James Crumley is basically the Raymond Chandler of the American west. I mean that as both a compliment and a dig. I like Chandler and appreciate his status as the OG of the contemporary American mystery novel but I wouldn’t say I’m one of his acolytes. His plots were often heavily convoluted and though I don’t like applying 2018 sensibilities to works published sixty-plus years before, the vast majority of his female characters and how they are treated by Marlowe is nothing shy of misogynistic. Nevertheless, […]
Tana French – take my money.
I have been recommending Tana French ad nauseum every time someone asks me for a book recommendation, ever since I discovered her delightful series in 2007. I have two left to read and I purposefully wait as looong as I can manage before reading one because they are so good and knowing I have one on the horizon makes me happy. That being said, imagine my delight as I’m perusing the “Hot Picks” aisle at my local library and see she has a new one […]
Police, Adjective
My word, this feels like the police procedural to end all. For reasons I can and cannot spoil. I’m not a big fan of police procedurals. I prefer private eyes or unlikely detectives in the mold of Hitchcock. In real life, detective work doesn’t get solved by a Sherlock Holmes-type using inductive reasoning until the killer is revealed by sheer cleverness. Instead, it takes hard, grinding work, and if a case is solved, it’s usually due to a combination of labor and luck. If a […]
Family Matters
I discovered Charles Willeford’s work last year and he’s become one of my favorite crime writers. Cockfighter was the best crime book I read in 2017 and his first Hank Moseley story Miami Blues will be chalked up to one of the best I’ve read this year. A raucous tale of the worst cat-and-mouse game ever played between cop and criminal. Willeford has a skill for three-dimensional characters, good-but-not-flashy dialogue, wry humor, and measured cynicism. All of those are on display for New Hope for the Dead, a book […]
Somehow this series still works.
This one started out really strong for me, and then petered out near the end, for a couple of reasons, which I will be marking in spoiler tags. Mary and Holmes continue to be a great pair, and I find their cerebral marriage a compelling one, though I am beginning to get a bit annoyed with King for discounting Watson so much. Here, we meet an old friend from the first book, the archaeologist Dorothy Ruskin, who shows up in Sussex for a visit, and […]
“The thing is, I suppose that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”
What Tana French, one of my favorite authors, has done here with The Witch Elm (her first non-Dublin Murder Squad book) is very interesting, but I will acknowledge it probably won’t be for everyone. The two starting points for inspiration on this book are Who Put Bella in the Witch Elm? and the idea of: what if your protagonist was a guy who has never had to work hard for anything in his life? And then you swirl those ideas around for a while in […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 201
- 202
- 203
- 204
- 205
- …
- 301
- Next Page »