I have been procrastinating about doing this for quite some time,
but I have finally sat down and written up my favourite books of 2012. I have
deliberately not numbered them but have to admit that the top five are in some sort
of order with Slaughters Hound and The Cutting Season most certainly
heading the list.
Slaughters Hound
by Declan Burke
In Slaughter’s Hound
Declan Burke has returned to an earlier character Harry Rigby whom we first met
in Eight Ball Boogie back in
2003. Do not mistake Slaughter’s Hound for being anything
like his brilliant and outstanding Absolute
Zero Cool they are nothing alike. It
is a wild read with black comedic asides and a darkness to it that will make
lovers of noir drool with happiness.
The Cutting Season
by Attica Locke
The Cutting Season
comes across as a traditional country house murder mystery that is given a
flavour of the Deep South set on a sugar plantation in Louisiana and in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Cutting Season is beautifully
written story that tugs at you and also makes you think deeply about the
history of segregation, the rippling effect that it has had on American history
and why it can never be brushed under the carpet.
Books to Die For
Edited by Declan Burke and John Connolly
If you have not heard of Books
To Die For then I am not sure where you have been this year. Books
To Die For is not the type of book that can be read at one go. It is a book that you have to savour and
therefore dip in and out of at will. Books To Die For is a book that any
self-respecting aficionado of crime fiction should have on their
bookshelf. I mean, where else will you
find over one hundred crime writers writing about their favourite crime novel? With personal essays from such luminaries as
Val McDermid, Michael Connelly, Mark Billingham, Lee Child, Marcia Muller,
Denis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Laura Wilson and Andrew Taylor to name a few, what
you have is in effect a history of crime fiction told from the point of view of
a number of well-known crime writers.
Books ranging from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 Dupin Stories, Liam O’Flaherty’s 1928 The Assassin, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, James Crumley’s 1978 The Last Good Kiss, A Dance
at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block (1991) and Dennis Lehane’s 2001
novel Mystic River and why they mean
so much to the authors that chose them. Books To Die For can also be seen as a reading guide to some of the best crime
novels that have been published. Not a book
to be missed.
Gone Girl by
Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl is a psychological thriller that is layered
and as you peel away each layer and read revelation after revelation, it
becomes abundantly clear that the truth is something that both the two main protagonists
have a huge problem with and as far as they are both concerned, it also does
not exist from their point of view. Whilst
the story starts, slowly it does build up and nothing is, as it seems in this
book.
What it was by
George Pelecanos
This book reminds one of Blaxploitation, life in the
seventies and Watergate. One of the
things that always draws me to the novels of George Pelecanos is the fact that his subject is how regular people, black and white,
endure in a world of hardship, crime and violence. For those of you (and that includes me) that
care about the soul music, muscle cars and bizarre clothing of the early 1970s,
Pelecanos evokes them in copious detail.
What is Was is of course and
what we have come to expect from such a writer,
Sharp, staccato storytelling, tightly plotted, packed with fascinating
characters as well as being rich in atmosphere.
Tequila Sunset by Sam Hawken
In Tequila Sunset Sam
Hawken has moved away from the rather harrowing and troubling but real life
subject of the senseless killing of the women of Juarez to the equally
disturbing and brutal gangs found on the US/Mexico border. Lives are truly at stake in this violent
novel where murder is a matter of course and here are no reservations about
killing anyone who gets in their way. Tequila Sunset is the type of novel that
will I hope in due course become a classic.
It is brutal, it is bloody but it is also a really good read.
The Golden Scales by
Parker Bilal
The Golden Scales is essentially
about two abductions that take place. Makana an ex-cop and a refugee from
Sudan lives on a riverboat. He cannot go back to Sudan, as this would
bring about his death almost immediately. He is forced to attend a
meeting with Saad Hanafi, a
man assumed to be one of the richest people in Egypt and the owner of the most
popular football team. But what does Saad Hanafi want with Makana?
The Golden Scales takes
the reader into a side of Cairo that is not often seen or read about. It
is a powerful and touching story that is much more than just a mystery; it is
also a social commentary that allows us to see the underbelly of Cairo.
The Twenty-Year Death
by Ariel S Winter.
A debut novel told in
three parts and each part told, set in a different decade and told in three
different voices? The voices being that
of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Did it work?
I personally thought so. Book 1, Malniveau Prison, sees Georges Simenon
as Chief Inspector Pelleter as he attempts to understand how a murdered
prisoner escaped the prison walls. Book
2, The Falling Star, is the
Chandleresque story of a private eye, Dennis Foster, who is engaged to mollify
a distrustful movie star and maybe take the blame for a murder. Whilst book 3 is Police at the Funeral, where Shem Rosenkrantz (A recurring
character from the first two books) takes over the story with the voice of a failed
Jim Thompson protagonist, and, as he comes undone, we see how the stories are
put together. Twenty-Year Death is a brave and amazingly accomplished novel but
also a lot of fun to read. Along the
way, Winter succeeds in dispensing more than a few acknowledgments to the genre
in general. You are either going to love
or hate this book.
The Double
Game by Dan Fesperman
Dan Fesperman’s novel The
Double Game is one of those books that you know that will never regret
picking up and reading. It is also a
novel that fans of cold war thrillers will revel in. In The
Double Game, it is a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and
spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster has revealed to up-and-coming journalist
Bill Cage that he had once considered spying for the enemy. There are many things about The Double Game, which make it such an
exciting read. It is of course about
spies and their secrets, fathers and sons, lovers and destiny, betrayal and
allegiance. What begins as a caper within
a caper soon becomes much more. With
clues found in old spy novels that will themselves take you back to a period of
double- dealing and more The Double Game
is in fact on the one hand a well
written homage to classic espionage novels that has been turned on its
head.
The
Dark Winter by David Mark
A series of suspicious deaths has rocked Hull, a port city
in England as old and mysterious as its bordering sea. In the middle of a Christmas service, a
teenage girl adopted from Sierra Leone is chopped down with a machete in front
of the entire congregation. A retired trawler
man is found dead at the scene of a tragedy he escaped, the only survivor,
forty years ago. An ugly fire rages in a
working-class neighbourhood, and when the flames die away, a body is
discovered, burned beyond recognition.
An assured well-written debut novel from an author who is bound to get
better and better.
There are also a couple of other books that I feel bound to
mention and these are Kings Of Cool
by Don Winslow, The Cocktail Waitress
by James M Cain, Dare Me by Megan
Abbott, Live by Night by Dennis
Lehane, Wrath of Angels by John
Connolly, The Black Box by Michael
Connelly and Whispers Underground by Ben
Aaronovitch.
2 comments:
This a great list and thanks for the timely reminder of 'The Twenty Year Death' which has been sat on my TBR pile for an age! I will also seek out the Sam Hawken as I loved 'The Dead Women of Juarez'. Worth the wait for your final choices!
I didn't know about The Twenty Year Death. What a cool concept.
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