Thirteen years in the writing
according to the publishers, and they offer a money-back guarantee if you don't "love" the book.
I really wish that I did - thirteen years is a long time to commit to telling a story, but I am not sure that this one is quite as epic, or deep, or meaningful as its gestation period might suggest.
A family wins a lottery. Two feckless young men decide to get themselves a big slice of that pie. One of them develops delusions of religious grandeur. A semi-retired cop suspects.
I know that there are probably some big themes, and that the author has something to say. Sadly, for me, the characters are underdeveloped, or too crudely sketched, or lack a coherent sense of purpose and personality. There is no moral centre. Tension is largely absent; will the old cop get fired or will he uncover the truth? Will the blackmailers get away with it all? This reader didn't really care one way or the other. I kept reading, but more to find out whether things reached a satisfying conclusion or not.
Unputdownability : Thirteen years to write; I suppose I had better give him a chance.
that Meg Gardiner went for so long without an American publisher, especially with the likes of Stephen King singing her praises.Her Evan Delaney series was a terrific five novel series full of suspense and great writing, and with Evan's story pretty much told, Gardiner has now turned to a newer character (I say "newer" but this is already the fourth in the series), the forensic scientist Jo Beckett.
Jo gets tangled up in a kidnapping that has her beset on all sides by opposing parties of evil-doers as well as the weather that threatens the lives of the teenagers she is doing her utmost to save.
Taut writing, bags of tension and plenty of "He's behind you" moments.
Unputdownability : The page-turning gets faster and faster...
DEXTER IS BACK...
in the sixth volume of the series. Now, for anyone who watches the TV series (and it is excellent in its own way) don't expect to be able to pick up the books in random order and make any sense of them. After Season One (which followed the first Dexter novel faithfully) the two media split in completely separate universes (see "Walking Dead" for another example). So don't expect to see all the same characters, in the same relationships, or even in the same state of corporeal existence.
In this print universe, Dex is married, a recently-made father and uncle, and still enjoying his nights out with his Dark Passenger. Until, that is, someone witnesses him at work and, deciding that he is a fit person to rid the world of a monster, sets out on a mission to Do Dex Down, while Dexter himself struggles to find a way to locate his new adversary and put him out of the picture. At the same time, Dex's old nemesis, the severely abbreviated Sgt Doakes finds a new ally in his campaign to uncover out our hero's secret life.
Lindsay manages to ring the changes with each new Dexter novel. There is never a feeling of repetition, of re-using the same plots, or of having the character re-voice pet anecdotes, but instead new scenarios are imagined, and characters grow and change, as people (and even monsters) do. Already looking forward to book seven.
Unputdownability : Not now! Can't you see I'm reading?
!940's Hollywood, the HUAC is working its dirty work, and a disgraced ex-oater hero and his "Red Indian" sidekick get drawn into it machinations as he uncovers the secrets behind the death of a scriptwriter accused of Un-American Activities. Nevert a dull paragraph, not a single page that doesn't make you want to hurry on to the next.
One of "The Wire" writer George Pelecanos's earlier efforts, this doesn't quite demonstrate the stripped down dialogue that he developed later in his career. It does, however, have pace, and a narrative thrust that makes you want to consume the whole, slim, book in one sitting. Like a latter-day pulp writer (think Horace McCoy, James M Cain or, most especially, Jim Thompson) Pelecanos's hero's fate is entirely out of his habds once he makes a single choice (an this case, giving away his last cigarette to a man who gives him a lift). The hero is a drifter, amoral, emotionally disconnected, trapped by the circumstances of his earlier life. He hitch-hikes his way into the middle of a criminal endeavour where almost everyone's intentions are quite what they seem, and discovers his own moral centre and sense of purpose in a climax that is both bloody and Thompson-esquely bleak. What a wonderful movie this could make.
Girl's brother disappears, years later one of her pupils disappears. Is she the only connection?
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.
You know just where you are with Carl Hiassen. A cast of likeable eccentrics. A sunny setting. A hero with high standards and an improbable mission statement. A reptile.
This time round he eschews his usual environmental issues and focuses on a sidelined investigative reporter who decides to dig into the death of a faded rock star and what his Courtney Love-esque widow had to do with it. You either find Hiassen samey, or you relish the familiarity. Put me in camp two, skipper.
George P. breaks the rules - all this "Show, don't tell" nonsense is just that as far as he is concerned. If it saves time to tell you, that's what he does. he's like that. Direct. To the point. That's how he got to write for "The Wire".
Two ex-cons find a bag full of money. But they are trying to go straight, so they put it back. Someone else takes it. The owner wants it back. Will it all end badly?
No doubt.
Read it.
OK, no more than once a year. I promise. Really. Once upon a time I could read two or three Yates's, one after the other. I felt more than a tad icky at the end of it, but I could do it, like eating six Mr Kipling Mince Pies in a single sitting. It's fun, but it ain't good for you. All that flowery prose and high romance and inter-war tacet racism. But still - the heroes are real heroes, the villains are real villains, and the fairyland chateaux set high in the Pyrenees are ... well, perhaps a bit too idealised for reality.
"Shoal Water" is one of Yates's side-shoot thrillers featuring a guest appearance by Jonah Mansel, but without the stiff-upper-chin of Richard Chandos to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. Usual palaver - ex-Uni type, bored with working in the City, buys a sports tourer and heads off to Europe for a few months holidays, meets a gorgeous gal in trouble, falls instantly in love, biffs a few baddies, condemns a few more to death...
Yates is one of the great Clubland Hero writers, and a lot of his novels would make great action movies (I have only ever seen one, and that was a pretty crummy BBC TV version), if they were just a tiny bit more plausible, and even slightly updateable. And that's it - no more for me this year... only, it must be a couple of years since I last read "She Fell Among Thieves", musn't it?
So many of my favourite authors are dying. The latest is Robert B Parker, whose hard-hitting, poetry quoting private eye Spenser has been treading the Philip Marlowe path 
for the last forty years. You can argue that no-forename Spenser's relationship with his psychologist gf Susan is a tad icky (face it, they must both be in their seventies by now) and that Spenser's open-armed acceptance of all races and sexual persuasions (he flirts outrageously with gay gangsters) is perhaps a little too idealised liberal and comes at the expense of actual plot advancement in the later works, but there is no denying that he writes page turners. A master of the snappy comeback and the short chapter (less than 300 words in some instances in this novel) you never put a Parker down though boredom.
This one is a latter day Magnificent Seven - Spenser recruits a crew to clean out a nest of crims, bikers, and general nogoodniks who are driving down property values in the rich people's playground of Potshot, Arizona. The novel is, perhaps, twenty percent Spenser/Susan smooching, seventy percent recruitment, and tenpercent showdown, and it has plot holes that you could hide the British Government overdraft in and still have room for manouevre, but you still read to the end and get a sense of satisfaction. Parker will be missed.
