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.
