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Friday 12th March | |||||||||||
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Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> ReviewsPieces Of Modesty Peter O'donnell Many collectors will be grateful for this welcome reissue of one of the hardest-to find Peter O'Donnell Modesty Blaise books. The 6 stories in this collection have the indomitable Modesty and her loyal sidekick, Willie Garvin, travelling and fighting their way around the world, from South America to Berlin, Finland to London, using everything that comes to hand, from a circus cannon to human kite-flying, to survive against the odds... What sort of issues do you expect your crime fiction to cover? If you feel that personal responsibility, cracks in the welfare state and the problems of parenthood are fair game for the crime novel, then Jo Nesbø is your man. All of these (and many more) are crammed into his weighty latest book, The Snowman... Barry Forshaw in The Independent One can have nothing but praise for Julia McKenzie's intelligent, subtly acted incarnation of Agatha Christie's immortal spinster heroine, and the high gloss of this series of productions is immensely pleasing. What is puzzling is the variable direction given to the prestigious supporting casts who are often encouraged to act in a massively larger-than-life, end-of-the-pier fashion (in marked contrast to Julia McKenzie's nicely understated performance... Involuntary Witness Gianrico Carofiglio Italian lawyer Guido Guerrieri has not always been proud of the cases he has won. However, following a painful separation Guido undergoes a personal crisis that has a transformative effect on his moral outlook. When a nine year old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well close to a well-known beach in Southern Italy local police are quick to label a Senegalese peddler as the culprit. Guido is approached to defend the peddler called Abdou Thiam although the weight of evidence against him seems overwhelming before the trial has even started. But Guido is quick to see the inconsistencies in the reports gathered about the case and soon comes to realise that Thiam is effectively being framed and demonised because of his ethnic background Sami Macbeth just can't get lucky. Having a girl's name doesn't help. Spending two and a half years in prison for a crime he didn't commit doesn't help much either. Coming out to find his sister in deep trouble makes things worse. Especially when it seems the only way he can get her out of it is to involve himself in something a lot more serious than the crime he didn't commit in the first place... At The Chime Of A City Clock D J Taylor Taylor has switched effortlessly forward in time from his Kept: A Victorian Mystery to the deep depression of Thirties Britain to bring us an atmospheric tale revolving around Ross, a would-be writer, behind with the rent and reduced to selling cleansing fluids door-to-door (ah, memory, it all comes back...). The Scroll Of The Dead David Stuart Davies 'What do you know of the real world, with real people and real passions, Mr Sherlock Holmes? You just sit here in your dry and dusty room working on clues and theories, never considering the hurt, anguish, and tragedy in which your cases are soaked. People are merely pieces of the puzzle to you, like figures on a chessboard. As long as the mystery is solved you have no consideration of how their lives are affected by your actions. You do not care.' Fever Of The Bone Val Mcdermid Admirers of the crime writer Val McDermid are a touch sniffy about the TV series Wire in the Blood — rightly so. Onscreen, McDermid's damaged criminal profiler Tony Hill is reduced to a rather bland copper in the hands of the actor Robson Green. Hill on the page is a much more multi-faceted character — and if you need persuading, Fever of the Bone is a salutary reminder of the superiority of the printed page over the dumbed-down visual image... Barry Forshaw in The Times Fear The Worst Linwood Barclay Fear the worst? Isn't that what all good crime novels should make the reader feel, regarding the beleaguered protagonist? The Canadian novelist Linwood Barclay is well versed in the ways of putting the reader through the wringer. It is a trick that Aristotle knew all about: catharsis. Certainly, that feeling of having been thoroughly purged (in a strangely pleasant way) is what Barclay's writing delivers here, very much in the fashion of his successful No Time for Goodbye.... Barry Forshaw in The Independent The Girl In Alfred Hitchcock's Shower Robert Graysmith This is both a fascinating concept and intriguing read. Graysmith is the author of the New York Times bestselling true-crime classic Zodiac, (filmed with Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith himself), and in The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower he again investigates a bizarre real-life mystery: the disappearance of the body double for Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock's classic Psycho Mr Shivers Robert Jackson Bennett A TRAIN crosses the Missouri state line with a man clinging to the side of a cattle car. three other men, shabbily dressed, also hold on, their eyes peeled for the freight boss who, if he catches them, will "whale them raw". This is the powerful opening to Robert Jackson Bennett's debut Mr Shivers, arriving on these shores festooned with the kind of praise rarely visited on first novels. It's the time of the Great Depression in the USA and the man hitching a ride is Marcus Connelly, who has little to live for except revenge... Barry Forshaw in The Express A Jew Must Die Jacques Chessex Like The Vampire Of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex's previous novel (see my review here) published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, A Jew Must Die is based on an historical crime, and like the first book it raised questions Swiss society did not necessarily want raised. But where Vampire was more concerned with the way society reacted to a crime, A Jew Must Die is more concerned first with the crime itself, the murder, in Payerne, of a Jewish cattle-merchant by Swiss Nazis, and by the lack of reaction from Swiss society to this crime... THE Tory Party's mantra "Broken Britain" might be said to be affirmed by Simon Lelic's provocative debut novel Rupture. Britain is in the grip of a humid summer when teacher Samuel Szajkowski strides into assembly at his school and unleashes a barrage of gunfire. Three pupils and one colleague lie dead before he turns the gun on himself...Barry Forshaw in The Express The remarkable life of the writer Joan Brady is surely a fit subject for an autobiography – but until she writes one, we'll have to be content with highly assured thrillers such as her latest, Venom. We'd already been acquainted with Brady's non-pareil skills in the much-acclaimed Bleedout, which had such writers as Jeffery Deaver and Val McDermid queuing up to scatter praise; the new book builds on (and consolidates) the success of its predecessor... Hollywood Moon Joseph Wambaugh It's the larger-than-life miscreants who really take the biscuit. The usual collection of drag queens and murderous crackheads begins to seem almost quotidian against the cast of villains here. Fraud artist Dewey Gleason and his sharp-tongued wife, Eunice, make their money by stealing credit cards and looting mailboxes. They decide that it's time to move into a bigger league, and initiate an ambitious plan for a kidnapping. But they make the mistake of hiring a fellow criminal, whose secret life as a serial sex attacker is to throw a monkey-wrench into their plans... Barry Forshaw in The Independent The Serpent Pool Martin Edwards Edwards also in revealing the past. As always, it is the past which Daniel Kind is researching which supplies the underlying theme. In The Serpent Pool, this is murder as a fine art, as expounded by Victorian essayist and opium addict Thomas de Quincey. If that sounds grotesque, it's not a false lead, and there are powerful elements of Gothic horror at work in this book. The Serpent Pool is the darkest of the four Lakes novels and possibly the most rewarding... This uncompromising French gangster film arrives festooned with praise, and has already evoked comparisons with the crime epics of Coppola and Scorsese. The two films which combine to tell this lacerating story are both fascinating examples of the genre, but also a provocative examination of the nature of celebrity... Chloe Hooper's lacerating vision of tainted justice arrives emblazoned with praise from Philip Roth and comparisons with Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Does it justify the hoopla? Barry Forshaw in The Times Mark Sanderson is one of the most perceptive current critics of crime fiction (as well as being as a noted observer of the London social scene), though neither of these attributes would necessarily qualify him as an adroit practitioner of the crime novel in his own right... Graham Hurley does two things exceptionally well, and these plots intertwine because of those two things. One is to detail the urban blight of Portsmouth, the decay, the moral rot of crime within the city. That Bazza should have set up Winter as a faux-community worker, complete with a bizarre green van, gives a touch of the absurd to the equation, but the first half of the book, centered on the reality of life in the estates, is truly upsetting A Jew Must Die Jacques Chessex Based on real life events, A Jew Must Die is a haunting and searing portrait of anti-Semitic hatred during the Second World War and its horrific consequences. Author Jacques Chessex grew up in Payerne and knew the murderers that he describes and attended the local school with their children. Chessex brings a painters eye to his descriptions of the Swiss countryside whose beauty he contrasts to great effect with the sickening, festering ideals that it secretly sheltered... Badfellas Tonino Benacquista: A Second View Badfellas offers a darkly humorous and knowing take on the Mafia genre that is neither sentimental nor glamorising and is often at pains to point out the seedy and prosaic nature of organised crime. Author Tonino Benacquista succeeds in creating a new take on the well worn theme of the Mafia family and delivers a pacey, stylish and entertaining story. Who said family values are dead? The Manzoni family exerts the same compulsive grip as the Sopranos – a fabulous blend of outrageous dark humour mixed with believable, if exaggerated, violence. Giovanni can no more be kept in rural idleness than could Tony Soprano – and neither can his family, each of whom 'breaks out' in a different way... Benacquista is faultless in this book. So, please, imagine it's not me but Giovanni who is recommending you to buy the book. Don't hesitate. Don't even think about it. This is an offer you really should not refuse. Pressure builds in the fair city... Although the credit crunch is causing the odd hiccup, the city of Dublin maintains its frenzy of property development; Barry Forshaw in The Independent Black Water Rising Attica Locke Black Water Rising sounds like it could be the name of a blues number sung by Bessie Smith or Memphis Minnie. And, in its own way, Locke's book is a kind of blues for the generation that came of age, as Locke's parents did, during the days of the civil rights and black power movements, and had to contend with its aftermath... Next 25 |
