Honey Brown: Six Degrees

Six degrees of sexual desire
This is a big change of direction for Honey Brown who usually writes perceptive and exciting psychological thrillers. It is a collection of six loosely interconnected stories about the impact of sexual attraction in everyday life. While some of the scenes are somewhat sexually explicit the stories are a world apart from the FSOG type of erotic nonsense that is so popular these days.

Each of the six short stories has a theme and the major players have some form of connection to make the collection of stories bind together:

~ Threesome - an unusual threesome brings together a long-standing twosome.
~ Two women - an exploration of a brief sapphic encounter.
~ Older - a fishing adventure with an older man.
~Younger - a short fantasy with a younger man before reality kicks in.
~ Two men - a quick loving connection between two men.
~ First time - the last connection is a first connection.

Honey Brown has written six  loosely connected stories that explore human relations through sexual attraction. This is top quality writing with meaning which shows how everyday life may be affected by such attraction. It is serious stuff, not erotica - I have read more explicit and steamy scenes in Nora Roberts bestsellers.

These stories showcase Honey Brown's excellent writing abilities. While I applaud this change of direction I hope it is not a long term thing and look forward to reading more of her excellent psychological thrillers.

My thanks to The Reading Room and Ventura Press for a copy of this book for review.

Honey Brown: Dark Horse

Stranded with a stranger
Honey Brown has once again written a top-class psychological thriller, this one set in the wild mountains of Victoria, Australia. It is a tale of two strangers who meet together in an emergency and struggle to understand what is happening to them and why they are there.

It is Christmas Day and Sarah Barnard is faced with losing everything that she treasures. Her marriage is over, her trail-riding business is about to be sold and she is set to lose all her horses, especially Tansy, her favourite black mare. In despair she rides Tansy towards remote Hangman's Hut on the summit of Devil's Mountain. On the way a flash storm turns Spinners Creek into a torrent and demolishes the only bridge back. Sarah is trapped at the Hut which is partly demolished for reconstruction and her only refuge is a rough workers' caravan, She is cold, wet and hungry.

During the storm Sarah rescues a bushwalker, Heath who is trapped in a bog nearby. They both struggle for survival in the wet and cold conditions with minimal shelter. Sarah is puzzled with why Heath is there and who he is. She soon finds herself in a position of forced intimacy for survival with a man who has many signs of being dangerous.

Honey Brown tells a tale of survival and suspicion that builds to an unexpected crescendo and then keeps you guessing until an even more unexpected twist in the tale at the finale.

This is a very different psychological tale to her previous book THROUGH THE CRACKS  which I found challenging and disturbing. Well done Honey Brown - you are surely in the top bracket of Australia's very talented authors of psychological thrillers.

My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for a copy of this book for review.

Honey Brown: Through the Cracks

Click to see in Amazon

Depths of human depravity - gone but not forgotten
Honey Brown has written a challenging book about a disturbing subject - child abduction, abuse and imprisonment. While the book is well written and sympathetic to the children and families involved, the emotional subject may not be a choice for some readers.

When "Alan" was 4 years old he was at a showground with his parents and he wandered off and disappeared. Despite massive police searches for "the showground boy" and national publicity he was never found. While most child abductions finish with murder, his parents still have hopes that he will come back to them some time in the future - to them he is gone but not forgotten.

Over ten years later "Alan" (not his real name) has grown into a strong boy who can at last physically challenge his ageing "father" who has kept him imprisoned and abused for so long. Alan attacks his "father" and locks him in the windowless room where he had been kept imprisoned most of the time. He can then explore the house, with its highly fenced and padlocked garden, where he has been kept for so long.

Next morning he finds his father has died because he didn't have his heart pills. When visitors arrive Alan hides and is found by Billy, a teenager who has suffered extensive abuse himself, especially when in juvenile care with the Church. Billy immediately recognises Alan's plight and tells him to avoid contact with the Police because they could put him into the kind of juvenile hell that Billy knows so well.

Billy takes him on a tour of the seedy and downtrodden parts of the city, living rough to avoid the authorities. Alan slowly learns about the real world he has been missing and gradually regains some memory of the time before he was abducted.

This is a somewhat disturbing story about the outcome of the depths of human depravity on young children and how a couple of victims get together to face up to living a normal life again. Well done Honey Brown in tackling this difficult topic in a compassionate and realistic way with an eventual heart-warming conclusion. I was especially affected because we live near where a child was abducted ten years ago. In that case his grave was found years later and the accused pedofile is currently on trial for murder.