This year I have not read as much as I would have liked to
and what reading I have done has been a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
In alphabetical order my favourite reads this year are.
Killing is my Business by Adam Christopher (Titan Books)
Another golden morning in a seedy town, and a new memory tape
for intrepid Pl-turned-hitman-and last robot left in working order--Raymond
Electromatic. When his comrade-in-electronic-arms, Ada, assigns a new morning
roster of clientele, Ray heads out into the LA sun, only to find that his
skills might be a bit rustier than he expected...
A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton)
It is deep winter. The darkness is unending. The private detective named Jaycob Eklund has
vanished, and Charlie Parker is dispatched to track him down. Parker's
employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his
own reasons for wanting Eklund found.
Eklund is no ordinary investigator. He is obsessively tracking a series
of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings. Now
Parker will be drawn into Eklund's world, a realm in which the monstrous Mother
rules a crumbling criminal empire, in which men strike bargains with angels,
and in which the innocent and guilty alike are pawns in a game of ghosts
American Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to US Crime Fiction, Film
& TV by Barry Forshaw (Pocket Essentials)
The crime genre is as much about films and TV as it is about
books, and American Noir is a celebration of the former as well as the latter.
US television crime drama in particular is enjoying a new golden age, and all
of the important current series are covered here, as well as key recent films.
The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler (Quercus)
Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people
think you're dead. So begins Christopher
Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once
hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves. Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner - no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten. And Fowler, as well as remembering their careers, lifts the lid on their lives, and why they often stopped writing or disappeared from the public eye.These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short
essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt
Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and
Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who
introduced us to psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the
world.
The Nowhere Man by Gregg Hurtwiz (Michael Joseph)
He was once called Orphan X. As a boy, Evan Smoak was taken from a
children's home, raised and trained as part of a secret government initiative
buried so deep that virtually no one knows it exists. But he broke with the programme, choosing instead to vanish off grid and use his formidable skill set to help those unable to protect themselves. One day, though, Evan's luck ran out ... Ambushed, drugged, and spirited away, Evan
wakes up in a locked room with no idea where he is or who has captured him. As
he tries to piece together what's happened, testing his gilded prison and its
highly trained guards for weaknesses, he receives a desperate call for
help. With time running out, he will
need to out-think, out-manoeuvre, and out-fight an opponent the likes of whom
he's never encountered to have any chance of escape. He's got to save
himself to protect those whose lives depend on him. Or die trying ...
Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi by Katharina Hall
(University of Wales Press
Crime Fiction in German is the first volume in English to
offer a comprehensive overview of German-language crime fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to its vibrant growth in the new millennium. As well as introducing readers to crime fiction from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the former East Germany, the volume expands the notion of a German crime-writing tradition by investigating Nazi crime fiction, Jewish-German crime fiction, Turkish-German crime fiction and the Afrika-Krimi. Other key areas, including the West German social crime novel, women's crime writing, regional crime fiction, historical crime fiction and the Fernsehkrimi (TV crime drama) are also explored, highlighting the genre's distinctive features in German-language contexts. The
volume includes a map of German-speaking Europe, a chronology of crime
publishing milestones, extracts from primary texts, and an annotated
bibliography of print and online resources in English and German.
Sirens by Joseph Knox (Transworld Publishers)
It starts with the girl. How it ends is up to Detective Aidan
Waits. Isabelle Rossiter has run away again. When Aidan Waits, a troubled
junior detective, is summoned to her father’s penthouse home – he finds a
manipulative man, with powerful friends.
But retracing Isabelle’s steps through a dark, nocturnal world, Waits
finds something else. An intelligent seventeen-year-old girl who’s scared to
death of something. As he investigates her story, and the unsolved
disappearance of a young woman just like her, he realizes Isabelle was right to
run away. Soon Waits is cut loose by his
superiors, stalked by an unseen killer and dangerously attracted to the wrong
woman. He’s out of his depth and out of time.
How can he save the girl, when he can't even save himself?
Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke (Profile Books)
Observer Southern fables usually go the other way
around. A white woman is killed or
harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun,
a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays
by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he is drawn to a case in the small town of Lark, where two dead bodies washed up in the bayou. First a black lawyer from Chicago and then, three days later, a local white woman, and it's stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the
crimes - and save himself in the process - before Lark's long-simmering racial
fault lines erupt.
Kiss, Kiss Bang, Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale
to the Eagle Has Landed by Mike Ripley (Harper Collins)
An entertaining history of British thrillers from Casino
Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, which reveals that, though Britain may have
lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the world. When Ian Fleming dismissed
his books in a 1956 letter to Raymond Chandler as `straight pillow fantasies of
the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety' he was being typically immodest. In three
short years, his James Bond novels were already spearheading a boom in thriller
fiction that would dominate the bestseller lists, not just in Britain, but
internationally. The decade following
World War II had seen Britain lose an Empire, demoted in terms of global power
and status and economically crippled by debt; yet its fictional spies, secret
agents, soldiers, sailors and even (occasionally) journalists were now saving
the world on a regular basis. From Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean in the
1950s through Desmond Bagley, Dick Francis, Len Deighton and John Le Carre in
the 1960s, to Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins in the 1970s. Many have been labelled `boys' books' written
by men who probably never grew up. Kiss
Kiss, Bang Bang, examines the rise of the thriller from the austere 1950s
through the boom time of the Swinging Sixties and early 1970s, examining some
150 British authors (plus a few notable South Africans). Drawing upon
conversations with many of the authors mentioned in the book, the author shows
how British writers, working very much in the shadow of World War II, came to
dominate the field of adventure thrillers and the two types of spy story - spy
fantasy (as epitomised by Ian Fleming's James Bond) and the more realistic spy
fiction created by Deighton, Le Carre and Ted Allbeury, plus the many
variations (and imitators) in between.
Grandville: Force Majeure
by Bryan Talbot. (Vintage)
In the middle of a gang war, wanted for murder, truly alone
and outside the law, Detective Inspector LeBrock is on the run from both the
police and gangster assassins, the victim of a
The Man Who Died by Antti Tuomainen (Orenda Books)
A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko
Kaunismaa is a man in his
The Force by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
Detective sergeant Denny Malone leads an elite unit to fight
gangs, drugs and guns in New York. For eighteen years he's been on the front
lines, doing whatever it takes to survive in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean. What only a few know is that Denny Malone himself is dirty: he and his
partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash. Now he's caught in
a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk a thin line of
betrayal, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that
could destroy them all.
Honourable mentions also to the return of Charlie Fox in Zoe
Sharp’s Fox Hunter, Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr, Insidious Intent by Val
McDermid, The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronvitch, The Late Show by Michael
Connelly and The Pictures by Guy Bolton.
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