Elise is the illegitimate daughter of King Henry II. Sir Bryan Stede is known as the Black Knight, an honorable knight who has served his king. When the king suddenly passes away, Elise’s life takes a massive change, one that finds her in the path of the Black Knight.

I had a problem getting through this book. It just didn’t work for me right from the beginning. I didn’t like the first interaction between the two main characters and it just continued to turn me away from it from there.

**I voluntarily read and reviewed this book

Here is the inside...

And the outside....

I had a ton of fun helping build and decorate it, but man am I PUMPED to finally get to relax inside of it. In fact I may just spend the rest of the night in there!

This was my first CJ Box novel and it won't be my last! This is a complex and gripping thriller that gets more tense with each page.  I could hardly put it down.

CJ Box writes a series about Joe Pickett, but this book is a stand alone.  In this story,12-year-old Annie and 10-year-old William witness an execution in the woods and then have to go on the run from the executioners, who happen to be retired, crooked cops. It is hard to know where to turn or who they can trust, as the crooked cops infect local law enforcement.

This story shifts POV quite often.  As a parent it's harrowing to read stories about missing children, so I liked when the POV shifted back to the kids and I could see that they were still "okay"  (I use that loosely, because how "okay" can one be when pursued by a group of killers).

There are several subplots that converge in this story and in the beginning this can make it a bit slow and choppy.  As you get very involved in the story the POV suddenly shifts and jolts you out.  But the ties between the storylines become apparent and it quickly becomes addictive.

The book lost one star for the ending, which I will not spoil. I will just say it felt a bit rushed and could have given better closure.  I have seen other reviews comment on this as well, but clearly not everyone is bothered by it. This can happen all too often  in these types of books, I've read more than one Sue Grafton novel that I couldn't put down just to get to the end and think, that's it? However, I still enjoyed the book a great deal and highly recommend it.

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box starts when little Annie and her brother William, while walking in the North Idaho woods stumble upon a group of four men, who they witness executing a fifth man. Immediately the siblings get spotted by the killers, and they are on the run. Later they end up on the farm of Jess Rawlins, a rancher, who is broke and whose ranch is on the verge of foreclosure. The local Sherriff, overwhelmed by the incident of missing children, accepts the help of the same four killers, who happens to be respected ex-LAPD, for helping him in the search of the missing children.

Officially C.J. Box has become my favourite author, period. What a piece of crime writing. With this book he took the extreme risk of pointing out the good and the bad guys from the very beginning. Normally I don’t appreciate this type of crime fiction, where the element of suspense or detection is not much present. As was the case here. From page one we come to know the four bad guys, we find out the victims on the run, we also recognise the hero of the story. But, instead of getting bored by the format of the novel, I got hooked to it from the beginning. Box using his talent as a writer created moments which were full of suspense, created characters who were not totally white, but various shades of grey. And to keep the ambience of a crime novel intact, he even threw in a subplot, which at the beginning looked like a subplot, but in the end merged with the main storyline, and formed the base of the motive for the crime. Another point scored by Box was the creation of the 4 killers. He made them feel real, cold, brutal, cunning and ruthless. And the fact that he made them ex-cops also added a feather to his hat, as this made the culprits more villainous, as it showed that it can get real bad when the saviour turns into the hunter.

Jess Rawlins, I wish there were men like you in real. They used to be, but now you are an extinct breed. What a man, what a hero. Never the knight in shining armour, he fights his own personal tragedies and his fear, to save the siblings. The scenes where he sees his ranch slipping away from him, and where he sees his son, but fails to communicate with him in a normal way, can get the heart bleeding in the toughest of men. I wish there were many more characters like him in fiction and in real life.

Lastly, the setting of North Idaho. Although I like reading crime novels set in exotic places, but if the novel gets interesting I gradually start losing interest in the setting, concentrating more on the plot. Here that was not the case; he made me feel the weather, the surroundings and the people of North Idaho. He made it impossible for me to ignore this aspect, and wrote about the place in such a way that by the end of the book I felt that had Blue heaven been set in any other place than North Idaho, the book would have lost 50% of its charm.

This book goes highly recommended for all crime fiction fans. Read it not as a suspense novel, but as a western where you know the outcome, but still want to read it as it is set in a beautiful place, full of cunning criminals, a hero with a big heart and personal tragedies, a damsel in distress, and most importantly of all, read it because it is written by a great author, who knows how to write.

P.S. If possible read the last 50 pages with a Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack playing in the background.