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Tuesday 9th February | |||||||||||
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Reviews and Articles listed A-Z by author >> ReviewsTHE 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... The Monster In The Box Ruth Rendell If you think the human race is basically kind-hearted, and that we are a perfectible species, then perhaps Ruth Rendell is not the author for you. This supreme practitioner of the crime novel has probably the most dyspeptic view of human nature since her American predecessor Patricia Highsmith. But for those of us who have a more cold-eyed view of life, Rendell's books are singularly bracing confirmations of what we all secretly know: that many of us are capable of the most appalling actions given the right circumstances and the right motivation...Barry Forshaw in The Express BBC Four is showing the second series of Spiral, made in France in 2008, three years after the first (see IT's reaction to that here) and it has a different feel to the first series, while retaining some of the elements, at least at the start, that make it French. Let's just hope BBC4 don't do what they did to the Swedish Wallander series, and stop showing it with just three episodes to go, deciding it was so popular they would make its fans wait until a special holiday showing, and bigger ratings, might be ensured. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest Stieg Larsson Although Stieg Larsson's Millenium series was projected for ten books (like Maj Sjowall's and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck series) this, the third and final novel which he turned in to his publishers, actually completes a very coherent and self-contained trilogy, as the battle between Lisbeth Salander and her oppressors, powerful men in Swedish society, reaches a courtroom climax Most writers, including crime writers, haven't the nerve to put themselves out there like Algren did, while, at the same time, doing so with all their heart and soul. Not, at any rate, if they intend to sell books or, for that matter, get published. Of course, there are examples of extreme literature, but it's usually pretty sterile stuff in comparison, too ironic or pretending to be tough and in your face... It's interesting that, when Michael Connelly decides to show us Harry Bosch at his most personal, he brings us back closer to the Bosch we originally met many years ago. In Nine Dragons, the kidnapping of Bosch's daughter in Hong Kong drives him into a situation which resembles Bosch's Vietnam War days as a tunnel rat, and takes pains to mention it, for the benefit of newer readers... Get Me Out Of Here Henry Sutton Sutton's new book is something quite unclassifiable. He has forged (in Get Me Out Of Here) a scabrously entertaining essay in excess, with its spleen-filled, self-loathing protagonist Matt Freeman locked in Olympian conflict with a surrealistically rendered (and seriously out of kilter) London On the evidence of the latest Ian Rankin looks as if his new copper will be just as sure-footed a guide to the city of Edinburgh as his grizzled predecessor... Barry Forshaw in The Express on The Complaints Hypothermia Arnauldur Indridason It was Indridason who, in effect, broke the bank with the CWA Daggers; his win instigating a rule change restricting books in translation to their own foreign ghetto. From the Daggers point of view, this was probably a good thing, because Hypothermia is not only Indridason's best novel yet, it is the best one I've read so far this year, and will take some beating... James Bond 007: The Girl Machine Jim Lawrence & Yaroslav Horak Titan Books continue their sterling work in making collections of this intelligently written (and strikingly drawn) strip available for the first time between the covers of a book. Jim Lawrence's remarkable 007 strips, perfectly visualised in the highly stylised illustrations of Yaroslav Horak, remain non-pareil entries in the strip universe The Interrogator Andrew Williams Quibbles regarding The interrogator are small, because the nature of Williams' challenge was huge. He keeps this book involving, suspenseful and fascinating to the end, and it is a remarkable first novel The problem with writing conspiracy novels, even one as gripping as The Dying Light, is that the conspiracy itself is always the strongest point: the ways in which the powerful conspire against you, use the machinery of the state, the inevitable betrayal by someone you trusted, the dark and shrinking corner into which you are inevitably backed. As a result, the weakest bit is often the resolution, the ways in which the intrepid hero/es manage to beat the system, and emerge victorious on the other side... When Donald Westlake died on New Year's Eve, he was as prolific as ever, and Get Real is a fitting coda to his writing career, because it shows Westlake at his comic best, doing what the youngsters would call 'deconstructing' the genre of so-called 'reality' TV while providing the Dortmunder gang with their most laid-back and funny caper in some time... Next 25 |
