I was in Germany last week, walking through the streets of Passau, almost emptied by the unseasionally high temperatures. I had a good time catching up with a friend I’ve known since secondary school. My reading was done mostly while I was travelling back from Germany. The queue to get through the new (and I think soon to be suspended) border controls for non-EU citizense took almost two hours. I was grateful to have good books with me.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s coming up next.
It was a varied reading week: American Crime stories, a German crime novel and the first book in what turned out to be an outstanding Science Fiction series.
Six all-new short novels:
The multi-million-dollar casino heist is impossible—it can’t be done. That’s what makes it irresistible to a legendary robber facing the rest of his life in prison for his “The Final Score.”
An ambitious, hard-working college-bound teenager has a side job delivering illegal booze to “The Sunday List” until a crooked cop, a seductive customer, and a fake guru threaten to end his dreams.
Two wise guys tell each other a “True Story” over breakfast at a diner. It’s all bullshit and laughs until someone else has to pick up the check.
An otherwise honest patrolman has to make an excruciating choice between his loyalty to the job and his love for a ne’er-do-well cousin in “The North Wing.”
The entitled, substance-addicted movie star that surfer/PI Boone Daniels and his crew are hired to babysit in “The Lunch Break” is a problem. She also has a problem—someone wants her dead.
Finally, the one terrible, momentary mistake that a devoted family man makes sends him to prison and on a “Collision” course between the man he wants to be and the killer he’s forced to become to survive.
This collection of six short crime novels is an impressive piece of writing. Don Winslow’s range is enormous. He delivers a slick heist story, a nostalgic coming of age story that has the power of autobiography, a pitch perfect story told entirely as a conversation between two old style Mafia men, a doom ladened but empathetic story of a slow motion fall from grace of a police officer, a laid back tale of surfers playing bodyguards and changing the life of a young actress and a grimly brutal tale of what happens when a rising star manager has to adapt to being in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
The stories vary in pace and tone. What never varies is the high quality of the writing and the incisive clarity with which the characters are drawn.
She’s a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they’re found and Naira Sharp knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity’s expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.
He’s the heir to the dynasty. Tarquin Mercator never wanted to run a galaxy-spanning business empire. He just wanted to study rocks and read books. But Tarquin’s father has tasked him with monitoring the mining of a new planet, and he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter.
Disguised as Tarquin’s new bodyguard, Naira plans to destroy his ship before it lands. But neither of them expects to end up stranded on a dead planet. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she’s sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that’s bigger than both of them.
Wow! This was intense. There was so much in this novel: vivid, textured world-building, big themes related to contagion, betrayal and the abuse of power, a tense, twisty, action-packed plot, some original and powerful ideas on enhancing humans through bio-engineering and memory mapping, and an enemies-to-lovers thread that avoided all the cliches and became gut-wrenchingly painful and surprising rather than predictably romantic.
I’m very glad that Megan O’Keefe wrote the books in The Devoured Worlds trilogy back-to-back because now I don’t have to wait to find out what happens next. I’ve already downloaded ‘The Fractured Dark’.
A serial killer is on the loose in Hamburg, targeting dancers from The Acapulco, a club in the city’s red-light district, removing their scalp as a gruesome trophy and replacing their hair with plastic wigs.
Chastity Riley is the state prosecutor responsible for crimes in the district, and she’s working alongside the police as they investigate.
Can she get inside the mind of the killer?
Her strength is thinking like a criminal; her weaknesses are pubs, bars, younger men and dingy light, but as Chastity searches for love and a flamboyant killer – battling her demons and the dark, foggy Hamburg weather – she hits dead end after dead end, and it may be too late. For everyone…
The plot of ‘The Acapulco’ hangs on finding a serial killer who is preying on dancers in the Kiez in Hamburg. It’s very different from a typical FBI Behavioural Science Unit hunting for a serial killer story. Firstly, the main character, Chastity Riley, isn’t a police officer; she’s a State Prosecutor. The police officers report to her, and she shapes their enquiries. Secondly, the book is much more about Chastity than it is about the serial killer. Everything is told from her point of view, and her point of view is both unusual and fascinating. In personality, personal habits, and cultural preferences, she is much closer to the inhabitants of the St. Pauli demi-monde than to her fellow prosecutors. Much of the book is spent sharing her history and explaining her affection for the Keis and its inhabitants.
The plot worked well enough, but it was the portrait of Chastity that engaged my interest and my emotions. She and I have almost nothing in common. The things she loves to do, the people she likes to associate with, the places that she chooses to spend her time do not appeal to me. And yet, when I see them through her eyes, I can understand why she values them. Chastity drinks and smokes too much; she’s conflicted about her relationship with her we-shouldn’t-be-doing-this lover, and she is occasionally physically and emotionally overwhelmed by her work. Yet I found myself admiring her empathy, her compassion and her commitment to finding the killer.
I was on holiday this week so I only bought three novels: Mary Gentle’s award-winning alternate history from 2000 that I saw reviewed this week (it’s going to take a while as it’s four books in one), Alice Feeney’s latest psychological thriller and a horror novel from Chuck Wendig that I’m tucking away for this year’s Halloween Bingo.
Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel, 2000
For the beautiful young woman Ash, life has always been arquebuses and artillery, swords and armour and the true horrors of hand-to-hand combat. War is her job. She has fought her way to the command of a mercenary company, and on her unlikely shoulders lies the destiny of a Europe threatened by the depredations of an Infidel army more terrible than any nightmare.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife.
On a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere
One friend walks up – but never comes back down.
Now twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared, and the friends return to find the lost boy – and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods…
This week, I’m restricting myself to one Science Fiction novel so I can vary my reading diet a bit. I’m hoping that ‘So Far Gone’ will be a reminder that I’m not the only one who sees the Trump regime as a mass psychosis. Kim Watt has just published her sixth DI Adams books so it’s muscled its way to the top of my reading list.
Fleet Lieutenant Esmay Suiza never wanted to become a hero. After a traumatic, war torn childhood and years of being plagued by nightmares, she is content to spend her years with the Fleet following orders and staying under the radar. Even after she finds herself the leader in a fierce battle against a treasonous captain, and the center of a subsequent military trial, Suiza wants nothing more than to return to the ranks.
Then she’s promoted and sent to the deep space repair ship Koskiusko. Suiza once again finds herself in the heart of danger. The Bloodhorde, a violent group of barbarian warriors, has made plans to sabotage her ship and clear the path for a full invasion. Suiza is thrust into command, leading the revolt against the invaders before a second wave of brutality threatens the lives of her fellow soldiers.
I’m having fun with this series. I’m intrigued by the apparent shift in focus to a character who was a minor player in a previous book. I’m hoping that it’s a good segue into upping the Military SF content of the series.
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.
I’ve read the first quarter of this book. To me, it doesn’t read as quirky and satirical. It isn’t an attempt at dry humour. It’s showing the toxic impact on families of normalising divisive Christian nationalist fundamentalist dogma and the attack on science and verifiable knowledge. It’s doing a good job of describing how it feels to watch helplessly as the world you value is being torn down by assholes, bigots and idiots.
DI Adams has faced down Folk, fae, and feral geese, but waking in a ditch on the Yorkshire moors, unarmed and uncaffeinated, is a new low. Worse still, her duck is missing.
And so is Dandy.
But that’s just the beginning. She’s not here by chance, and neither are the others wandering the moors. No, they’ve been put here for a reason, and if they can’t escape the estate before sunrise, they’re never going to.
Gingerbread villages, Yorkshire alligators, and haunted, statue-riddled woods would be challenge enough. But as the moon rises, the hunt rides out, and behind it something ancient stirs.
I always enjoy Kim Watt’s cozy fantasy novels, but the DI Adams books are my favourites. They’ve been getting darker as they go along, and it seems to me that Adams is in danger of getting in over her head unless she learns more about magic and the world of the Folk and gets herself some powerful friends. I’m looking forward to seeing how she pushes through.
Mike Finn's Fiction 