Rather like my penchant for male thriller writers whose surnames begin with "C" I also have a thing for the Gardner/Gardiner duopoly - Lisa and Meg. And, of course, I only began reading one having confused her with the other.
Lisa is NOT the one championed by Stephen King, the one who can't get a deal in her native Americ for her Evan Delaney novels (read 'em, I implore you). No, that one is Meg. This one is Lisa without-an-I-Gardner, and spins off from earlier novels of hers. Helps if you have read them, doesn't hurt if you haven't. This is taut and efficient, a page-turner and satisfying in itself. It won't live forever in the memory, but deals with disappeared wife, suspect husband, nearby sex offender trying to live a straight life. Nothing is as it seems, and Ms Gardner manages to conceal the twists yet make them wholly inevitable when they are finally bought to light.
I wanted to like this book. I liked the basic premise - a crashed airliner whose passengers have maintained a nineteen-fifties, public school society are invaded by the sole survivor of an "I'm Not A Celebrity, Get me Out Of Here" TV endurance/reality show. 
The Wilt-like character at the centre of the plot is an archetypal English lower middle class loser, a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, divorced, skint, emotionally stunted, blah, blah, and very much blah. There doesn't seem much about his life that he likes, and there doesn't seem much about anything at all that the author likes. His satire bites at reality TV, TV producers, English men, chavs, modern society, 1950's society, feminism, ex-wives, the public school system... he really doesn't have a good word to say for anyone. Which is a shame, because he can plot, he can write, he can do dialogue, but he can't invest the book with any warmth, any heart, any positivity. And to write a book which will be enjoyed and appreciated by anyone not terminally addicted to schadenfreude, then, like the song says, "You gotta have heart".
Elmore Leonard is, perhaps, the best dialogue writer in American crime fiction. Couple this with the fact that he writes believable, engaging characters and intriguing plots and you have an author who bears reading and re-reading.
"Comfort to the Enemy" is a linked series of two short stories and a novella, watching lawman Carlos "Carl" Webster over a span over twenty or so years of his life. Beware the cover - this makes you expect some kind of "White Heat", "Little Caeser", Chicago gangster affair, but the contents are a long way from that. Encounters with wannabe Dillinger sidekicks, cattle rustlers, hard-working men who turn to bank robbery out of despair, a German PoW who escapes and then returns to camp almost at will. There's no detection, as such, very little in the way of knock-down, shoot 'em up gunplay, but a portrait of a man growing older and wiser in his job. Recommended.
The first book of the New Year, an Andrew Vacchs novel (is Vacchs my "turn of the year" author? Cetainly 2009 kicked of with a slew of his work).
Vacchs may have finished with his series character last year, but this novel gives the impression of having been plotted as a Burke vehicle. There is the wise, troubled "leader" and the family of misfits, this time a gathering of homeless who learn valuable life lessons, as does the reluctant head of the family. Ho is a retired sensei with a raft of memories of people he has let down, intent on defeating his own demons. If you have never read a Vacchs before, this one is not going to convert you. Plots peter out, people utter gnomically, nothing much really happens. If you have read Vacchs before, it will remind you of one of the more melancholy Burke novels, but without the graphic details. It's not a thriller, not a "caper", just "a novel". An interesting departure, but not an entirely satisfying one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
