daniel Graves is still suffering from the shit that went down in The Demons Beneath and while you need not have read that to understand his inner turmoil – I’m pretty sure he has a form of PTSD as well – if you don’t want to know how the first book ends, and which character dies, and how, you should really read that one first.

Graves is a great main character, I really like him. He’s not your run-of-the-mill tough-as-nails manly man, but he’s not a wuss either. He comes across as a rather vulnerable man, not yet jaded at the sight of a gruesome murder, but that doesn’t stop him from investigating a bunch of them. While the first Graves instalment felt horror-esque at the start, what with the whole demon / demonologist thing, From Inside the House is horror of an entirely different kind: people are getting killed in the most gruesome ways in their own homes, organs and body parts are taken, and when Graves and his team arrive at the scene they are met with a bloodbath every single time. This becomes a pattern: we witness the intruders in the homes, attacking or about to attack the victims, and then we meet (a gagging ?) Graves and his team for the aftermath. Don’t worry too much about that, no need to feel overly queasy just yet, we see what happened, obviously, but we are spared the most gruesome details. Well, most of the time anyway… There are some scenes that made me grimace and want to curl up into a little ball too…

The search for the culprit and trying to find the common denominator of the murders is highly entertaining, the murders must be connected, but how, and why? Then there’s the side storyline of Kelly, a journalist willing to go to whatever lengths needed to get that perfect article, including invading victims’ privacy and putting herself in harm’s way. And there is of course the continuation of Graves’ storyline. Someone is still out to get him and they are getting closer. I loved switching between these storylines and seeing them all come together in a thrilling finale.

From Inside the House packs a lot of punch in not that many pages. If you’re in the market for an entertaining serial killer story to read this summer, I’d happily recommend this one!

From Inside the House is available from Amazon as from today!

Be sure to check out the other stops on this tour: