Eastgate: A Robert Hoon Thriller (Robert Hoon Thrillers Book 4)

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You may not know this about me… BUT I love Die Hard and I DO think its a Christmas movie… fight me if you don’t (just kidding 🤣) but seriously it is my go to Christmas movie… what can I say Bruce Willis Yippy Kai Ayying all over the place blowing sh*t up just screams Christmas to me… my point….

Took me 3 weeks to read half the book and just an hour to finish the last half day time reading is probably my best time . And when my first Space Team book came out, a couple of people in that group who I’d not necessarily helped but who had seen me help others out, shared it, said check this new book out, and it just built from there.Lesson learned … “reviews are good, but take time before falling for something based on the reviews”. I just love that kind of thing happening regardless of any knock-on effect, but people then become more than readers of the book, they become invested in the community as well, so that when a new book comes out they’re straight on it and chatting about it. They were quite mixed, it was half going, ‘I absolutely hate this character and skip over all his scenes’, and the other half going, ‘I love him, he’s the greatest character I’ve ever read’. So for those who may not know, you self-publish your crime fiction through Zertex Media, and to massive success.

So in summary there is a hostage situation that takes Hoon by surprise while he’s off in the toilet, there is action, there are Christmas carols and explosive Santa’s….The man is nothing if not persistent, and before long I had stopped thinking about whether it was possible for readers to root for him, and had started thinking about the how. JD Kirk lives in the Highlands of Scotland with his wife, two children, and a number of sturdy umbrellas. If there is one line that had me spilling my whisky it was the description of the skinny jeans, possibly my biggest (of many) chuckles.

Here was a character so thoroughly unpleasant that even if readers enjoyed his scenes, surely they couldn’t cope with a full length novel in which he took centre stage? After reading the first book in the DCI Logan Series, A Litter of Bones, I picked up the first Hoon and the next few Logan.The Hoon stories on the other hand are proving just as dark and brutal as Smith’s, and this one maybe even more so. Bob and Berta, the dream team, against an army of killer Santas, what more could anyone want in a book? And, as the series progressed, I took a perverse delight in making Bob that bit worse in every book.

Then we went away on holiday, and Space Team started outselling all my kids’ books, but I’d done no marketing for it. I have said before; Hoon is over the top, foul mothed, and eager to use violence as a blunt instrument to find out what he needs to know. Long time JD Kirk fans will be glad to know that DCI Jack Logan and his team feature as does Hoon's sister, the equally obnoxious Berta and Skye's most notorious one-eyed Liverpudlian arms-dealer Iris. But a lot of people like that lingering in a place and establishing the scene, so it fascinates me how different readers respond to different ways of writing. I put on some quizzes, I’d recorded videos with a wee Santa hat, and loads of them got together on the Facebook group to chat and spend Christmas together.

As mentioned there are guest appearances from DCI Jack Logan and the team but if you are expecting them to be in the entire book as main characters they are not… they are simply guests and the main event is Hoon and the craziness that he gets up to. The whole series ran out of steam in book 3 and this book, the fourth in the series is weak both in content and plot.