I just read Robert Crais’s latest Joe Pike/Elvis Cole novel, A Dangerous Man, today. He writes a ripping yarn about a girl getting kidnapped for unknown reasons, but unfortunately for the kidnappers, Joe Pike is there to rescue her.
Crais writes many a rattling good action yarn. The first 5 just go, but from LA Requiem on, really good stuff.
He’s written a few non-Cole books, one of which, Hostage, was filmed a few years back. I can recommend Demolition Angel about a bomb disposal expert who dies (although revived) when an LA earthquake detonates a bomb as she’s about to defuse it.
Although unintentional, Elvis Cole and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, live in the same hillside neighbourhood in LA.
Just picked up an armful of Mick Herron who is supposedly a well-regarded up and comer in the more intellectual spy fiction genre. Anyone tried him out? Also found a signed copy of Garry Disher’s first so am about to see if the product equals the reviews.
Just finished 2 David Baldaccis - rattling good yarns, but no particular depth.
Just starting Sarah Bailey’s third - Where the Dead Go. I’m not sure if it’s just me not understanding how the state police forces interact, but both she and Jane Harper in The Dry have police officers swapping from one state police force to another willy-nilly.
Gemma Woodstock, the detective heroine, is in inland NSW in her first book, a cop in inner Melbourne in the second, and now in the third, she’s heading off to Byron Bay to investigate a murder/kidnapping and based in Sydney.
Have done Baldacci once before and it left me underwhelmed. Sounds like there’s some literary licence being enjoyed with the peripatetic female cop. I’m reading the very confronting and very sad The Tall Man about the death in custody on Palm Island a while back. Well-written but endlessly depressing.
I read plenty of heavy duty books, and you need a break. Baldacci is ideal for that. Not too much exercise of the grey matter, much like the Les Norton books.
I’ve read a lot of Mick Herron. The best are the Slow Horses series. Start with the book called Slow Horses. I wouldn’t call him intellectual though.
They’re quite funny. Very high body count.
Cheers for that S10. I obviously erroneously picked up on the intellectual tag from a review which favourably compared him to Le Carre and Greene. Regardless, I’ve got three of the Slow Horses tranche and look forward to kicking them off.
Well…classic Le Carre…i found one of his later books unreadable, but his final book…which needed you to know the Smiley books and in particular, The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, was pretty good.
I don’t think the end of the Cold War did him any favours.
I’ve just finished a book called Quicksand, by a Swedish woman called Malin Persson Giolito. I actually read this one, as opposed to listening to the audiobook. I’m generally a bit over Scandi noir, but this one is rather different. It’s written in the first person by an 18 year old girl charged with having shot, together with her boyfriend, three students and the teacher from their class at school. It’s known from early on that she did in fact kill her best friend and then her boyfriend. The story opens with the beginning of her trial, and the full story, and the reasons for it all, emerges over the course of the narrative of the trial. So it’s a kind of courtroom drama, and as a lawyer I’m hyper-critical of those and usually hate them; but the author is herself a lawyer of some ability and she’s been scrupulous about creating a trial that takes place in a very realistic fashion.
I wasn’t expecting to like it but I did, a lot. Highly recommended.
Returning to audiobooks, I’m currently listening to the latest Mick Herron Slow Horses thriller. It’s more of the same, but the same is pretty good.
I got talked into buying Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 about the hunt for a serial child killer in Russia about the time of Stalin’s death. In the book, I thought the ending was as bad as could be imagined…almost as bad as Shutter Island. Quite byzantine, but good in showing the desperation, dumb acceptance and nihilism of Stalinist times.
Then I watched the 2015 movie with Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman, and I thought that was worse. Added in an unnecessary bad guy, had all the English-speaking actors speak with bad Russian accents and at least, changed the twist which I thought made a terrible ending in the book. They even changed the names of some of the characters…no idea why, there was no necessity. Fyodor became Andrei.
Finished Philip Kerr’s last Bernie Gunther book Metropolis just before.
This one’s a bit unusual in that it concentrates on one period of time - 1928 - before the rise of the Nazis and while there were Jewish guys running the Berlin Murder Commission. Bernie’s just been made a homicide detective and is investigating murders of prostitutes and of disabled veterans begging. Fritz Lang has made Metropolis and the real crimes mentioned in this book are past of the plot for his 1931 movie M.
I think there might be one I haven’t read yet, One From The Other, set in Munich in 1949 and roughly paralleling Forsyth’s The Odessa File. Not 100% sure because there is a book that does cover that sort of thing.
About to start James Ellroy’s latest, This Storm, set in LA just after Pearl Harbor, so has some characters killed in later books like LA Confidential… His previous book, Perfidia, was set a little before this.
I’ve done all but the most recent Ellroy LA books and have found each successively less enjoyable than the last. The one which had sentences no longer than six words bordered on torture. I think it was White Jazz. That said I’ll probably still line up for his latest eventually…
We mentioned Garry Disher a couple of weeks ago. I read his first and won’t be going back. Every cliche possible jammed into one book was quite a feat. And a very unconvincing take on police procedure.