Death Dolls by Simon Farrant #RandomThingsTours #DeathDolls

Benjamin McGuinness fulfils his dream of establishing successful businesses and gives jobs with a new home to some of life’s misfits, deep in the English countryside on a farm. Everything seems perfect and his workers are as close as family.

A fire strikes close to home, a disaster that changes his perception of life and one of his loyal workers takes the chance to propose a life-changing venture.

This new business drags Lisa, his sister, into the deadly web of deception.

When exiled Russian twins join the family a symbolic tattoo is created that drives Benjamin’s money into a new league.

Benjamin knows that his future is defined by ‘the family’.

Will greed cause everything to crumble before his eyes, or will there be brutal consequences to their actions?

*Many thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the Death Dolls blog tour. I received a review copy in exchange for an honest review.*

Death Dolls… I don’t know where to start.. I haven’t ever read anything quite so sinister. Truly… psychopathic.. Psychopathic in large volume… just, wow! Death Dolls is definitely crime, definitely noir and for a majority of people it would simply read as horror. The most creepy type of horror. Reading this book reminded me of a day off work, a few years ago, where I binged on all SAW movies one after the other and ended up rocking back and forth, wrapped in a blanket, by the end of the movie marathon… I’d say I was quite close to breaking my brain that day. Death Dolls definitely pushed those mental boundaries again…

The story takes place in England, a quiet countryside where Benjamin has purchased the use of some farmland and units to open up his tattoo shop. Benjamin, who loves his mother and sister very, very much is an extremely ambitious man- he wants to be successful and rich. He wants to be rich so bad, that when it comes to the time to make moral decisions, he cares naught for what is right or wrong as long as there’s a profit to be made. As his merry band of psychopaths gets added to by way of employees, each with their ideas on how to make that profit grow, the plot gives ‘dysfunctional’ a whole new meaning…

You can probably guess who’s behind the idea of the Death Dolls brand of tattoos… think stereotypes when it comes to baddies… It’s always the Eastern Europeans and Russians who end up doing the bloodiest work… Ah well… 😀 But to make it quite clear, we’re not dealing with some sort of magical powers or a curse that get injected through a tattoo gun into skin that then makes the tattooed lose their mind and go off on a murder-spree. Oh, no! You can’t even imagine what the Death Doll tattoo in someone’s skin will mean… Or how valuable a tattooed skin ends up being… *shudders remembering*

In addition to the tattoo shop, Benjamin starts a number of other businesses with staff (one creepier than the other, but all of them with very little- zero-  conscience) who live on site. For the sake of some mystery, I will withhold the information about these other businesses that opened up the hair-rising, blood curdling possibilities in this story…If I told you, you might put 2 and 2 together, you see, and I’ll leave this particular easter egg for you to discover.

Death Dolls doesn’t have that one element I most love in books- character development.  But this is not that kind of book anyway… At times, the writing lost a bit of smoothness by ‘he said/she did’ but what the story does have in spades is the idea behind it all which is something I couldn’t conjure up in my wildest nightmares! I am but one opinion and when I put aside my very subjective preference, I cannot deny that the point of this book isn’t a case study to dissect the minds of nutjobs, the psyhcological questions and answers to fit into a complete mental picture (and lordy, believe you me, the characters all have crawled out of their holes in Hell to come together in this sordid tale). Death Dolls is not a book to investigate where the breaking point of morality happens. There is no ‘but why’ or ‘but how’… The breaking point has been passed, the line that separates the madmen from humanity has been over-stepped and what you’ll witness is a nest of crazy people who will bat zero eyelids in the name of money. It gets truly bloody and unbelievable and more sinister by the page. People die… dun-dun-duuuun… 

At 182 pages, there isn’t much by the way of complex character development but you’ll get a story to remember for weeks to come. It is that effective. Whilst the leisurely pace at the start of the story comes across good-natured, it kicks off suddenly and whoaaa, the madness is pouring off the page like blood from a carotid artery.

Death Dolls offers a solid plot wrapped in butchery and your worst nightmares- all heading towards an ending that is wonderfully ironic… That is, if you got the cojones to pick this title up… Forget about food for a few hours, crack open something a bit stronger (if you’re old enough, of course!) and receive your Halloween shock treatment, my friends!

Death Dolls on Goodreads ¦ Amazon UK ¦ USA

About the Author:

I am an emerging author, a submission to a short story anthology kicked it all off.

Black Cat is my first short story, and the hero isn’t maybe who you would assume.

Originally from Doncaster, South Yorkshire and now Corby in Northants. I’m in my forties, married with three children. We share our home with a Bengal cat and a Pink Tongued Skink.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had an interesting (well to me!) life. I have been a truck driver, university graduate and motorbike salesman amongst other things.

My two novellas, Newdon Killers series, The Crucifix and Famously Ordinary are out now!
The third book, Death Dolls is coming soon estimated launch date 22 August.
Later this year a new series in a different genre Mystery / contemporary fantasy will be published.
.
I have a Facebook page, Simon Farrant Official, I’d be pleased to see you there.

Twitter @asfarrant

I also have a newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest news first 🙂
https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/b2t0m0