I was gifted my copy for the blog tour for which i am late and can only apologise. This was a brilliant thrilling and tense read that just got darker and darker as the narrative went on. Cara has just started her life sentence in a new prison, something about the place makes it unique - a different concept. We soon start to learn about Caras history, her nickname The Butcher soon gets explained and we soon realise she is adament it was a crime she didnt commit.

When she is dragged from her cell bed in the middle of the night because her cell mate and friend has been shot, she is adament she has been set up once more. However, it wasn't physically possible anyone else could of done it - the room was never opened and closed, and the camera cut out for only 3 seconds. So, Cara decides she must make her own investigation and solve the mystery in front of her but what she soon begins to discover is North Fern is not like a normal prison however normal it seems and things run alot deeper here.

This was honestly so gripping, i put it down to sleep and then decided sleep could wait because i needed answers and i needed them now, it was just so engaging. Like i mentioned it got darker as the narrative went on and the twists and turns were so unexpected. I found myself invested in Cara not only her in past but her present too - why was this happening? I feel like the author made it in a way that it was unclear what was actually happening and it was not an easy one to guess.

Its the first book i have read by the author and i can say i really was a fan of the writing style and pacing, it was fast enough that your were invested but not too fast that you lost track. I also words were written for a purpose and not just to fill space, everything was necessary even if you didnt realise it at the time.

A great tense and thrilling read.

This is the first Chris M George novel I've read. I was really excited by the premise of the book and a locked door mystery. This book did not disappoint. Well worth a read.

Inside Out is Chris McGeorge’s third thriller and once again his speciality for crafting Agatha Christie-esque locked room mystery thrillers comes to the fore, with this being his best yet. Cara Lockhart is sentenced to life imprisonment at a new maximum security facility known as Fern Hall, for a crime she is adamant she did not commit and has maintained her innocence about from the very beginning. Not to mention, after settling in, she feels there is something incredibly strange about the prison with its use of futuristic technology, ban on visitors and extremely limited contact with the outside world. Windows don't exist and in their place are electronic screens which are used to show a movie one evening per week, but the strange thing is they play the same movie every week without fail. Soon musings like these are far from her mind as one morning she awakens to a nightmare. Her cellmate has been murdered and with no-one having been in or out due to the state of the art security system, Cara is once again about to be blamed for a brutal killing she apparently didn't commit.

What hits you initially about this thriller is that it's very original; by fusing advanced technology and science fiction elements with prison life and a seemingly impossible murder, McGeorge has crafted a thoroughly unpredictable, twisty and exciting read; It kept me in a state of suspense the whole time, and I loved how the author always had me feeling off-balance with no idea what was going on inside this incredibly odd prison system. Due to that, it was one of the most enjoyable thrillers I've read recently, but I suspect it'll be quite a Marmite read — one you'll either love or hate. It's well written, quick-paced and as twist after twist and reveal and reveal hits, you are left shocked and in awe of McGeorge’s imagination. Fern Hall is very much the centre of the story, even more so than central character Cara, in all its bizarre glory. This is an addictive, unique and captivating locked room mystery with plenty of intrigue and a whole lot of tension and drama. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Orion for an ARC.

When Cara-Jane Lockhart, a 23-year-old prisoner serving a life sentence, is transferred from New Hall prison in Wakefield to North Fern in Buckinghamshire, she’s rather surprised to find herself at a new, futuristic prison that has its own rules and regulations.

At North Fern, prisoners wear Cuffs, which are like ID cards with a built-in tracker and allow them access to some areas and restrict where they can go. If the prisoners stray somewhere they shouldn’t, they get an electric shock. The prison guards also wear Cuffs.

The prison has impressive, state-of-the-art facilities and, rather than actual windows, there are multiple screens on the ceiling that show images of the sky. There are no clocks or any indication of time passing. Rather than time outside, the women have periods of illumination where the natural light system is turned on. The exercise yard is actually indoors and like a sports hall with mats and equipment, a wooden floor and gym equipment. It all feels like a bizarre social experiment.

The women aren’t allowed to have visitors, due to the seriousness of their crimes, but they can receive letters and small parcels from their families and friends. Movie night on Saturdays is compulsory and a rather repetitive event.

Cara was nicknamed ‘The Butcher’ at New Hall and her reputation has followed her to North Fern. She’s very wary of the other women and has a few run ins but soon makes friends with her cellmate, Stephanie Barnard, and the two women get into a routine and support each other.

When she wakes up one morning to find her cellmate dead, with a bullet hole in her forehead, Cara is horrified and protests her innocence. It seems futile with the overwhelming evidence against her – the pair were in a locked cell together and, despite a 12-second blank period in the camera feed, the systems prove that no one else had any access to the room.

As Cara is marched into an isolation cell, she’s left alone with her thoughts and decides that she needs to be strong and work out exactly what’s going on. There’s something really off about the prison but she has to remain calm and not give up, and work out the whys and hows of the situation and find the murder weapon if she has any hope of proving her innocence.

At first, there seems to be no reason why Cara has been set up but, as we learn more about past events, everything becomes clearer and there were some good twists and turns and a few aha moments!

I’m a big fan of books set in prisons and this was certainly a bit different and even more claustrophobic than your average establishment. Cara seemed the ultimate unreliable narrator – I was never sure if she was imagining things, lying or telling the truth. I wanted to like her but the crime she was convicted of was horrific and she seemed strangely detached from reality at times.

Overall, I really enjoyed Inside Out – it was entertaining, cleverly plotted and had a gripping storyline. Once I’d got into the story, I was frantically turning the pages to see how the main protagonist was going to get out of her impossible predicament. There were some interesting characters and I was never really sure who could be trusted. I had to suspend belief at times but that was all part of the charm!

Fast becoming the modern master of the locked room mystery, this is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, locked inside a box that has had the key thrown away. And then chucked in the sea.

Starting with a 'there is no way that could have happened' murder, Cara's story flashes back and forth throughout the book but at the very beginning, the reader is left with little doubt that she has been accused of a horrific crime. Her nickname, 'The Butcher', is eventually explained, but the reader is 100% with cara as she is taken from the prison environment which she has just about become accustomed to and thrust into an entirely new one.

She doesn't know whee she is. There are no windows and no clocks. All the women prisoners are given an iteinery but have no clue whether the times that such activities as 'Illumination' are actually held at the time they are told. The 'windows' in their cells are like tv screensavers with artificial daylight being pumped into their cells. There isn't even an exercise yard. No visiting, no contact with the outside world except for a weekly letter. The women are shown the same movie over and over and over again.

It reads like a modern hellscape, but at the same time, these are apparently the country's worst offenders. So shouldn't a punishment fit the crime?

And this is where the reader becomes fully engaged into what Chris is trying to say, in context, do those who commit crimes and step outside of the clearly defined rules of society, have the right to say what is and is not, a fair punishment? Or is that for others to decide? How much of the narrative around personal and collective responsibility is driven by the media and perceptions of who, or what a criminal is? And what about those who are actually wrongly convicted?

As Cara begins to fight back against the brutal regime of North Fern, she is working from an internal and external perspective, trying to release her mind and her body from a system which has consistently failed her.

Thoughtful, engaging and a real puzzle to work through, this novel also has cross over mentions to Chris' other books, 'Guess Who?' and 'Now You See Me' which really thrilled me! Go grab 'Inside Out' in ebook format, I guarentee it will be a few hours well spent!

This one is a good read but it’s a bit different.
Carla is in prison for something she strongly denies doing and life isn’t great for her. Her cellmate is then found shot dead in their shared cell, and as the door was locked all night, all eyes are on Cara.
The prison has some strange rules so things don’t go smoothly.
For a lot of the book I couldn’t see where the story was going, whether that was intentional due to the bizarreness of it or just story telling, I’m not sure. Parts of the plot are a bit mind boggling at times so you do need to suspend belief a bit along the way.
Overall a good read.
Thanks to Orion Publishing Group and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

3.5*

I’ve only read one other book by Chris McGeorge, 'Now You See Me' – I do love a story with that ‘locked in’ vibe – and you can’t get much more locked in than a prison!

When Cara Lockhart arrives at HMP North Fen, Buckinghamshire, she has already acquired the nickname of ‘The Butcher’. It will be a while before we find out why. However it is clear that the other women prisoners despise her, which is rather ironic seeing as none of them are angels.

North Fen is a new prison and rather futuristic in design. Both prisoners and guards wear electronic cuffs to move through the prison’s areas and cells – but if a prisoner goes anywhere off limits they get an electric shock. There are no windows, but instead digital screens show pictures of outside views of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. It’s definitely designed with security – and secrecy in mind it would seem. No visitors are allowed.

Cara is placed in a cell with Stephanie Barnard. They get along ok and Cara thinks she has a friend. However when Stephanie is found dead in their cell, killed by a shot to the head, Cara is the obvious suspect. Their cell was locked, no one else can get into it without setting off alarms so Cara must have done it – even though the gun cannot be found.

If Cara thought that her nightmare began on being sentenced to life imprisonment for murders that she maintains she didn’t commit, her life is about to get a lot worse. There is something very wrong about New Fen – including the very sinister Governor but with no contact with the outside world, who can Cara turn to for help and how can she prove that she wasn’t a killer.

This was a complex and twisty tale that kept me wondering what on earth was going on. With the story told from Cara’s third person perspective, it was hard to always trust her version of events; there were times when I had no idea whether things were actually happening or were just in her imagination.

As the story moves on, the backstory is revealed so that we find out why Cara is imprisoned and all the reasons behind it. There were very few characters that I actually cared about, Cara being one of them, and I was keen for her to prove her innocence as I felt she had been unjustly accused on all counts, however being locked up on her own and not knowing who she could trust, I really couldn’t see how she would do it. Kudos to the author for devising a plotline as to how this difficulty could be managed.

There were dips in pace, with the middle being a bit slower but then towards the end the pace picks up as it heads towards a dramatic denouement. The plot may have seemed a bit crazy at times, and you may have to suspend belief at some of the strands but nevertheless it was very entertaining and intriguing with plenty to keep me glued to my Kindle until the end.

My thanks to Netgalley and Orion for a copy of “ Inside Out” for an honest review.

I really enjoyed Chris Mc George’s previous book “ Guess Who “ and was intrigued by the premise of this new one by him .From the beginning it had a sci-fi feel to the story , which isn’t really my favourite genre. .I kept with the story and enjoyed the first 3/4 of the book but then I found it became confusing and really far fetched so unfortunately I can only give this an average score.

A good and interesting read!

I would recommend this to everyone who loves a good story with captivating characters! Definitely a good read!

Welcome to HMP North Fern – the newest maximum security women’s prison in England. No one can go anywhere without the system knowing about it – all doors are coded to the electronic cuffs that everybody wears. You cannot go anywhere you shouldn’t go and your every movement is recorded.

Cara Lockhart, nicknamed The Butcher, is the latest inmate to arrive at North Fern, but she manages to find some sort of routine in life behind bars, even electronic ones. She even makes friends with her cell mate – life is almost bearable.

Until one night when the cameras go out for a couple of seconds – and when they come on, Cara’s cell mate has been shot in the head. The door never opened, no one else entered the cell – Cara is obviously the guilty party, despite never moving on the tape before and after the camera loss. And the fact that the gun is nowhere to be found…

“The new novel from the king of the locked room mystery” – well, that’s quite a claim. Not the new novel bit, the bit about McGeorge being the king of the locked room mystery.

As you know, I’m old school on this and the current use of the phrase “locked room mystery” does rather get on my goat. And Then There Were None, and the countless modern isolated group mysteries are not locked room mysteries. They are closed circle mysteries, which doesn’t really catch on, but they are not locked room mysteries. For decades, a locked room mystery involves a crime committed inside a location that was apparently inaccessible to the culprit. There are other impossible crimes that can fit under the same banner, but it’s the impossible bit of the definition that’s crucial.

Chris McGeorge seems to have got his aforementioned reputation from Guess Who, his first novel, an enjoyable thriller/mystery involving five people waking up locked in a room with a body with nobody knowing which of them killed the victim. It’s an entertaining book, but it’s not a locked room mystery in the accepted sense of the phrase.

The set-up for Inside Out is, however. Fans of classic mysteries will see echoes of Carter Dickson’s masterpiece The Judas Window in the set-up, where the suspect awakes to find himself locked inside a room (from the outside) with the victim. The Judas Window has a cunning solution to what happened – completely unbelievable if you think about it too hard, but that’s the Golden Age for you.

But be warned – this book is not The Judas Window.

It’s far more of a thriller than a mystery novel, and for the most part, it’s a very entertaining one. Cara’s predicament is gripping, and McGeorge cleverly drip-feeds parts of the back story to lead the reader to the big picture of what is going on, both with Cara and with North Fern in general. It’s one of the most effective uses of the possibly-unreliable narrator that I’ve seen for a good while, and you really develop a concern for the character, despite, initially, being unclear of what earned her the nickname Butcher – probably not her impression of Karl Urban – and how sane she really is. The pacing is excellent, the villains suitably nasty, although it is somewhat undermined by the obviousness as to who is who and the supervillain-level bonkersness of the overall scheme. I think both of these are deliberate choices, but as I say, this is a thriller more than a classic mystery.

And the locked room… there is really only one way to do a locked room when it is under camera surveillance, and it’s never satisfying. As such, it’s a shame that this seems to be a major selling point in the blurb.

So, if you want a thriller (especially if you don’t mind it going a bit OTT at the end) then this is recommended. But if you want a classic locked room mystery, well, someone’s going to reprint The Judas Window at some point, surely.

Inside Out is out in paperback and ebook on Thursday 29th October from Orion. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy.

I was really excited by the premise of this, who doesn't love a locked room mystery?!
I was so frustrated by the execution. The structure was so confusing, at times it was hard to work out whether they were talking about the murder she got jailed for, or the one that happened in the jail cell.
The plot was good at times, building suspense but then I felt this went on too long and didnt get to the cell murder quickly enough for me to stay engaged. By the time the ending happened I had lost the flow and was too confused!

The blurb of Chris McGeorge’s Inside Out promised the ultimate locked room mystery however the book did not hook me with too long scene setting and no characters that you would want to root for.

Overall a disappointment

This is the first Chris McGeorge book I have read and it is somewhat mad in its premise. The prison is totally dystopic in many ways in the first parts of the book and I must admit I enjoyed this aspect. Certainly the premise of the book being a locked room conundrum does it a disservice as it is so much more. I really enjoyed the book though I am unsure about the ending...I certainly couldn't put it down and I think the prison description was the strongest part as in many ways it seemed hopeless for those in there.
A good read but still not sure about the ending.

I really enjoyed this book all the way through. It had a really good plot, great main characters and really keeps you hooked on the plot. I would highly recommend this book.

Cara Lockhart is serving life in prison for a crime she claims she didn't commit, she then gets moved to a new state of the art, maximum security, womens prison where things all seem rather strange but she decides to keep her head down and stay out of trouble. When she wakes one morning to find her cellmate has been shot in the head, with a gun that is missing, behind a door that was locked all night, making her the only suspect, she fears her troubles are only just beginning. It's clear to Cara that she's been set up, but how can she prove it and will anyone believe a convicted murderer?

This story is told over two timelines; present and past and is the ultimate whodunnit mystery. It's the first I've read by this author and most of the time I hadn't got a clue what was going on and the concept was slightly bonkers, but it's a real page turner and I struggled to put it down. I was desperate for Cara to clear her name and reveal the real murderer but it wasn't looking good and with another transfer on the cards, her time was running out. It's a good all round read, shrouded in mystery and intrigue.

I'd like to thank Orion and Netgalley for the auto approval, I will post my review on Goodreads now and Amazon on publication day.

This was a bit of a mad book, and not at all what I was expecting. The author obviously has a great imagination, and I think anyone reading this book needs to have a good imagination, and go with the flow to really get into this book. I liked the main character and the prison was a well thought out and unexpected place. I don't want to say too much to give anything away and spoil it for other readers, but if you can get over some of the quirky and somewhat wacky ideas you should enjoy it. It was certainly original, and very different, it reminded me of the first time I watched "Killing Eve" I thought what the hell am I watching, and it was like a guilty pleasure because I loved it .I do enjoy writers who think outside of the box, and I think this writer never had a box in the first place !

3.5 stars rounded up.
I have read and loved both this author's previous books but I am afraid that this one just didn't quite do it for me. I've rounded up cos, despite any issues I may have had with it, I never once debated putting it down.
We follow Carla as she is in prison for something she vehemently denies doing. If that wasn't enough, she is dumped into a locked door mystery when her cellmate is found shot dead in their shared cell, the door having been locked all night. The gun is also missing, compounding the issue. And so begins a convoluted and interconnected tale, set in a rather extreme experimental prison, which connects her past to her present, both of which have a really big impact on her potential future...
This book was a little bonkers, and I mean in a good way. The prison in which it is set has some strange rules and is governed by some rather bizarre characters. I spent the majority of the book not really having a clue where we were going, which is a novelty these days so hats off to the author for that. Parts of the plot are a bit OTT and you do have to both keep your wits about you and also suspend belief a tad along the way.
But, and it's a big but, the story gets on with itself very well (albeit a tad slower in the middle third) and is waffle and padding free so, even though I didn't quite get that wholly satisfied ending I crave, I did have fun along the way.
All in all, not his strongest book, read this with a pinch of salt, but please do check out his other books. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I really enjoyed Guess Who, a previous book by Chris McGeorge, so I was excited to receive a Netgalley copy of Inside Out.

Cara Lockheart, otherwise known as The Butcher, has been transferred from the woman's prison she was incarcerated in to North Fern, the newest maximum security prison in the UK. It's high tech, flashy and state of the art.

Still pleading her innocence she wakes up to find her cell mate shot dead in the night. But with no way in or out Cara must have done it. Cara now finds herself trying to find out why she has once again been set up for a murder she didn't commit.

I can split this down into 3 parts. The first was interesting, setting the scene, and starting the guesswork. The second was confusing and drawn out and I lost interest for a while. The third took up pace as the past was revealed and the ending started drawing in. I was little disappointed by the ending but all in all it was an enjoyable read and I would give this 3 and a half stars.

Inside Out is the third book I've read by Chris McGeorge (the other two being Guess Who and Now You See Me). Although the concept behind this new novel is more than slightly bonkers, I must admit I really enjoyed it.

Cara Lockhart is sentenced to life imprisonment at a new maximum security facility; although she maintains her innocence. As days pass it becomes apparent there's something strange going on. Visitors are forbidden and all contact with the outside world is limited. Instead of windows there are electronic screens hidden in the walls. Movie night is once a week — the SAME movie EVERY week. Just what the heck is going on?

Cara awakens one morning to discover her cellmate dead; a bullet through her head. But the door has been locked all night and Cara is the only suspect. If life was tough before, it's about to get a whole lot worse. With time running out, she must locate the missing murder weapon, the real perpetrator AND a motive.

Inside Out was an extremely entertaining read. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on and it kept me gripped until the end. You really do have to suspend disbelief for it to work — the plot is incredibly ridiculous, but in a good way. For me it was pure escapism and I loved its sinister overtones. A corker of a read!

A fun read but be sure to hold that level of disbelief quite high. It felt a bit sci-fi in places and wasn't the novel I was expecting. Definately a locked room mystery which is a lot of fun to work out - which I didn't. Some things made sense and others didn't.

I did enjoy learning about Fern Hall, the new high-tech prison as it sounded very interesting and compelling. What a place to be! Not for the prisoners mind - for the reader.