This was a really good book within this genre. It has a grittiness to the action. My only complaint was that ending was a bit predictable.

A gripping page turning thriller. The main character is an ex military policeman now working as a private investigator. Set in Singapore in the 50’s it was a refreshing setting to my usual reads. Fast paced, intriguing would definitely recommend

this was a lot of fun to ride, it felt like a really good movie. The characters were great and I really enjoyed the twists and turns.

Ash Carter is asked to look at a helicopter accident and the bodies found with the crash. Was it an accident? Ash no longer works for the government but doesn't mind doing work for them. Then he is asked to look at some bodies with unusual ways of being killed. Ash is a careful person but also a curious person as well. Two undercover agents are missing, one might have been in the crash. Bodies are burned so hard to tell. Ash keeps at the investigation and it turns into some interesting happenings. This could have been a story by Tom Clancy as well as a few others I read. It has action and mystery to keep you wondering what will happen next.

Commencing with an excellent and absorbing, reader's hook, SINGAPORE KILLER unravels an unusually executed mystery starring a laid-back private investigator, formerly a member of a secretive military arm, tasked to investigate a helicopter crash, a missing pilot, and a murdered military policeman.


What I particularly enjoyed about this Mystery was first, the almost Feckless protagonist, who isn't arrogant, vain, or egotistical, but is quite intelligent and excellent at puzzling situations; and the perception of reading a classic Golden Age era Mystery. The Singapore and environs setting and the historical era also made the story exotic and appealing.

Ash Carter is enough of an investigator to see through the obvious at a crime scene but enough of an action hero to beat up bad guys when necessary. The setting, near Singapore in the 1950’s, is unusual and fascinating, with Carter moving around a lot and finally infiltrating a mysterious hidden commune to investigate its shady leaders and rescue the women and children held behind its fence. The action is compelling and well-paced. The parallels to Jack Reacher (ex-army investigator now taking private cases) are obvious, but the violence of this story is well beyond what we are used to seeing in a typical Reacher novel. The serial killings are particularly grisly, and as the story moves on the corpse count starts to become a bit much. In between chasing a serial killer, Carter almost incidentally finds time to investigate a couple of smaller cases close to home—a missing dog, a protection-money scheme, etc. These side cases add humanity to what could otherwise have been too much of a bloody action scene the whole time. I would have preferred a more neatly tied up ending, but I can’t blame the author for wanting to plant the seeds of the next book. I look forward to reading the next Ash Carter novel and also to checking out previous books featuring this excellent protagonist.

Thanks to Netgalley and Heritage Books for a digital advance review copy.

I came across this book through my goodreads friends and requested it. I was not disappointed, rather I thoroughly enjoyed it and finished it late into a Saturday night. I will be going back to the previous books now. The names of places were a bit difficult. The setting was different as the story is in 1950s Singapore. I wish there was some background history to better understand the geopolitical facts. I don't know how I missed this author. Thanks to netgalley and the publisher.

Set in Singapore in the 1950s, Singapore Killer continues the exciting Ash Carter series. The book begins with an explosive start: a helicopter dramatically crashes and catches fire, with the death of the pilot and a military policeman.

Ash Carter was in the British Army’s Royal Military Police and then worked for the internal security secretary of the Singapore government and a private protection force in Malaya. He’s now an independent investigator and is called in to help the Special Investigations Branch (SIB) look into the helicopter accident.

From the evidence, Carter discovers that the silvery grey Sikorsky S-51 didn’t crash as a result of the pilot losing control due to mechanical error and that the training helicopter was set on fire after it came down. The hunt is on for the killer after a metal dog tag with the word ‘BlackJack’ on it is discovered in the helicopter’s fuel pipe.

When Carter set up as an independent investigator, he recruited a Chinese lady, Madam Chau, as a secretary/receptionist. She sounds an amazing character – she’s described as being ‘as wily as a fox and as bad-tempered as a baited bear’ and with a ‘face that was so flat that it looked like she’d been struck with a frying pan’. She reminds Carter of ‘a basset hound – an ugly one’!

Madam Chau is great at helping him to weed out the timewasters – he receives lots of letters asking for assistance, often from women who are pregnant by soldiers who have now disappeared – and she is an excellent translator. Carter investigates the death of a greengrocer who was bitten by a snake and also looks into the disappearance of a dog! Rather different cases from his SIB days!

When Scott ‘Slugger’ Stevenson, head of the Perak Protection Force and Carter’s friend, phones up about a mutilated body, Ash takes on the case and drives to Batu Gajah in Perak, Malaya to investigate.

Two SIB men, Captain John Harwood and Lieutenant Joe Jenkins, are working on classified missions, and Carter checks their recent reports and begins to make connections between his various cases and realises there’s a serial killer on the loose who’s targeting military personnel. After one of the men doesn’t check in, Carter heads to the small town of Bandar Permaisuri, near Terengganu, where he was last seen and, after a tip off from a young waitress, Carter heads to a town called Bandar Putih (‘white town’), which was built by a white man called Jeremiah and has a big fence around it.

Carter joins the rather mysterious commune and cult, which the residents call Shangri-La, and meets the ex-military men who run the place and the women who look after them. As Carter realises that the men are involved in a gold pipeline (trading) and linked in with his hunt for BlackJack, he lays low and tried to work out exactly what’s going on, with help from another of his contacts. This is where things get even more exciting and there are numerous unexpected and disturbing events as Carter gets deeper into the weird cult and BlackJack taunts him and leaves more clues behind.

This was an action-packed, fast-paced read and I really enjoyed following Ash Carter as he attempted to track down BlackJack. There were several sections written from BlackJack’s point of view and it was intriguing to read his evil thoughts.

Singapore Killer was a well-plotted, gripping thriller with some rather gruesome descriptions of murder scenes, as well as several really tense moments that had me holding my breath and frantically turning the pages to see who was going to be taken out next! It had lots of great twists and turns!

There were several strands to the story and lots of characters – it was fun to try and guess the connections and how everything was going to come together. At times, I had to refer back to remember who the characters were and how they were linked but I do have a particularly bad memory for names!!

I haven’t read any of the other four books in the series but I didn’t feel like I was missing out on lots of back stories – there were a few mentions of past events but I didn’t feel confused.

Overall, I really enjoyed Singapore Killer – it was an intense and absorbing read with some fascinating descriptions of military investigations and 1950s Singapore and Malaya and I loved the character of Madam Chau. I’ll have to go back and read Singapore 52, Singapore Girl, Singapore Boxer and Singapore Ghost to get to know Ash Carter better before the final book, Singapore Fire, is released next year!

Ash Carter, a freelance investigator operating out of Singapore, is looking into a mystery posed by the discovery of a burned helicopter in the Malaysian jungle with the almost unidentified remains of two Special Investigations Bureau military policemen as well as traces of a third, nameless passenger who left a tantalizing clue that points to a serial killer who calls himself Black Jack. Ash's travels through Malaysia lead him to a bizarre jungle encampment called Shangri La, whose founder, along with a handful of former soldiers, is smuggling gold out of the country and incidentally kidnapping, drugging and enslaving young women to service his men.
It's a complicated narrative with plenty of violent action surrounding the main event, although the other cases Ash takes on when he's not in country but home in Singapore are more pedestrian; arson, extortion, and the occasional missing dog. An interesting protagonist in a long-running series set in an exotic locale.

Gripping action thriller that had me reading on. I enjoyed Ash Carter have not read the previous book I still found him enthralling. Interesting setting I don't think I had read a book set in Singapore/Malaysia. A surprise ending that opens it up for further books.

Well, that was a suspenseful read. Action packed and full of so many twists and turns, I had trouble keeping up with everything going on.
The story starts off with a helicopter crash and just keeps getting more and more mysterious as the story unfolds.
Truly a murder, mystery, thriller with gripping moments.
Though part of a series, I had no problem reading this as a stand alone. I will definitely go back and read the other books in the series. I enjoyed the writing style of Murray Bailey.
Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the opportunity to read and review this book for my honest opinion.

**Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for providing me a copy for an honest review!**
This is a new-to-me author and series, but I find this story really engaging. Ash Carter is a complex character, who was in the British army, but is now working as a private investigator in post-war Singapore. He is called in to investigate a helicopter crash . The investigation intersected with numerous murders, apparently done by a serial killer named Blackjack. This then leads to Ash going undercover at a suspicious commune/cult composed of ex-soldiers calling itself Shangri-La. Amongst all this, Ash is also trying to make a living and is forced to take small jobs, like looking for a dog for a bored, horny housewife. Since I haven't read the earlier books of this series, several of the characters are unfamiiiar to me. There are references to events that happened in previous books. However, reading this as a stand-alone is still quite enjoyable.

This is the first book I have read by this author. I believe it is the 5th book in the series featuring the character Ash Carter. Although I believe this is a stand alone story, I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read the previous book(s). I perhaps would have known more about the character Ash Carter himself – who he was, his background, his views etc and I would have found it easier to be “rooting” for him.

It is set in 1953, but there are few references to this era, so while concentrating on the story – and you really need to do this, as it is very easy to lose track of what is going on – I found it easy to forget this. It is only when you remember that the story is set in 1953, and the forensic tools that are available now, when, for instance, they are trying to identify a body, they need to use more circumstantial evidence to do this, rather than up to date forensics. Or when the characters need to make a phone call, they have to go looking for a phone they can use!

There is a lot of extreme violence in the book, and the motives why he did what, to whom, cannot be explained as the perpetrator has yet to be caught. I’m sure this is not the last we have heard of Blackjack, and I think, and hope, these motives will be explained sometime in a future book, Some of the deaths would have taken some time to carry out, and I sometimes wondered how he managed to have the time to do them in the time frame available!

As it was I still enjoyed the book, and would read more by the same author, and perhaps read the previous books featuring the character Ash Carter to, hopefully, learn more about him.

What a read!

Non stop action from beginning to end. Just how I like my books.

So many twists and turns and every chapter ends on a cliffhanger so you just need to read the next one! I devoured it within a couple of days and will definitely be reading more from this super talented author.

Ash Carter is asked to assist with investigating a helicopter crash in which two men have died. He quickly realises it was not an accident and his search for the killer, the missing third nan from the helicopter, begins.

Who is BlackJack, the killer who is judge, jury and executioner?

Is it Jeremiah, the twisted head of a strange commune hidden deep in the woods? Or one of his small army of ex military men?

Ash must find a way to be accepted into the commune to find his answers.

I challenge you to guess the killer correctly!

Thanks to NetGalley, Murray Bailey and Heritage Books for an advance copy to review.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Heritage Books for the ARC.
Oh my Goodness - talk about action-packed! This is book #5 in the Ash Carter series and the first one that I have read - must catch-up with the previous four.
This is a real page-turner, very well written with great characters and dialogue.

Ash Carter, an ex-military investigator but now working privately, is called on by the Army in Singapore to help investigate a helicopter crash. They only have two SIB officers on staff and both are on secretive missions. The pilot and a passenger are both dead and unrecognisable due to a fire which broke out at the crash site. However, an otherwise blank military dog-tag recovered from the scene had one word written on it "Blackjack". When one of the SIB officers fails to report-in and the remains of an identification card are found on the passenger's body, Ash starts to track all the investigations the two SIB officers had been involved in, and starts to uncover a trail of deaths of military personnel.
What's the connection between these men and the clues Blackjack is leaving for Ash?

We are taken into the world of 1950s Singapore and Malaya; the military presence there; black-market trading and gold.

Absolutely gripping! - And I didn't see THAT twist coming!

I've read all the previous Ash Carter thrillers. In this one, Carter is drawn into an investigation that involves the Special Investigations Branch of the military police that takes him from Singapore into the jungles of Malaysia and eventually a town that's the centre of a cult.

Firstly, let me say that this is undoubtedly the best Ash Carter so far. As I've come to expect, there are twists and turns all the way. I love the way I can't tell what's going to happen and am constantly surprised. This book has some great characters (especially Madam Chau, Carter's ugly receptionist) and the atmosphere is tremendous. Murray Bailey manages to throw his readers straight into an exotic world of strange sights, sounds and smells with a plot that is far superior to any Lee Child has written. I reference Child because the obvious comparison is with Jack Reacher and the genre which is part crime, part thriller and part mystery.

I highly recommend this book as one of the best I've ever read... and can't wait for the final instalment next year.

Good stuff. This is my first book my this author, and I'll have to circle back quickly. This author knows how to craft and tell a good tale. Lots of action and interesting characters. Recommended for thriller fans. Well done.

Really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Singapore Killer is a plot driven thriller set in Singapore in the 1950s, though most of the character display very modern sensibilities and it's easy to understand who they are. A serial killer is operating amongst the military police. There’s a lot of interesting incident - helicopter crashes, religious cults, smuggling, guerrillas etc. The characters are relatively broad strokes and some of the military ones are a bit bland. I’m afraid you will very quickly narrow the villain down to two men but it's touch and go which is the killer before the reveal. That’s not a huge problem, the pleasure of the book is in its pace and I read it in just a couple of days. Fast entertainment for fans of Jack Reacher and his ilk.

I was given this book by the publisher with the agreement that I would post a review. Singapore Killer was an exciting, thrilling novel. Although this is book #5 in a series I have not read the others and was not lost at all. The author did a great job of developing the main character, Ash Carter, quickly and easily at the beginning.

Ash is an investigator who is called on to investigate a helicopter crash that killed two men. The things that he finds during the investigation leads him to believe the crash was not an accident and that other murders were connected. Ash puts together clues and finally ends up in remote Malaysia at the compound of a cult and the thrills continue from there! The thing I liked most about this book was the engagement of Ash not only in the crime at hand, but also with other neighborhood crimes, which he also solves. I also enjoyed the relationship between the secretary, Madam Chau, and Ash. Their relationship was humorous at times and lent a lot of personality to Ash's character.

There really wasn't anything about this book that I disliked. I thought it had the right amount of detail in the murders and other crimes without being overly gory or inappropriate.

This is a well written novel for anyone who loves thrillers and mysteries. I highly recommend it.

This is the fourth book I have read from this Author featuring three very different main characters, each book has been well written and researched entertaining and enjoyable throughout. Gripping from first to last page clever descriptive imaginative but there the similarities end. Black Creek White Lies features a wrongly accused man seeking redemption and the truth behind a missing girl. I Dare You where a women's boyfriend is snatched off the the street prompting her to investigate, and is one of the best books I have ever read. Then Singapore 52 and this book features Ash Carter the English 'Jack Reacher' a former MP turned PI but there the similarities end our hero has a base does not find himself a mystery in a new city each book, but is a clever and resourceful officer and gentleman. This is book five in this series and whilst there are references to previous cases this story works as a standalone book. A helicopter crash sees our hero searching for BlackJack a serial killer which leads to a mysterious jungle compound, with plenty of action and suspense before our story is complete or is it, I cannot say any more at the risk of spoiling it for my fellow readers.
Totally recommended.