OH, now THIS is a book to finish the year on. It starts on a high, turns it first big twist on page twelve and then keeps going all the way to the end.
Plot is relatively simple. Cuban policewoman seeks revenge for the killing of her father. Nothing easier, eh? Except that her father was a refugee from the Castro regime, hiding in the States, and she has just one week to sneak into the USA, find the killer, do the business, and get back home without the authorities in Havana noticing that she had been into the Forbidden Zone.
McKinty writes like a dream. An Irishman, apparently, but like John Connolly, he has the hard-bolied voice off perfectly. At the same time, he is capable of beautiful metaphors and almost poetic passages. Try this, the opening sentence for size, and if it doesn't make you want to grab the book and read on, then I'm a burrito.
"The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days."
Genius.
A shock-troop invades a small American town, bent on eliminating every single inhabitant. A small handful stand against them and by a series of lucky coincidences, and the ability to stand almost any amount of pain (toes bitten off, ruptured kidneys, self-amputation, and no amount of being thrown across rooms)... but why spoil the ending for you? 
Hundreds of heads roll, much blood is spilled, the tension is racked up here and there, but it isn't a book to pick up again in a few years time and think "I really enjoyed it last time, let's give it another go.
Ever picked a book up off a pile of stuff to go to Oxfam, and started reading it? And even though you don't want to you just keep turning the pages? well, that's me and Harry Redknapp's 1998 biography, written while he was still in charge at West Ham, and timed to coincide with their return to European football. Read it because I rememebered watching Redknapp as a player at West Ham, and because I followed the team through many of the years he managed them. And despite all the Tom Bowyer allegations, there is still something charming about 'Arry and the way he talks about overpaid footballers, underpaid managers, and how he never made any "dough" from the game. One hideous piece of dramatic irony - he talks about signing Marc Vivien Foe when Liverpool turnewd him down, apperntly because of a "dodgy medical condition": Harry couldn't see any sign of anything wrong with the player and reckoned he was one of the fittest players around. Foe colapsed and died in the middle of a fottball match just a few years later.
The sequel to "The Prisoner of Zenda" tells of Rudolf Rassendyll's return to Ruritania to save the reputation of the woman he loves, Princess (now Queen) Flavia. The prose is as chewy as late Victorian prose was wont to get, and the plot is somewhat naive by modern standards. It is a more melancholy book than its predecessor, in some ways acknowledging that the era of small European kingdoms with scheming Counts and duelling Dukes was coming to an end (although the setting served to provide Dornford Yates with a backdrop for his thrillers into the nineteen forties and beyond).
An enforcer who works for a pair of London crime lords takes a little time off to look into the death of his brother. 
Everybody knows the film adaptation "Get Carter", where Michael Caine makes a superb job of playing the one-track anti-hero, his emotional range displayed by INCREASING THE VOLUME WHEN HE'S A BIT ANGRY. Nothing wrong with that. It was a great way of portraying the man with anger constantly seething an inch below the surface. If the film (for the most part, a faithful rendition of the book) is a nineteen-seventies take on the Jacobean Revenge tragedy, then the book is an attempt at literary noir - part Raymond Chandler, part Jim Thompson. Willis's descriptions of the almost-Scunthorpe townscape and population bear comparison with Chandler and Hammett, as does much of the dialogue, while the seediness, corruption, and inevitability of the tragedy bring to mind the best of Jim Thompson's novels (which reminds me - I must search out "The Getaway" for a 2010 read).
I first (and most recently) read this almost forty years ago. It is about its time, but is in no way a period piece, no more than "The Big Sleep". It won't be forty years before I read it again.
The late Donald Westlake back in his Richard Stark guise to present one last adventure with Parker. If you have never read any of the novels, you may remember Parker as being played by Lee Marvin in "Point Blank" (a terrific film)or by Mel Gibson in "Payback" (a pointless remake).
Westlake/Stark is one of a few writers to make a success out of writing under two separate identities. Ed MacBain/Evan Hunter springs to mind (and, indeed, must be the only instance of a writer collaborating with his alter-ego on a single novel), but whereas MacBain/Hunter wrote completely different genres (policers and literary), W/S splits between "caper" novels and the adventures of killer/thief Parker. In this one parker tries to recover the proceeds of an earlier novel, hampered at every turn by police, state troopers, rival gangsters, bounty hunters, and accomplices; just another working day for Parker.
Taut, pacy, never a wasted word; Stark by name and stark by execution.
Ah, the 1920s, and a return to the desert to revisit some of the second-stringer characters from "Beau Geste"...
Nothing is going to match up to that first, beautifully constructed novel, of course, but Wren is nothing if not a great yarn-spinner and he crosses backwards and forwards through time before pulling all the threads together in the story of how some old friends and enemies are reunited years after the events at Fort Zinderneuf.
Black Friday is the first shopping day after Thanksgiving; a day of deep discounting, huge crowds, and, in this efficient police-tec thriller, an opportunity for a terrorist-style suicide bomb attack on a crowded shopping mall. 
The characters never really seem to come to life in this one. Too many of them crowd the pages, and there is at least one too many coincidence. Nonetheless, there's enough there to keep you turning the pages to the end, and to tempt another venture into the world of Maggie O'Dell.
I never knew that teenage fiction was quite as strong as this. I picked it up by accident (it was on the "New Books" shelf at the library) and the opening paragraphs hooked me before I realised that its target market was about a quarter of my age.
The book tackles important themes; bullying, loneliness, homophobia, tolerance, learning trust, and parallels its contemporary plot with another set in a fantasy land created by the lead characters.There is just a tiny echo of some of the works of Alan Garner - anyone who remembers "The Owl Service" will agree that cross-over didn't start with Philip Pullman and JK Rowling. "The Traitor Game" is intelligent, honest and worthwhile without being worthy, and the book is only occasionally let down by the fact that its author(ess) has never been a teenage boy so gets a few notes just a tiny bit off key. This shouldn't be sufficient to put anyone off reading it however; even someone as old as me can appreciate both the craft and the caring that has gone into writing it.
Series characters - doncha just love 'em? There's something about coming back to the same person time after time, knowing how they are going to react, what their moral code is. Lee Child's Jack Reacher has been around for a while now - thirteen books - but this is the first of them, and the first I have read. Now why haven't I done it before? Child is right there on the bookshop shelves with all the "C"s that I read so avidly - Crais, Connolley, Coben, Connolly... but there's something about the author's name that I have always found a little offputting; prejudice against the name "Lee", perhaps. And then there's the description of Reacher himself - six foot five, two hundred and forty pounds... 
... I remember when it was sufficient for a hero to top out at an even six feet - but then I remember a time when you never saw a girl more than about five feet eight tall, so maybe better diet has worked for heroes too.
I should have ignored the prejudice. Reacher works, in a hard-boiled, tight-lipped, avenging angel sort of way. Women fall for him at the drop of a gun, men respect or fear him, he's not afraid to fall in love, kill a bad guy, or walk away from a woman when it's for her own good.
The plot is a standard format - lone stranger wanders into town, gets banged up by the local police, uncovers dirty doings. But the prose is terse, snappy, driving, and the twists are surprisingly effective (and effectively surprising), and the characters are sufficiently modelled to garner interest and sympathy. I am sure I have seen the major plot device before, but maybe it was Childs who used it here for the first time so I won't hold it against him. I shall seek out more of these; not too frequently, but regularly.
Michael Chabon's first "Children's" novel. A knowledge of baseball helps, but is not essential.
A great biography of one of the true masters of the comic book art form; Steve Ditko.
An engrossing trip though the troubled relatinship between the creator of Spiderman, the industry that milked his talent, and the fans who adored his early work, abused his generosity, and eventually abandoned him.
Beautifully illustrated, with wonderful black-and-white full page repros of Strange Tales splash pages, and even featuring a complete reprint of his first ever published story, making you realise that the Ditko talent hit the industry fully formed and as mature as the greats of the fifties.
Moving from the pupil to the master.
The earliest stories in the career of Hornblower, Cornwell's model for his own Napoleonic era character, but written to meet the demand for more stories of the hero, and thus perfectly polished. Not only did Forester have the voice off pat, but also knew exactly who Hornblower was going to grow into, so there are no false notes here (compare with Richard Sharpe who starts off a Cockney and then becomes the Sheffield blade). Essentially a series of short stories, and familiar to anyone who watched the TV series with Mister Fantastic stretching himself into the role of a seventeen year old, seasick midshipman.
You wonder why simple seafaring tales are still on the shelves more than fifty years after they were originally published, then you open one of the Hornblower books and you understand; great writing, great story-telling, transcends time and fashion and remains eternally readable.
Another century, another battle, another job for Richard Sharpe... oops! I mean some other person with a sharp sounding name; Hook, yes, that's it, Hook.
Like Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion, Cornwell's soldiers all seem to be re-incarnations (pre-incarnations) of the same man, and it is almost impossible to read this book without hearing Sean Bean's voice. I mean to say - I watch "Lord of the Rings" and I think Bernard Corwell wrote it.
If you like Cornwell, and battles, and mad religious fanatics, and glimpses of historical characters with their trousers round their ankles, and women in peril, this'll pass the time of day more than adequately.
Oh, and final sentences with exactly three beats in them...
Then this one is for you.
See my review on bookersatz
http://bookersatz.blogspot.com/
It seems like only weeks ago that "The Lovers", Connolly's most recent addition to the Charlie Parker series, was keeping me awake. And now Connolly is back with another hero who finds himself in conflict with something not entirely of this world.
See my review on bookersatz http://bookersatz.blogspot.com/
Concise. Informative. Possibly the most valuable Creative Writing "How To..." in print.
Travis McGee is a beach bum James Bond, lurving the ladies and dealing with villains, and all with an air of cynicism that he reckons is his nature but we, the readers, know that he adopts to cover some past hurt, and to hide what a naturally good guy he is. Written in 1964, and oh, so redolent of the times - men and women call each other "dear" and "darling", and hop into bed for pleasure or the banishment of pain. The first of the Travis McGee novels, and with a great villain straight out of the Max Cady mould, this shows its age, but not in a bad way. The plot isn't madly complicated, but it more than holds the attention. I shall re-read a few more of these, but not too frequently. Sixties swingers can become nauseaous very quickly, after all.
Okey-dokey, let's start with the publishing economics of this book. 246 pages, 43 chapters. Each chapter starts halfway down a page so thats (hmmm) 21.5 blank pages.
On average, each chapter ends halfway down a page, so thats another 21.5 pages. And every chapter starts on a right-hand page, meaning that if the previous chapter finished on a right hand page, the new chapter is faced by a completely blank page. This happens, on average, every other chapter. That's another 21 pages. That's 63 (sixty-three, and you know they are big numbers when the teletype prints them out in words on the football scores) pages containing nothing. That's a quarter of the book.
And the typeface is big. Very big. Probably almost big enough to have the words "You won't need your magnifying-book-page-reader for this one" on the cover and to go on the shelves in the library marked "Large Print". So what does this all mean? Well, it means that you don't get much book for your money in terms of number of words. And, sadly, you don't get much book for your money in terms of writing.
Now, I remember when Tom Sharpe was a master farceur. His characters whirled in a typhoon of misunderstanding and misapprehensions. Language tied itself in knots as meanings doubled back on themselves and bit their speakers well-and-truly in the backside. Onjects animate and inanimate conspired to trap Sharpe's victims in the unlikeliest, and yet, oddly enough, the most plausible manner.
I remember having to thrust an open paperback (one of the two South African novels) into the hands of the person sitting next to me on the Tube one day, just so they could see the cause of the tears that were pouring down my face, and then having to wrestle the damn thing back from them when they were reduced to the same state. But I was younger then. And so was Tom Sharpe.
And there, for me, lies the major problem with this book. It is old. It is tired. It is perfunctory. All marriage is loveless. Sex is procreation, not recreation. The police are stupid. Women are selfish dominators. Men are spineless. Sharpe has written all this before, but always given us, at the heart of the novel, a character we can care for. Not this time.
The cast comprises (a) a married couple where a spineless man is dominated by his wife, (b) a married, infertile, couple where a stereotypical Essex wide boy husband fails to satisfy his wife, so she dominates him by making him take of his shoes when he enters the room, and (c) the spineless male product of union (a).
Add some police whose presence (as is often the case) is to misinterpret an everyday phrase to draw the conclusion that something significant has taken place. The phrase in this case is "bloody thing", which our policeman, in order to actually make something happen in the plot, is forced to interpret in a Shakespearean fashion, and assume that a "bloody thing" is a thing covered in blood (this despite the fact that he, himself uses "bloody" as an oath only a page or two distant). And so weak is this misinterpretation that Sharpe even has to underline it, to virtually draw the reader aside and say "Did you see what he did there? He completely misunderstood!". When an author has to nudge you in the ribs like a drunk in a saloon bar, you know you are in trouble.
The book ends suddenly. So suddenly that I thought some pages must have fallen out in the binding process, but no - it just stops. The grand denouement doesn't occur. All the (surviving) characters do a 180 degree turn; not even a graceful U-turn, just a handbrake turn which fails to raise any dust, or convince the reader.
There is one vintage Sharpe comic image. One. Just one. I won't tell you what it is, or where it is, but when something about transvesticism raises a smile to your lips, you know that the book has just peaked, and you can put it down content in the knowledge that you won't miss anything by continuing no further.
I picked this up because of Pelecanos' connection to "The Wire", another one of those drama serials that American TV now does so well, and his influence on the show is made evident by his writing in this novel. His style can be clumsy, and he is prone to ignore the "Show-don't-tell" rule, but I guess that's a habit you fall into when writing for TV. But if you can get past these stylistic aggravations, he plots and does dialogue like a master, and his characters are more than a series of vocal tics and social mannerisms; they have depth and they are capable of change, and of surprising the reader.
How highly can I praise this book? How strongly can I recommend it.
Words almost totally fail me.
Just do yourself a favour.
Oh Lord. Two Bulldog Drummonds in one year. I feel very slightly icky.
OK, it's great that new books are coming out all the time, and there's never a shortage in the shops. But sometimes, it repays to dig through back catalogues and pull out something like this. 
It is easy to forget just how sophisticated the writing in a thriller novel can be, and just how well language was mastered by popular novelists in the pre 1950s. It is, perhaps, a little redundant to say it, but Graham Greene really could write, and this is a fine example of the twisting, turning, paranoid thrillers that were being produced years before Robert Ludlum and his kind came along.
Ah, after the Cornwell nonsense below, all I can say is thank goodness there are writers who still give value for money. One nasty, nasty villain, one plucky heroine, a little bit of romantic conflict, twists and turns, and just enough clue dropping for the reader to go "I saw that coming" and then pulling them up with an "I didn't see that coming!"
Having been so disappointed with a recent Patricia Cornwell, I thought I would try one of the older, non-Scarpetta, books.
All I can say is, glad I got this from the library. 180 pages, 27 lines to the page, 10 words to a line, I make that (counts on fingers) under 50,000 words. Imagine paying 13 squids for 50,000 words, and then realising that it was that short because the author just couldn't be bothered to create three-dimensional characters, or sow the seeds of the solution more than about three chapters from the end. As Johnny Rotten said, "Ever had the feeling you've been cheated?"
For something called "Target", this was somewhat unfocussed. Never quite sure who to make the central character, Kernick asks us to identify with, perhaps, too wide a range of characters.
Could you have more of a contrast with James Ellroy?
A contender for most people's favourite Narnia book, and probably the least "Christian" (if you can just ignore the "lion and the lamb" section at the end), 
but so heavily anti-"progressive education" that it is more firmly rooted in the 1950s than most of the tothers (if memory serves me - it is twenty-odd years since I last read them, and then it was to my children rather than for myself).
Still has some nice fantasy concepts, and the plot packs in a remarkable diversity of action in a slim volume.
Powerful, moving, a realistic and convincing portrayal of obsession and how it damages.
Ellroy's own experiences provide a sense of perpective - whenever you wonder if someone could really feel this way, you just need to re-read Ellroy's account of how his life was damaged by early tragedy.
Hooray! Charlie Parker is back! This is something like number eight in the Parker series and I
cannot wait for numbers nine, ten, eleven...
The Parker books read with an authentic American tone; this could be any of the "C"s (Crais, Coben, Michael Connelly) but instead the author is Irish, and perhaps that's where the mystical undercurrent comes from. Sometime almost dead-straight private-eye/thrillers, every now and again Connolly delves into Parker's unusual spiritual situation. There's something more going on here than good versus evil on a mundane level.
It shouldn't work. It does work. That's the genius of John Connolly.
Oh, and do try his "Book of Lost Things", a wonderful fantasy novel.
A debut novelist with a pacily written Brit-tec policer. A woman in charge, this time, and one with the usual burden of 'issues', but a 'tec without issues would be a bland old affair - even Gran'dad Sherlock had his 'habit'. Happily, instead of a too-close relationship with the bottle and a fondness for some genre music (the regular betokeners of individuality), this one lacks both self-confidence and a regular partner. Initially a little top-heavy with the supporting cast, but the pace accelerates and, as it does so, the main characters come into sharper focus. Plenty of action, and Ms. Russell is adept at turning the plot into unexpected side streets. This one will grow into a series, and don't be surprised to see it on TV one day in the future. 
Look. Not everything has to be "worthy" does it? Sometimes you just want to read in order to save your eyes from atrophy.
Not sure what the target market for this is supposed to be - Bride of Frankenstein's monster wreaks havoc with the Whitby hoteliers, visits Hell (which turns out to be Whitby at Christmas) and ... ermm... that's it, really. Like "Buffy" for Agatha Raisin fans.
A detailed portrait of a nine-sixties male chauvinist. Actually, male chauvinist fails to do him justice; Alfie doesn't even realise that women belong to the same species - "birds" are all "it", rather than "she", as far as Alfie is concerned.
Bill Nuaghton's control of voice is a triumph; there is never a word that falls from Alfie Elkins's self-congratulatory lips that doesn't ring true. Forty-odd years after it was written, it is sad to think that there are plenty of men who really haven't evolved from this primitive state.
What an you say about Ray Bradbury? It has been more than seventy years since his first story was published and he still keeps finding new inspiration. This collection is from the late nineties, and his distinctive voice rings as true as ever. From the seemingly everyday to the fantastical, his short stories provide a template for any aspiring writer.
I "discovered" Elmore Leonard when Time Out wrote a feature about this unknown, ex-Western, writer sometime in the seventies. Seems he was moving into the thriller market. Some writer. Elmore Leonard is probably the boss of dialogue writing - his people speak like people, but with the heightened reality that fiction demands, Masterful. And his plots swing along, too. This one is from around 1980 - hasn't dated one minute.
This is more like it - I do like Tom Thorne, despite the predictable predilection for genre music.
Efficient and everything you have come to expect from JK. It won't change your life but then, hey, how many books do?
A standalone novel (although Tom Thorne does make a cameo) - not an unreserved success, but one written, perhaps, with an eye to a TV/film adaptation?
Liked the first book in the Millenium trilogy so much that I went right out and bought the second. Now... how long 'til they publish the third?
Originally drawn characters, great plot.
Ellory was recommended to me but I would not be tempted to pass the recommendation on on the basis of this one.
Who would have thought that the Superman myth could be made fresh all over again?
The Scarpetta soap opera is starting to grow a little stale.
Connelly returns to one of his second-string characters and pits him against a classy villain.
Suprisingly slight - and could Bond REALLLY smoke sixty a day?
An intriguing character concept, but somewhat wasted in this series novel. A pleasant enough time-passer, but not one to be remembered.
Ry Bradbury really does write poetic prose. A brief soujourn in a dystopia, but one that will linger in the memory forever.
Coben knows how to write a page-turner. This was a one-sitting book, full of great hooks, suspense, tension... ahhh, he just does what he does so well.
I read this book about once every two years, and have done ever since I first bought a copy of it in a jumble sale in 1966. I am, of course, aware of the references which could be edited out, but they are part of the original and reflect the mores of the time. Putting that issue to one side for a moment, this is probably the best of Buchan's thrillers, and the main task of detection and correction is laid at the door of a female character, so perhaps Buchan was not completely iredeemable.
Superb plotting, wonderful pace, and a marvellous villain.
I shall enjoy reading it again in 2011.
