I’ve picked eight Best Reads from the fifty books that I read from 1st May to 31st August.
Three of them fit into the crime genre, although they’re very different from one another. Two are stories involving magic. Three are stories set in dystopian futures in which climate change has reshaped the world.
Two of them were published this year. The oldest was published in 2015. The authors are from England, Scotland, Australia and the United States.
I hope you’ll find at least one book among them that calls to you
Blacktop Wasteland (2020) by S. A. Cosby
‘Blacktop Wasteland’ was one of those rare books that left me lost in admiration when I finished the last page. It was startlingly different from anything else I’d read and everything about it worked. It was about a world that I have no direct experience of and yet I quickly felt immersed in it.
The characters are complex, not in that over-thought let’s-write-about-existential-angst way but in the way the people you know well are complex. It’s also an exciting action-packed thriller that kept me wanting to know what would happen next. Best of all, what does happen is driven more by who the people are than by the circumstances that they find themselves in.
I strongly recommend the audiobook version. Adam Lazzare-White’s narration enriched my experience of the book.
Malibu Burning – Shape & Walker #1 (2023) by Lee Goldberg
Yes, I know ‘Malibu Burning’ only came out on 1st September but Amazon offered it a month early as part of their ‘First Reads’ promotion. I snapped it up and it turned out to be one of my favourite reads of the summer.
‘Malibu Burning‘, the first book in Lee Goldberg’s new series about Sharpe and Walker two arson investigators in LA, is slick, fast, clever and funny.
Lee Goldberg has taken a small detail from real life in LA and spun it into an ingenious plot, populated with engaging, larger-than-life characters delivered a taut, I-have-to-read-the-next-chapter pace while keeping the tone light.
LA uses convicts as volunteer firefighters, fighting the endless wildfires that burn through the canyon forests. For Lee Goldberg, thisseems to have sparked the question: What would a really smart criminal do with the knowledge and experience he’d gained fighting those fires? The answer surprised and delighted me.
The plot is a heist story, told from the perspective of the criminals trying to pull off the heist and the arson investigators trying to figure out what’s going on. It feels like ‘White Collar’ meets ‘Mission Impossible’.
I had great fun with this book and I’m glad that there are more Sharpe & Walker books to come.
I Have Some Questions For You (2023) by Rebecca Makkai
‘I Have Some Questions For You’ is a powerful, thought-provoking, sometimes very uncomfortable-to-read book. What it’s not is a cold-case murder mystery or a thriller. The story doesn’t have and isn’t meant to have the tension and punch of a thriller or the plot twists and surprises of a murder mystery.
It’s a mainstream book that questions how we understand and shape and lie to ourselves about the narrative of our lives. It does this by having a professor return to teach a two-week course at the posh school she graduated from, during which she and her students make a podcast re-examining the 1995 murder on campus of one the professor’s classmates, The investigation raises questions about whether the right man was convicted of the crime and prompts the professor to reassess her memories of the past and her attiudes in the present.
At the end of the book, I found myself satisfied and a little exhausted. I felt as if I witnessed something real and found myself trying to define what that ‘real’ thing was.
I found my answer not by revisiting the plot twists but by considering the title: ‘I Have Some Questions For You’. The recurring questions in the novel are: How did I let this happen? and How did I not see this?
What I took away from the book was that our lives are only narratives when we make them, or let other people make them, so. We become blind when we let that narrative sit unchallenged. We need to learn to ask questions that enable us to reassess, reject, reaffirm or reshape our narrative. We need to understand that our answers are all temporary and imperfect and need to change over time.
Age Of Assassins – The Wounded Kingdom #1 (2017) by R. J. Barker
‘Age Of Assassins’ is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in a very long time. To me, it felt much more real and immediate than most fantasy novels do. The storytelling was immediately immersive. The characters were unusual and engaging. The world-building was solid. delivering much more than a generic medieval-but-with-magic fantasy backdrop. The plot was structured so that it kept escalating the tension while elegantly integrating the main character’s backstory and delivering twists that kept me guessing.
What I liked most about ‘Age Of Assassins‘ was that it grabbed and kept my full attention. I was so wrapped up in the story and in the people that I barely registered how R. J. Barker worked his magic on me. I love it when something is so well-written, so thoroughly imagined and so inherently engaging that I feel as though I’m walking through the writer’s imagination and seeing everything as they meant it to be.
Of Sorrow And Such (2015) by Angela Slatter
‘Of Sorrow And Such’ is a 158-page novella that packs an enormous punch. From the first page, I fell in love with the clarity of the writing and the deftness of the storytelling. With a light touch, Angela Slatter immersed me completely in the life of the little village of Edda’s Meadow as seen through the eyes of Patience Gideon, a woman who practices her craft without anyone ever actually calling her a witch.
Patience Gideon is a wonderful creation. She sees herself and the world she lives in clearly and doesn’t look away or give in. Even though she knows how brutal and unfair the world can be and how vulnerable people with her gifts are once the priests prod the people into turning against them, she’s still willing to take risks for others. She’s a pragmatist. She prepares for the worst and expects it to happen someday but, in the meantime, she does what good she can, looks after her adopted daughter and tries to open herself to life’s small pleasures.
I was impressed by how grimly real the story was. This isn’t an escapist fantasy. It isn’t something where the witch can cast a spell and walk away. Patience’s world is ruled by men. They are not kind. They are not wise. They are not brave. But they have an absolute belief in their entitlement to take whatever they want whenever they can and a complete disdain for women, especially women who are any kind of threat to them or the world as they believe it should be.
Patience sees all of this clearly. Has been able to see it clearly since she was a child and knows that while she might be able to protect herself from it or even revenge herself on it, she cannot change it.
In her notes on the book, Angela Slatter says Patience…
“…remains one of my favourite characters: she’s determined and cynical and clear-eyed, unafraid to do the things that must be done, unafraid to get her hands dirty, yet she has a conscience and tries to atone for her sins. Her survival instinct is strong and I think that may be what I love the most about her.”
Slatter, Angela. Of Sorrow and Such (p. 151). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition
This Is Our Undoing (2021) by Lorraine Wilson
‘This Is Our Undoing‘ was a powerful reading experience that I lost myself in completely. I sank into the consciousness of the main character, Lina Stephenson, and felt as if I’d fallen into a disturbing dream that was edging towards a nightmare but from which I couldn’t wake. I emerged with a sense of having lived through something difficult but important, dark but ultimately hopeful and also of having read something beautifully written, and elegantly structured.
It‘, has elements that could classify it as a dystopian thriller, a story of personal trauma, climate fiction, or even magical realism but none of those labels work well for me. They are the threads, not the tapestry.
This is a tense but low-key story, soaked in guilt, fear, and impotent rage, heightened by bonds of love, inconvenient but inescapable empathy and an inability completely to let go of hope.
Set against a broadly drawn but credible dystopian background, it delivers an intensely personal story that is tightly focused on the personal cost of making difficult choices in circumstances where there are no good options, where you are confronted by the monstrous and where your survival may require you to become a monster.
The Warehouse (2019) by Rob Hart
In ‘The Warehouse’, Rob Hart delivers a horribly plausible picture of a near-future dystopian America and an intriguing, I-need-to-know-how-this-will-work-out thriller. What I liked most was that ‘The Warehouse’ doesn’t fall into the simple black-and-white, good-guy bad-guy mode that so many techno-thrillers have. There are no simple answers here and no oversimplified people either. The result was an engaging, thought-provoking piece of Speculative Fiction that left me wanting to read more of Rob Hart’s work.
The story takes place in an America where poverty is widespread as the effects of climate change destroy traditional ways of making a living or even living outdoors at all. America is now a nation where those who have money hunker down at home and have what they need delivered by drones owned and run by Cloud, a sort of Amazon on steroids. Those who don’t have money try hard to win and keep a job at Cloud. Most of them live and work in MotherClouds, enormous warehouse compounds built in remote areas of America, well away from towns or cities.
The MotherCloud setup is more than an extrapolation of Amazon work practices. It mimics the neo-serfdom / modern slavery of some Chinese factory towns, made worse by the addition of a Corporate America ‘Everything is good here’ propaganda gloss
The plot explores Cloud in three ways. Firstly through posts on the public blog of Gibson Wells, the founder of Cloud, who, knowing that he is dying, wants to share the real story of how Cloud came to be, the good that it’s done and the bright future that it offers America and Americans. Secondly through the eyes of Paxton, an inventor who used to run a small company that Cloud put out of business and who now needs to take the only job he can get, as a worker in a MotherCloud. Finally, we see Cloud through the eyes of Zinnia, who wasn’t looking for a job because she already had one, to infiltrate Cloud and who gets herself hired to the same MotherCloud as Paxton.
‘The Warehouse’ works very well as a thriller. You can see the collision between Gibson Wells, Paxton and Zinnia coming but you are kept guessing about how and when and what it will mean. There are some good surprises along the way and the ending was as textured and thought-provoking as the rest of the story.
The Last Day (2020) by Andrew Hunter Murray
‘The Last Day‘ is a Must Read if you want a well-written, nuanced, thriller with an original twist on catastrophic climate change, strong, nicely paced world-building, a main character who has depth, secrets and complicated motivations, all set in set in a depressingly plausible, very British, near-future totalitarian regime that is drenched in threat, defeat, compromise and betrayal.
I finished ‘The Last Day‘ several weeks ago and it’s been haunting me ever since. It took me a long time to read, not because I wasn’t interested but because I found the future that Andrew Hunter Murray had created so intense and so credible and so full of dread that I could only stay in for short periods.
Why did it have such an impact?
Firstly, it’s a very British dystopia, so it felt real to me. I couldn’t distance myself from it, only picture myself in it and wonder how weak or strong I would be when surrounded by such threat and hopelessness.
Secondly, although it is a good page-turning thriller with a secret at its heart, the people unravelling the secret and the people trying to prevent them from unravelling it aren’t larger-than-life heroes or villains. There is no ex-special-forces-gone-rogue fighting a lone but competent war against a totalitarian state. There’s just a bright, often brave, even more often frightened, woman who cannot let go of discovering what she suspects to be a dreadful truth. The people opposing her are ordinary people who have perhaps become the worst versions of themselves but who still remind me of people I’ve met and even worked with. I found this ordinariness far more disturbing than melodrama would have been.
Mike Finn's Fiction 