bookshelves of doom

Gentlemen -- Michael Northrop

Until I saw this book cover up close, I thought the kid was wearing a hoodie.

But... nope.  It's a body bag.  Yowza.  Big points to the designer.  [Later:  Just found this post about the process behind creating the cover.  They definitely made the right call in changing it.]

Since I loved his voice so very much, I'll let Micheal introduce himself (this is from page two):

I started out in 9A, in case you're wondering, one down from honors.  I'd done OK on the test they made us all take back at the end of eighth grade.  Better than OK, but the classes didn't work out.  They said I wasn't "applying myself," and that's fair enough.  Then I threw Oscar Tully a serious beating for saying something he shouldn't've, and that was that, down to general in the middle of the third marking period.  I had no idea what was going on in G, and I didn't really feel like trying to figure it out.  Sophomore year started and I found myself in 10R.

Fine with me, that's where someone like me belongs--someone of my "pedigree," if you read me.  This should clue you in:  My first name is spelled wrong.  It's Micheal instead of Michael.  Mom or Dad, one of them dropped the ball on that one, probably Dad, in the hospital or wherever it is you fill out that paperwork.  Not that it matters; everyone calls me Mike.  Still, it's a bad way to start things out.

Micheal, Mixer, Tommy and Bones have been friends for a long time.  They know each other well.  So, when Tommy doesn't show up in his afternoon classes after throwing a desk in math, the others don't think much of it.  After all, it's likely that he's been suspended.

But then he doesn't show up the next day.  And he doesn't answer his phone.  And his mother doesn't know where he is.

That's when the three remaining boys start to think about what went on in English class that day.  And about what may have really happened to Tommy.

Short version:  Gentlemen gets a Hulk-sized double thumbs-up from me.  I'm totally in love with it and you really should run to your local library and snag it immediately.

Longer-but-still short version:  What, you don't believe me?  See above.  Yeesh.  Really.  Micheal is very bright, very perceptive and always believable.  His voice is fresh and distinct, clever in a way that feels new, gritty and hard-boiled in a way that feels true to his age, and darkly funny in a way that never comes off as flip or downplays the situation.  He spun the story out in a way that kept me guessing until he himself realized what had happened and what was going to happen, and I'm just totally in love.  Even after finishing the book, I find that I'm thinking of him as a real person.

It's an outstanding, excellent book, and I very much hope that Michael Northrup will have more to come for the YA audience.

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Book source:  ILLed from my local library.

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I read this book for the 2009 Cybils.  (It had been on my TBR list for a zillion years as well -- the nomination just got my rear in gear.)

The Morgue and Me -- John C. Ford

The Morgue and Me begins:

When you're eighteen years old and you shoot somebody in a public place at two in the morning, of course you expect some attention.  Especially when it's the person I shot, and especially when you're found right there on the scene with that person at your feet, gasping away in a pool of blood that seeps around your shoes.  Still, I find it really embarrassing.

The summer before his freshman year of college, photography enthusiast and aspiring spy Christopher Newell gets a summer job at the morgue.  He was supposed to work at the NWMU astronomy department, but that fell through when... well, it's a long story.

Anyway, the morgue.  While snooping (there's really no other word for it) in the coroner's office, he finds $15,000 in cash.  Which is weird.  But then when he realizes that the coroner falsified his most recent report... well, Christopher Newell is pretty good at math.

He teams up with Tina, a Trans Am driving, fishnet wearing, drinking, smoking, big mouthed (and extremely attractive) young journalist -- he wants to solve the mystery, she wants a big break -- and before the two of them know it, they're up to their ears in an investigation that seems to involve every single powerful person in their Michigan town.

And powerful people do not usually take kindly to being investigated: especially when that investigation is conducted by a couple of nobodies and involves corruption, blackmail and murder.

Christopher's narration definitely brings to mind a hard-boiled detective -- not because he is one (or acts like one), mind you, but because he wants to be one -- and it especially comes out in some of his descriptions of people:

I've heard that lots of movie stars have huge heads.  I don't know about his acting skills, but Corbett was qualified in the head department.  His giant helmet of black hair was gelled so thick I could almost see a reflection of the clouds in it.  On his feet he wore tiny black loafers, equally shiny.  In between, there was lots of tailored clothing.

His relationship with Tina is especially well done.  He has to remind himself to stop drooling every time he looks at her even though he knows it is SO not going to happen -- and that attraction persists throughout the book, even as their working relationship develops into a genuine friendship.  And, very importantly, they're rather hilarious:

"See?"  Tina said.  "You lurk a little, you get your answers."

"I'm not sure it was the lurking.  I think it was more the asking."

"Whatever.  We're lurking till I finish this drink."

And while Tina easily could have become a two-dimensional stock character (because it isn't like we haven't met the brash and brassy type many, many times before), she didn't.  As the book progressed, as she and Christopher got to know each other, she became more and more real.  By the end of the book, I felt like she was as much a main character as he was.

Big thumbs up here -- it's a strong mystery (minus one plot point that felt really, really wrong) that feels both classic and contemporary.  It was suspenseful and twisty and funny with strong secondary characters and just good all around.  I know I always say it when I find one, but here I go again:  I'm so glad that we're starting to see more noir-ish crime novels written for and marketed to the teen audience. 

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Book source:  My local library.

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Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

Rather gorgeous.

Even though between the two of us, Josh and I probably own three complete sets of the Ripley books, I find that I am tempted by this:

Click through for more images, including shots of each cover.

So pretty.

The Case of the Two Watsons.

(via Hark, A Vagrant!, which I will be following from now on.)

A.C. Doyle.

If anyone still doesn't understand my love for Hard Case Crime, I give you the cover of the December 2009 release:

 

Hit List: Keller, #2 -- Lawrence Block

For the past few months, I've been writing about Hard Case Crime titles here and at Guys Lit Wire. But, as is usual for me, I got distracted. Hard Case led me to Lawrence Block, which led me to Keller, and I now I won't be moved from Keller until I've read all of the books about him.

Keller is a hit man. He's good at what he does. He doesn't do it because he's a vigilante (though he has been known to go against the client's wishes if he disapproves), and he doesn't do it because he enjoys it. No, he kills people for a paycheck. At one point, he was actually planning on retiring, but then he re-started his boyhood philately hobby -- so now he has to keep the money coming in so that he can continue adding to his stamp collection.

In Hit List, Keller meets a girl. She introduces him to an astrologist, who tells him that he has a murderer's thumb. Which doesn't sit right with Keller, because, despite his day job, he doesn't think of himself as a murderer. And the idea that his profession could have been preordained bothers him.  And after meeting with the astrologist, things feel off. Jobs don't go right, and eventually, Keller realizes that his life is in danger -- someone, for reason or reasons unknown -- wants him out of the picture.

What I love about the Keller books is that they aren't action-packed go-go-go thrill-rides about an assassin. They're books about a smart, slightly odd guy who has likes and dislikes and a job and who goes to jury duty because it's the right thing to do. And I also love his conversations with Dot, the lady who sets up his jobs. This excerpt will give you a brief taste of the awesome that is Keller:

"The cop's black," he told Dot, "and the defendant's white. I don't think I mentioned that before."

"You and Justice," she said. "Both color-blind."

"At first," he said, "we didn't know. I mean, we knew about the defendant, because there he was sitting with his lawyers, and middle-aged white guy with an OTB face and a bad rug named Huberman."

"His rug's got a name?"

"What is this, English class? You know what I meant. His name is Huberman."

"I know what a rug is," she said, "whether it's got a name or not, and I never saw a good one. But what's an OTB face? Off the books? On the button?"

"Off-track betting," he said. "There's a look horseplayers get."

"A kind of woulda-coulda-shoulda look."

"That's the one."

While this one wasn't a collection of short stories like the first one, it still reads like a series of connected vingettes -- due to the pacing, I think that not everyone will take to it, but those of you who do will adore it.

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Previously:

Keller:

1. Hit Man

Other Lawrence Block:

Grifter's Game (Hard Case #1)
Girl with the Long Green Heart (Hard Case #14)

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(cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire)

Book source: My local library.

Denise Mina: all-around awesome.

From the Scotsman:

Well, I say, I've just read all the cuttings and I'm tired of hearing about this Glasgow crime writer who's always down-to-earth, feisty, funny, nice, and all the rest of it. She smiles, signs the book, and slides it back.

"To David," it says. "F*** YOU! Denise Mina."

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Previously:

1. Garnethill
2. Exile
3. Resolution

Hit Man: Keller, #1 -- Lawrence Block

From Hit Man:

He hadn't met the man, but he knew his name.  Even if he wasn't sure how to pronounce it.

The man in White Plains had handed Keller an index card with two lines of block capitals hand-printed.

"Lyman Crowder," he read, as if it rhymed with louder.  "Or should that be Crowder?"  As if it rhymed with loader.

A shrug in response.

"Martingale, WY," Keller went on.  "Why indeed?  And where, besides Wyoming?  Is Martingale near anything?"

I picked that excerpt mostly because it was an early example of Keller's habit of playing with words and of Keller's habit of talking to himself even when he's having a conversation with someone else.  (Although I'm pretty sure that all of his on-screen conversations with the man in White Plains were one-sided.)

What it doesn't highlight is his relationship with the inimitable Dot.  Or how he feels about dogs.  Or how he deals with therapy*.  Or the aspects of his job he actually enjoys (figuring out how to off someone without becoming a suspect, let alone seen, caught or killed -- he views it as a kind of puzzle).  That excerpt doesn't have any wonderful lines like:

Around nine that night Keller wanted a drink, but he didn't want to have it in the company of adulterers and their favorite music.

Here's another one:

"Then the son of a bitch joined a gym," she said, "and he wound up leaving me for his personal trainer.  He wadded me up and threw me away like a used Kleenex."

She didn't look like the sort of person you'd blow your nose on.

The book is chock-full of wonderful funny little bits like that, but it never ever feels like Lawrence Block is throwing out one-liner after one-liner.  Everything flows and is perfectly integrated into the storyline(s), and even though the book is in the third person, somehow it feels like it's in Keller's voice.  Like if Keller was writing a story about a guy named Keller who was a hit man, that's how it would read.  I don't know how Block did that.  But I love him for it.

There's plenty of sex and violence, but most of it is off-screen, and what little isn't never struck me as graphic or even remotely gratuitous.  And there's surprisingly little profanity.  Maybe that's because the stories -- they were written (and originally published) as short stories** -- are more about Keller and Who He Is than about Keller and What He Does.

What all of that amounts to is this:  I have a new love, and he is a stamp-collecting assassin.

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*That was my favorite story.  And Josh liked the one with the dog best.

**I read it straight through in one sitting, though -- it reads like a novel in installments.

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Previously:

Grifter's Game
The Girl with the Long Green Heart

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Book source:  My local library.

Mistress of the Art of Death -- Ariana Franklin

England, 1170.  After the Catholics of Cambridge turn into a riotous mob because they believe that the Jews are to blame for the particularly horrific murder of a child, Henry II finds himself in a bit of a bind.  As all of the Cambridge Jews are now living in Cambridge castle (for protection), he's losing much needed tax revenue.  Also, it's clear that they are innocent.

So he contacts the King of Sicily, and asks for a "master of the art of death".

And the King of Sicily complies.  Sort of.  He sends Simon, an investigatory genius -- who happens to be Jewish; Mansur, a Saracen castrato; and Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, a Mistress of the Art of Death.

Of course, in England, publicly admitting to being a female doctor is an impossibility.  So the three companions set up shop in Cambridge, with Mansur standing in as the doctor and Adelia as his translator and assistant.  And the investigation begins.

Well, I'm in love.  After finishing this one, I pulled Ye Olde Babble at the library.  Patrons had to listen to me yap on at length about how much I loved it and about how now I was all curious about Henry II and about the medical school at Salerno and about how if the library didn't get Ariana Franklin's other books, I was JUST. GOING. TO. DIE*.

The writing was lovely and evoked especially vivid images in my mind (though not always pretty ones), and it brought me to another time and place.  Adelia's status and perspective as an outsider in England allowed for plenty of musing on the culture of the time -- she noticed and thought about things that a Cambridge native probably would have taken for granted, and that, I think, added to the richness of the description and world building.  I cared about the characters very much, and found that even most of the secondary characters became real to me, the plotting surprised me again and again, and for me, best of all, I was really, really emotionally invested -- there was one specific section that had me deliriously happy until Something Bad Happened.  And I said, "Oh."  (Out loud, though I was alone in the house).  And then I had to put the book down, get up, drink a glass of water and compose myself.  Only then could I dive back in.

So thanks so much to Elizabeth and Arlene for the recommendation.  Good lord.  I totally owe the two of you a whoopie pie** or something.

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*The director ordered them.  Possibly just to shut me up, but I'm not going to complain.  Because A) I'm not big on complaining and B) gift horses.

**In college, I discovered that there are many people who don't know what whoopie pies are.  Which is just wrong.  And sad.

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Book source:  My local library.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart -- Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime, #14

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year.  (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.)  Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining.  They make me happy.  If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Lately I've been exploring Lawrence Block -- I tore through the first Bernie Rhodenbarr book and one about Matthew Scudder which gave me an inkling of his range, and, just to round things out, I brought home all four Keller books for the holiday weekend -- so, since I was in the groove, I decided to jump ahead a bit and read another of Block's Hard Case titles. 

The Girl with the Long Green Heartwas originally published in 1965. It's about Johnny Hayden, a retired grifter. After a miserable seven-year stint in San Quentin, he's been playing it straight -- working in a bowling alley, taking correspondence courses in hotel management and saving every penny. At the rate he's saving, in ten years, he'll have enough money to buy a local hotel. Ten years. In ten years, he'll be fifty.

So when his old associate Doug Rance shows up with a plan for a long con that'll set him up with enough cash to buy the hotel, he decides to do this one last job. It's a job that requires help on the inside. Luckily, the mark's secretary has a big reason to hate her boss... and, as it turns out, she's a natural at the grifter's game.

I really loved this one. Johnny tells his story simply and believably in a voice that has that noir accent without ever feeling like a caricature. Which is impressive. He jumps from the main story to flashback and back again so seamlessly that I kept falling into the flashbacks and forgetting that the main story even existed -- his voice made everything that vivid and real and in-the-now.

I didn't want to care about him -- long con stories so often go the same way that I generally try not to get attached -- but he was just so damn likable. His narration of the game moved along with lots of those how-to details that I love, and while, due to the conventions of the genre, I guessed at some of the twists before they came, I had no idea how Johnny would react or what the outcome would be. Surprises came fast and furious towards the end, and the ending itself left me feeling a whole lot happier than I expected it to -- it was so nice to run into a grifter without a tendency towards deep dark depression.  

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Previously:

1.  Grifter's Game, Lawrence Block
2.  Fade to Blonde, Max Phillips
3.  Top of the Heap, Erle Stanley Gardner

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(cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire)

The Angel of Death: Cameryn Mahoney, Book 2 -- Alane Ferguson

I'm a sucker for cover art that features toe tags.  I realize that might mean I have problems.

I read The Christopher Killer ages and ages ago, had on-the-cooler-end-of-lukewarm feelings about it, and never got around to posting those thoughts here.  So The Angel of Death is not my first go-round with Cameryn Mahoney, seventeen-year-old forensic genius.

Cammie has pressure on her from all different directions: she lives and works with her coroner father, who encourages her interest in forensics -- but she also lives with her Catholic grandmother, who thinks that her interest is going to send her to Hell.  She and Deputy Crowley are clearly attracted to each other, but she's still in high school AND they work together.  And then there's that whole thing with her mother:  for reasons explained and explored in the first book, Cammie's mother hasn't really been in the picture in a long, long time.  Now she's back in the picture.  Sort of.  But Cammie hasn't told her father. 

So that's a source of stress.

Add to that an extremely dead high school teacher found by Big Man On Campus Mr. HottieMcHotHot Eagle Scout Kyle O'Neil -- who takes a shine to Cammie during the investigation -- and there's suddenly a lot going on in a usually sleepy Colorado town.

I still haven't found a forensics series that I adore, adult or YA.  The subject is just, well, neat, but as of yet, the characterization and writing in every forensic mystery I've read gets overshadowed by the science -- for me, the investigation and the detecting work steal the show.  Angel of Death was not an exception, except that not much of the book dealt with the actual forensics.  So... yeah.

Part of my issue with the book was certainly personal -- among other things*, I just don't like Cammie very much.  She's prone to being amazingly tortured and angsty** ("Now everyone, it seemed, hovered over Cameryn, anxious to find out what was happening inside her head, as though they possessed a set of sharp autopsy instruments all their own, poised and ready to pick her mind and dissect her heart.") and she's very much the type of brilliant-yet-clueless heroine that I end up yelling "OH, COME ON!  REALLY?  WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?  HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW WHO THE BAD GUY IS???  I HAD HIM PEGGED BY THE COPY ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK!" at, and so without the forensics to entertain me, this one, sadly, didn't really work for me.

But it has, like, five stars at Amazon, so I'm clearly in the minority.

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*I really did not find the dialogue believable.  Or the interactions between the teen characters.

**Just like I was in high school, so it's quite possible that the younger me would have enjoyed this much more.

Fade to Blonde -- Max Phillips Hard Case Crime, #2

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year.  (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.)  Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining.  They make me happy.  If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the late-40's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed.  So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order.  Or as close to in order as I can.  

Fade to Blonde was a Hard Case original, and it won the 2005 Shamus Award for Best Paperback of the Year.  It's a pretty familiar setup, with a more-striking-than-classically-beautiful woman approaching the narrator and spinning a story about being in danger and needing help, leading him to an underworld of drugs, gangsters, prostitution and pornography.  The tension, for me, came from never being quite sure how it would all play out -- Ray Corson is aware from minute one that Rebecca isn't telling him everything, but are her omissions (or are they just flat-out lies?) going to get him killed?

While this book got what looks to be stellar reviews across the board, my feelings were a little more mixed.  For the first half-to-three-quarters of the book, I had a hard time believing that Ray Corson would've gotten as involved as he did -- I never believed that he cared much for Rebecca, though I think I was supposed to, and even if his motivation was different (say, simple curiosity), I felt that he was too smart to stick around.  There were moments when his temper took over, when he made a decision to do something even though he knew that it would come back to slap him, but those moments were different.  They worked for me.  There was a distinct turning point where my issues dissolved and it finally made sense to me for him to go all-in, but that was so far into the story -- there had been so many moments that I felt he would have just walked away -- that I felt it was still a problem.

What really worked for me was his voice.  Ray Corson was bright and likable and great with the one-liners and literary references (he's an aspiring-but-pretty-much-failed screenwriter) without laying them on too thick:

His suit was what mine wanted to be when it grew up.  My suit was kidding itself.

By the time I got there, the bartender had another gimlet waiting.  I'd be doing well to get home that night with my liver still attached.

I laid them out in a row and started noodling names and facts and connecting them with arrows and generally smoking my meerschaum and playing my violin.

If you want more, there's a sample chapter up at Hard Case's site.

I also really enjoyed, for the most part, the secondary characters -- Mattie and L. R. Bellinger, especially.  And the Hollywood setting was great.  Even with the aspects I found problematic, I found myself thinking quite often of Chinatown, actually.  Which is in no way a bad thing.

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Previously:

1.  Grifter's Game, Lawrence Block
3.  Top of the Heap, Erle Stanley Gardner

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(cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire)

The Agatha Christie Murders.

Sounds like a book title, no?  Well, it probably will be one at some point, if it isn't already. 

From the Guardian:

Police in Iran believe they have caught the country's first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie.

Top of the Heap -- Erle Stanley Gardner Hard Case Crime, #3

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year.  (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.)  Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining.  They make me happy.  If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the late-40's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed.  So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order.  Of course, two months in and I'm already off -- my copy of #2 hasn't arrived yet, so I had to skip ahead.

Top of the Heap was originally published in 1952 under the name A. A. Fair.  Erle Stanley Gardner is most well-known for the Perry Mason series, but Top of the Heap features a different hero:  Donald Lam, of the Cool & Lam Detective Agency.  (I have mixed feelings about the disembodied heads on the cover of the book.  On one hand, I kind of love them.  On the other, they freak me out.  I keep waiting for them to zoom in and out at me.)

The book starts off with a voice as classic as classic can be:

I was in the outer office, standing by the files, doing some research on a blackmailer, when he came in, all six feet of him.

He wore a plaid coat, carefully tailored, pleated slacks, and two-tone sport shoes.  He was built like a secondhand soda straw, and I heard him say he wanted to see the senior partner.  He said it with the air of a man who always demands the best, and then settles for what he can get.

Awesome, right?  I love that last line.  Turns out, Mr. Secondhand Soda Straw is looking to track down a couple of young ladies he spent the night with earlier in the week -- but he doesn't know their names.  Don Lam is on the case -- but from minute one, he knows that there's something fishy about Soda Straw's story.  He follows the case wherever it leads, from a failed assassination attempt of a gangster and a missing gangster's moll to a questionable mining operation and an illegal casino.  And, of course, murder.  Multiple murders, in fact.

The joy in this one, for me, was in the dialogue between Lam and the young ladies -- all of the young ladies.  He and his secretary flirt and spar throughout the book, which I loved, and there was a conversation between Lam and a woman he questioned about the case that I dare you to read without picturing Bogart and Bacall.  I had their voices ringing in my ears after that chapter.  Bertha is another story, but she's one you need to experience for yourself.

I really liked that although Don Lam narrates like a hard-boiled tough guy, he isn't really all that hard-boiled.  He bluffs his way through some dicey situations, and he isn't afraid of getting beat up, but he isn't always super cool.  He gets scared.  And he's not much of a fighter.

The mystery itself, I wasn't particularly interested in.  It was so convoluted -- though unlike The Big Sleep, by the end you know who killed who, so that's something -- that I stopped trying to keep track of it and just enjoyed the ride.  There were a few parts near the end where Don Lam goes on for pages explaining who did what to who and why and how he figured it out and so on -- I admit to glazing over a bit. 

Overall, his voice was a kick and the action and dialogue made even the eye-crossing bits worth it.  Apparently, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote almost thirty books about Cool & Lam -- Hard Case has only republished this one, but I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for the others.

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Previously:

1.  Grifter's Game, Lawrence Block

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(cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire)

YES! YES! DO IT!

TAAAAAAAAKE THEEEEEEEEEM DOOOOOOOOOOOOWN!

...

...

Sorry.  I'm calm now.

Seriously, though.  Good on you, guys.  I mean, yeah.  It isn't like I don't know that this is a publicity stunt for your own books.  But it's a hilarious publicity stunt.  Or at least one that I find hilarious.  So I approve.

Grifter's Game -- Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime, #1

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year.  (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.)  Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining.  They make me happy.  If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the mid-50's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed.  So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order.

Grifter's Game was originally published in 1961 as Mona, and then re-named and re-released by Hard Case in 2004.  It's about con artist Joe Marlin, who's been pulling the old check-in-to-a-hotel-and-stay-for-a-while-before-taking-off-without-paying scam.  It's an easy way to stay comfortable, well-fed and well-hydrated, but it's much easier to pull off if you're carrying expensive luggage when you check in -- hotel clerks are less likely to ask for money up front that way.  So he steals some suitcases.

Which turn out to contain a large amount of uncut heroin.

And then he meets the wife of the man who owns the suitcases.

And falls in love with her.  And she with him.  And so the husband has to go, one way or another.  Leading Joe Marlin to say, "I don't know whether the kiss was a sign of love or a bargain sealed with lipstick instead of blood." 

I've read quite a lot of crime novels.  And watched lots of film noir.  So the set-up was a familiar one.  The first thirty pages -- where Block sets the stage with Joe scamming rich women and hotel clerks -- seemed so familiar that I almost got up and started going through my recent reads to look for another book with that same situation.  Almost.

But even after I hit the point where I was totally and completely positive that I hadn't already read the book, I kept waiting for the situation to play out as I expected it.  Because crime novels where A GUY KILLS FOR THE LOVE OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN WHO TOTALLY HAS THE MADONNA/WHORE THING GOING ON don't usually end well for the guy.  But then I started wondering if maybe this story was going to be different -- and right up until the last few pages, I really didn't know which way it was going to go.  I had no idea that Lawrence Block was so tricky.

Apart from the trickiness of Lawrence Block's from-left-field-I-totally-didn't-expect-it-and-I'm-going-to-be-thinking-about-it-for-a-good-long-while plot twist, I loved the details about Joe Marlin covering his tracks -- like switching license plates on a car before stealing it -- and I loved his musings about memory, the emotional baggage that comes with murder and about how the moments that end up haunting you aren't necessarily the ones that one would expect.  He's not a quipping cold-blooded killer by any means, which made the last quarter of the book especially effective.

Though I'm very familiar with Lawrence Block's name, I'm not all that familiar with his books.  That's going to change.  Soon.

(cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire)

Kisses and Lies: Scarlett Wakefield, #2 -- Lauren Henderson

When I got this one in the mail I shrieked and did a happy dance even though I was still miserably wearing my sick girl pajamas.  I'd been dying to read it ever since reading Kiss Me Kill Me last year.

Kisses and Lies starts right where Kiss Me Kill Me left off:  in the middle of 16-year-old Scarlett Wakefield's investigation into the murder of the first boy she ever kissed, Dan McAndrew.

Yes, you read that right.  You can imagine why I found the first book's ending so very frustrating.  While there is a bit of a recap at the beginning of this book, I'd definitely suggest reading the series in order -- both for the mystery details and to see Scarlett's transformation from shy girl desperate for popularity and terrified of being embarrassed to mostly confident amateur sleuth who'll do whatever she must to find out what she needs to know.

There's so much to love about these books:  Scarlett is British and her co-investigator, Taylor, is American, so there's always a bit of the culture clash going on, the combination of crime novel and Gossip Girl-ish Rich Kids Behaving Badly novel works so extremely well that I wish it would become a subgenre in its own right, and Scarlett's confusion about her various love interests* is spot on.  Her friendship with Taylor, the class differences with her gardener love interest, her family issues, her athleticism, her voice... it's all good.  This is one of those rare series that could appeal to readers who love the RKBB genre as well as to readers who want to punch the entire RKBB genre in the face.  So yay for that, too.

I found myself suspecting almost every character of some sort of malfeasance at one point or another, and though I spotted the villain a little while before Scarlett did, I never found her investigatory style even remotely slow or dimwitted.  Which might not sound like a huge compliment, but it is.  Mystery-wise, the story seems to be wrapped up, but the stage is clearly set for more action.  So bring it, Lauren Henderson.  I'm looking forward to more, more, more!

_______________________________________________________________

*Unlike whatsherface in the Cast vampire books, Scarlett's multiple love interests don't make her sound like a tramp.  They make her sound like a real person.  I have to admit that after just a few scenes with the New Boy, I'm ready to throw over her original crush for him -- and I'm not usually fickle like that.  But maybe I'll feel differently when Book Three rolls around.  There'd better be a Book Three...

_______________________________________________________________

Previously:

Kiss Me Kill Me

This is not the way to ring in the new year.

Donald Westlake has died.

I am so depressed.

Contest over at Elizabeth Scott's blog!

Go!  Give her the title of a fave book from 2008 for a chance to win a copy of Dooley Takes the Fall AND a copy of the movie Brick.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for bringing attention to this Fabbity-McFaberson of a fab book!

Parts 1 & 2 of the Benjamin Black profile up at TEV.

From Part One:

There are precedents for writers adopting a pen-name when they try their hand at other genres, but Mr. Black makes it clear that he’s not slumming. His conversion came when he discovered Georges Simenon’s romans durs – the hard novels – which are distinct from the novels that feature Detective Maigret, for which Simenon is best known. Mr. Banville has written eloquently and at length about the staggeringly prolific writer, who wrote 193 novels under his own name and over 200 more under 18 pseudonyms. Banville makes no bones about his devotion: "He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary writer."

Another author Banville cites as an "exemplar" of "existential crime fiction" is the work of Richard Stark, the alter ego of Donald Westlake. Both pen crime novels, but Stark’s novels are more hardboiled.  Westlake employed a pseudonym to convey a mode of storytelling distinct from its predecessor so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans.

Part Two here.

Oops. Heh heh.

I just "accidentally" subscribed to the Hard Case Crime book club.

Sort of relatedly, the president of our library's Friends group gave me a copy of Colin Watson's Charity Ends at Home because, according to her, no one would buy it except one of the two of us, and she'd already read it.  She described Colin Watson as the anti-Agatha Christie, in that his Flaxborough novels are set in a quaint little English hamlet that is actually a Seething Den of Corruption and Vice.  I AM SO EXCITED.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Unshelved.

The strip is here.

If you haven't read the book yet, you're missing out.  I'm dying to read the sequel.  It's been out for over a month?!  What have I been waiting for?  I'd better get on that.

Oh, please, please, please tell me that these will be released in the US.

This is just one of the fourteen new Bond covers Penguin commissioned.

I'm in love.  I want the set of books so badly that I'm feeling a bit faint.  Also, I want all of the covers in poster format, I want, I want, I want.

Why I Write: Reginald Hill.

I wore my I ♥ Fat Andy t-shirt to work last week and (of course) had to explain it forty-seven times. 

But it was worth it -- a patron mentioned to me early this week that he'd read two Reginald Hill books since our chat and was headed back to the stacks for more.  Hooray!

From the Guardian:

When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
We were an ordinary working-class family. There was no library or butler. But I knew about libraries and butlers because my mother was a great fan of crime fiction. The adult books that came into the house tended to be Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, which perhaps fed a taste which I developed later.

Not really YA related.

But it's book related, and I read a lot of his SF when I was a teen, so it's sort of YA related and whatever, I'm going to mention it anyway:

There's an essay about the fabulous-o Fredric Brown up at the Chicago Tribune.

I've read some of his crime stories, but now I'm reminded that I must. Read. More!

Dexter in the Dark -- Jeff Lindsay

There are going to be some major spoilers after my synopsis, so if you're planning on reading the book, watch out for the big *SPOILERS* note.  Avoid at will.

As fans know, Dexter Morgan is a complicated guy.  In his life as Dear Devoted Dexter, he's preparing for his upcoming wedding with Rita.  In his life as Dazed Daddy Dexter, he's busy trying to explain to his almost-stepchildren Astor and Cody that they need to wait on the mayhem -- that they need to learn to blend in with everyone else before they can become his mini Dark Darlings. 

That would be enough for most people, right?  But we're talking about Dexter, so now for The Big One:  At a somewhat tame (from Dexter's point of view, of course -- blood spatter experts/vigilante serial killers have kind of seen it all, you know) crime scene, Dexter's Dark Passenger goes silent.  And shortly thereafter, it disappears.  Without his inner voice to guide him, he is unable to provide hints about the case to his sister, and he just feels... lost. 

And then there's The Watcher.

Okay, *SPOILERS*.

Got that?

*SPOILERS* below.

Dexter -- the book series -- has totally jumped the shark.  Remember the stupid midichlorians from the new, crappy Star Wars movies?  Yeah.  About halfway through Dexter in the Dark, I stomped into the living room and declared, "Arrrrgh!  Jeff Lindsay TOTALLY pulled a George Lucas!"  You know what?  Explaining The Force diminished it.  And the same goes for Dexter.  Changing his Dark Passenger from a metaphor into a literal being diminished it and diminished Dexter.

Dexter went from being something special -- someone who was, in my eyes, broken and, yeah, sick, but able to make it work for him -- to just... a poor schlub who went through major trauma and became host to (and dependent on) the bastard child of an Old God.  Yeah, you heard that right.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I like the show a whole lot better.  I like the show a whole lot better.  How often do you hear that?

I'm pretty sure I'm done with the books.

All of this isn't to say that I didn't like anything about the book.  I loved the Astor and Cody storyline, and if anything convinces me to read the next book, it'll be my curiosity about them.  But, at the moment, my horror at the midichlorian parallel coupled with the really unsatisfying, slapped together, possibly-written-in-fifteen-minutes-action-packed ending has me feeling Deeply Disappointed.

Crime novelist's novel may have been nonfiction.

From the Times Online:

Where reality ends and fiction begins in the stomach-turning novel Amok is the central task before the jury in Poland’s trial of the decade. Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.

More at the Guardian.

CWA Daggers 2007.

Duncan Lawrie Dagger (Best Crime Novel of the Year):

Peter Temple, The Broken Shore

Duncan Lawrie International Dagger (Best Crime Novel Translated into English):

Fred Vargas, Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand, translated by Siân Reynolds

Ian Fleming Steel Dagger (Best James Bond-y Adventure/Thriller):

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

New Blood Dagger (Best Book by a Previously Unpublished Author):

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

Something about the Vargas cover art gives me the wicked creeps.  I've been meaning to read the Flynn for quite a while now -- I'll have to bump it up a few spots. 

More here.

It's gross-out time.

From Michael Dibdin's Ratking:

"A ratking.  Do you know what that is?"

Zen shrugged.  "The king rat, I suppose.  The dominant animal in the pack."

Bartocci shook his head.  "That's what everyone thinks.  But they're wrong.  A ratking is something that happens when too many rats have to live in too small a space under too much pressure.  Their tails become entwined and the more they strain and stretch to free themselves the tighter grows the knot binding them, until at last it becomes a solid mass of embedded tissue.  And the creature thus formed, as many as thirty rats tied together by the tail, is called a ratking."

The Wikipedia article suggests that ratkings are merely legendary.  Either way, yuck-o.

This was my first Aurelio Zen mystery.  While I was hooked on the intrigue (the mystery itself, the politics surrounding the case and within the police force) from this moment in the second chapter...:

Salvatore Iovino, their chief, a corpulent, vivacious fifty-year-old from Catania, had given a masterly performance.  Fulsome and vapid, laden with insincere warmth and hidden barbs, his introductory speech had nevertheless left no legitimate grounds for complaint.  She had spoken of Zen's "reputation," without actually mentioning that his abrupt departure from the Rome Questura in 1978 had been the subject of the wildest rumors throughout the force.  The two cases he had mentioned dated from the midseventies, underlining Zen's lack of recent operational experience.  He had referred to the transfer as a "posting," thus emphasizing that it had been imposed on him by the Ministry, and had called it a symbol of the historic relationship between Rome and Perugia, a relationship consisting of two thousand years of bitterly resented domination.

...Zen himself didn't completely win me over until close to the end.  But when he did, he did it in a big way.  He has a run-in with a horrible beast of a librarian who won't help him at all -- she makes him jump through hoop after hoop after hoop while she just sits there knitting.  When he finally has everything in order:

He handed back the forms corresponding to the last three months.  The woman scrutinized them in vain for further errors or omissions, laid down her knitting with a reluctant sigh, and trotted off.  As soon as she was out of sight, Zen took out his pocket knife and cut through a stitch in the middle of the work she had completed.

Yep.  Love him. 

Yikes. This quote makes way too much sense.

From The Telegraph (via Bookslut):

Patricia Highsmith's mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Later in life, she said to her daughter: "It's funny you like the smell of turpentine, Pat."

Anyway.  If you haven't read her and this sounds at all attractive...:

Think of the mild terror you experience when the crank at the next table, having subjected you to his monologues, somehow prizes your phone number out of you; or at the loud, drunken bore on a plane.

...

She created unsympathetic protagonists: the seriously unhinged or the dully melancholic. Her endings are rarely predictable; the action is often a demented loop. Victims turn into stalkers, stalkers turn into victims, murders are botched, the eccentric can be harmless or insane. We are anxious because we have no way of knowing: the world is out of control.

...then get to it.  She's fantastic.

Deception -- Denise Mina

When Lachlan Harriot's wife is found guilty of murdering a former patient*, he is desperate to find new information that will allow an appeal.  He knows that she didn't do it.  She couldn't have -- she's his Susie, his love, the mother of his child and a brilliant psychiatrist.

So he breaks into her study.  And what he finds in there makes him start to wonder.  Deception is a collection of Lachie's diary entries during the time of his investigation.

Lachlan is the best unreliable narrator I've come across in a long time -- because it was never quite clear if he was actually unreliable.  Right up until the end, I wasn't sure if I could trust his version of events -- but I wasn't sure that I couldn't either.  His moods changed quickly, as did his suspicions, and his feelings towards his wife changed drastically from page to page.  Sometimes two or three times on the same page, even.  But it's always all about him -- he'd prefer to discover that Susie was a murderess than that he'd been cuckolded.

Regardless of whether you trust him or not -- or even like him -- he's always entertaining.  After transcribing an exclamation point-heavy letter into his case file, he says:

Fucking hell, Donna!!  Learn to punctuate?!  I shouldn't take the piss out of the dead, she might come back from the grave and beat me to death with an exclamation mark.

Denise Mina continues to be my favorite author for character description:

Stevie Ray is a bad man, a selfish man who makes money by cashing in on the misery of others, but after meeting him it's hard to believe he actually means any harm to anyone.  He is small and balding in a messy way, not a straightforward receding hairline.  He has a brown hairy button on his forehead and thin wisps all over the top.  He's short and fat as well and ties his raincoat belt in a knot at his swollen waist, which makes it look worse.  He's simultaneously repellent and sympathetic.  It's like he's got his charisma on backward.

Those last two sentences actually apply pretty well to Lachlan himself, actually. 

Fab.

*Not just any old murder -- a particularly gruesome murder.  A stabbing and tongue-ripping-out murder.  Possibly even two murders, but the second body hasn't been found.

Florida Roadkill -- Tim Dorsey

Some swearing ahead.

I love the Friends of the Library.  Not only do they run our ongoing book sale (so... dangerous...), but the President and I have very similar reading tastes.  She loves the revenge stories, the anti-heroes, the crime capers.  Florida Roadkill is the first of a whole series starring Serge Storms, a sociopath with an obsession with Florida history.

When I hit this scene in the Prologue (which you can read in its entirety here), in which a bigoted redneck uses the n-word on a convenience store clerk in front of the Wrong People, I knew that This Was A Book For Me:

"Now give me my fucking change, you stupid fucking ..."

And he said it. The word. It hung in the air between them, an electrical cumulonimbus over the cash register.

The driver realized what he'd spoken and paused to flash back. He used the word once to criticize a bad parking job at a Wendy's, and this little four-foot guy went Tasmanian Devil on him. He received bruised ribs, a jaw wired shut and eight fog lights snapped off his truck.

He panicked. He jumped back from the counter and pulled a switchblade on Ellrod. "Don't try anything! You know you guys call each other that all the time! Don't go getting on me about slavery!"

The tallest Latin was next in line, fiddling with a point-of-purchase display, key-chain flashlights in the shape of AK-47 bullets.

"Hey!" the Latin said to the pickup driver. "Apologize!"

The driver turned the blade toward him. "Fuck off, Julio! You don't even have a dog in this fight! Go back to your guacamole farm and those tropical monkeys you call the mothers of your children!"

The driver never saw it. A second Latin came from behind, holding a bottle of honey-mustard barbecue sauce the size of a bowling pin. He had it by the neck and swung it around into the driver's nose, which exploded. Blood squirted everywhere like someone had stomped the heel of a boot down on a packet of ketchup.

Ellrod witnessed an entirely new league of violence. Everything in his experience up to now, even murder, was amateur softball. The driver was swarmed as he fell, and the Latins came up with makeshift convenience store weapons. Dry cell battery, meat tenderizer, Parrot Gardens car deodorizer. In ten seconds, they pulverized both elbows, both kneecaps and both testicles.

The tallest Latin walked to the rotisserie next to the soda machine. A dozen hot dogs had turned on a circle of spits for six hours, and they were leathery and resistant to conventional forks and knives. He grabbed two of the spits and held one in each fist, pointing down, like daggers. The others saw him and cleared away from the pickup driver, now on his back. The tall one pounced and drove the spits into the driver's chest, a bullfight banderillero setting the decorative spears. One spit pierced the right lung, and the other blew a ventricle. The driver torqued and shimmied on the floor and then fell into the death rattle, two shriveled-up hot dogs quivering on rabbit-ear antennas sticking out of his chest.

The tall Latin stepped over the driver and up to the cash register. He pulled a ten from an eelskin wallet and handed it to Ellrod. "Three Cokes and two Jumbo Meaty Dogs."

I read that passage aloud to Josh, and we laughed so hard that it took me four times as long to get through it as it normally would.  There were tears, even.

Anyway, I'll definitely be reading more.  Dorsey occasionally repeated himself, and it felt a little uneven, but overall, lots of ridiculously violent fun.  One of the characters does so many drugs that by the end, I was starting to feel like I was on them, too. 

I was reminded at times of Tom Sharpe (for the far-flung ridiculous situations that all come together by the end) and Hunter S. Thompson (for the drugs, mostly, but occasionally the rhythm -- sometimes I imagined him narrating it, and it was even funnier that way).  Cameos by Carl Hiassen, Dave Barry and Weird Al.

Knots and Crosses -- Ian Rankin

Yeah.  I'd been meaning to get around to starting this series for ages.  Not only has it been recommended to me again and again by Readers I Trust, but Ian Rankin is slated to do a run on Hellblazer sometime after Denise Mina*, and, well, gritty crime fiction set in Scotland is just something that appeals to me.

Okay.  I admit it.  What really and truly bumped me out of Ian Rankin Procrastination Land was watching the first season of Rebus.

John Hannah**?  Hot.  So dreamy that I spent at least thirty minutes discussing him (and Rebus) with one of my patrons -- and then, when she came to the library THE NEXT DAY, we did it AGAIN.  It was a tad ridiculous.

So obviously, I had to get off my lazy fangirl ass*** and track down the first book in the series.

The premise in a nutshell:  Someone is strangling teen girls in Edinburgh but there is no apparent connection between the stranglees.  Detective Sergeant Rebus is getting anonymous notes in the mail that say there are clues everywhere, he's neck-deep in office politics and a journalist suspects that he and his hypnotist brother are Up To No Good. 

Hooray.  I found the mystery engaging, but really, for me, it was all about Rebus.  Because, well:

Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside of which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls.  The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper.  The shop was a dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus.  Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows.  Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly.  A moment later he hesitated, then walked back on tiptoe to the shop, the criminal returning to the scene of the crime, the dog to its vomit.  Rebus had never actually seen dogs doing that, but he had it on the authority of Saint Peter.

Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself.

See?  Hot.

Hoping to get the next one soon.

*Who I finally picked up BECAUSE of her run on Hellblazer.

**People do seem to be divided about his casting.  Some love him as Rebus, others hate him.  But, as I watched first and read second (and have only read the first book), I loved him.

***Metaphorically.  I actually ordered it online.

Red Harvest -- Dashiell Hammett

I re-read this one periodically -- I admit to having a bit of a crush on the Continental Op.  Here are some of my favorite bits from this go-round.

The opening paragraph:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.  He also called his shirt a shoit.  I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name.  Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation.  I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary.  A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

After being ordered to drop the case by the corrupt old man who hired him:

"Your fat chief of police tried to assassinate me last night.  I don't like that.  I'm just mean enough to want to ruin him for it.  Now I'm going to have my fun.  I've got ten thousand dollars of your money to play with.  I'm going to use it opening Poisonville up from Adam's apple to ankles.  I'll see that you get my reports as regularly as possible.  I hope you enjoy them."

And I went out of the house with his curses sizzling around my head.

While hiding from gunmen in the woods with Dinah Brand:

I gave her another drink from the flask.  That bought me ten minutes of peace.

Then she said:

"I'm catching cold.  By the time anybody comes, if they ever do, I'll be sneezing and coughing loud enough to be heard in the city."

"Just once," I told her.  "Then you'll be all strangled."

"There's a mouse or something crawling under the blanket."

"Probably only a snake."

"Are you married?"

"Don't start that."

"Then you are?"

"No."

"I'll bet your wife's glad of it."

Next time I read it, I'll have to count the bodies -- there were over twenty, but I know I missed some, and that definitely doesn't include the nameless red shirts.

Resolution -- Denise Mina

Resolution is the final installment of the Garnethill trilogy.

As both Maureen and Leslie were left jobless at the end of Exile, the story opens with them selling illegally imported cigarettes at a flea market.

Maureen's father is still in town, the rest of the family (minus the ever-supportive Liam) refuse to acknowledge the sexual abuse that they know occurred, and Maureen is terrified that her sister's unborn child will be a little girl.  To prevent history from repeating itself, she's seriously considering patricide. 

You'd think that would be enough torment for anyone, but she's also slated to appear in court -- as the star witness -- to testify against the person who killed her ex-lover in the first book.  She knows that if he is released, he'll come for her.

And her drinking is starting to catch up with her.

So, when another flea market stall owner tells Maureen that she's taking her son to small claims court and then ends up badly beaten in the hospital, Maureen sees the situation as a way of keeping her mind off of her own problems.

I'm sure I said this about the other two books, but WOW.  Denise Mina is fab.  Her books are gritty and grimy and gloomy but sometimes funny and just plain wonderful.  The characters are well-drawn, many of them quite unlikeable yet still understandable -- As a friend of mine said, "You know you're in trouble when the most decent person in your family is a huge drug dealer" -- and honestly, now that I've finished the trilogy, I think I'll miss them.  Not just Maureen and Leslie and Liam, but her horrible mother and sisters, too. 

I'm going to read the hell out of Denise Mina's other books.  Soon.

Exile -- Denise Mina

This is the sequel to Garnethill.  Yes, it is possible to read Exile and understand/enjoy it without having read Garnethill.  No, I wouldn't recommend doing so.

With the assumption that you've read the first book:

It's a few months after the events of Garnethill.  Maureen has a new job, working for the same organization that runs the battered women's shelter where Leslie works.

She's miserable.  Her family is still a disaster. As her father is still in town, she won't see them anyway, but it would maybe be nice if they didn't treat him as the prodigal son.  Her friendship with Leslie is falling apart.  She's seeing someone but it isn't working out.  She's still being badgered by the police and has been receiving threatening letters:

She picked it up and went back into the kitchen, sat down and lit a fresh cigarette from the dying tip of the old one.  The envelope was made of cheap porous paper, her name and address written in a careful hand.  She leaned across to the bills drawer and pulled out the pile of blue envelopes, laying all fifteen in chronological rows on the table.  The writing was changing, becoming more controlled.  He was getting better.  Some of his letters were threatening, mostly they were gibberish, but the threats and the gibberish were evenly interspersed, regular and anticipatable.  She knew the voice of random insanity from her own time in mental hospital and this wasn't it.  He was a rapist and a murderer, but she wasn't afraid of him and she didn't give a shit.  He was locked away in the state mental hospital.  It was like being challenged to a dancing competition by a brick.

When one of the women from the shelter turns up in London, very very very dead, Maureen sees the situation as an escape from her problems.  She heads to London to investigate the circumstances of Ann's death.

This is going to sound strange, but my reaction to this book was similar to my reaction to the most recent Harry Potter book. 

Exile has the same fantabulous writing as Garnethill, the same realer-than-real characters and the same amazing sense of atmosphere.  But the plot felt like it was mostly just there to get everything in place for the last book in the trilogy.  Then again, the same can be said of Empire Strikes Back.

I read the book in one sitting, found it totally engrossing, and enjoyed it.  But it did end up feeling very much like a set-up for Resolution.  Which I guess isn't really a complaint -- because I can't wait to read it.

Garnethill -- Denise Mina

Maureen O'Donnell gets massively drunk with a friend one night, goes home to her flat in Glasgow's Garnethill district, falls into bed and passes out.

The next morning, she finds her married lover tied to a chair in her living room with his throat cut.

After being questioned by the police, she realizes that she's the prime suspect.  Not wanting to spend the rest of her life in prison (or a mental institution, which, given her history, is more likely), she begins her own investigation. 

I'm hideously tired today -- I couldn't sleep last night, so around 2:30, I got up and started reading.  An hour or so later, I was ready to go back to bed, but at that point I was so hooked that I fought off my exhaustion and finished the book -- EVEN THOUGH I HAD ALREADY IDENTIFIED THE KILLER.

Usually, I get annoyed if I even have an inkling about the conclusion, but in this case, I just became more and more engrossed.  I think it was partly because I suspected that Maureen was going to do something that would make Burke proud, and who wouldn't want to stay up a little later for that?

Denise Mina has a real way with description:

The lady realized that Tanya was a bit mental -- it wouldn't have taken a hardened professional to spot it: she had a booming voice and the concentration span of a spliffed goldfish.  The lady turned away and walked, as if casually, out of the shelter to stand in the drizzling rain.

...

The reserve funding was running out rapidly now and the house looked shoddy in comparison to its neighbors.  It stood out in the elegant street of terraced houses like a meatball in caviar.

...

His hairpiece sat so high on his head it looked as if he kept his sandwiches under it.

...

One of the strip lights was failing, palpitating nervously.

...

His jumper was tucked fussily into his jeans and there was something irritatingly meticulous about the way he did his hair. It looked as if he had carefully bouffanted it over a bald patch on his crown but he wasn't balding.  And his Italianism seemed affected; like a dull man accentuation a single feature as a substitute for a personality.

Yeah.  So, loved it.  I'll be reading more soon, but first I'm going to finally read my first Minette Walters.  My mystery/crime kick continues.

Finally reading Denise Mina.

Took me long enough, right?  The President of our Friends group has been telling me to read her for ages and ages, and I've had a copy of Garnethill sitting on a shelf for over a year, but what was it that finally put me over the edge?

Denise Mina's run on Hellblazer.  I figured if she likes John Constantine, she must be cool.

I'm totally loving it, don't want to put it down:  I walked down to the grocery store during my lunch break, reading the whole way, got honked at by the mailman, who loves to make me jump, bought my food and walked back, still reading. 

(And the mailman gave me a hard time on the way back, too -- he thinks I'm going to get run over.  I always tell him I have good peripheral vision, but apparently that just isn't good enough.  I love everyone who works for our post office -- every time I get books in the mail, our mail-lady says, "Bookshelves of DOOM strikes AGAIN!"  and then laughs maniacally.  She rules.)

The Mephisto Club -- Tess Gerritsen

Lori-Anne Tucker, a woman in her late twenties, has been brutally murdered.  The crime scene is like something out of a Laurell K. Hamilton book -- complete with dismembered limbs, the victim's head surrounded by a red circle and five black candles, blood everywhere, detectives vomiting, strange, possibly Satanic symbols and a Latin phrase -- written in reverse -- on the wall.

Boston medical examiner Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli are on the job.

Almost immediately, they make a interesting find: the killer called someone from Lori-Anne Tucker's house, and that someone just happens to be Joyce O'Donnell, a psychiatrist who just happens to specialize in serial killers and just happens to be Jane Rizzoli's nemesis.  (Maura's not too keen on her either.)  From there, they realize that there is another connection. 

Dr. O'Donnell is a member of the Mephisto Club, a shady and mysterious group devoted to the study of evil.

It isn't long before there's another murder.  And another.  And they all seem to point to the Club.

I realize that I'm a total weenie, but this book gave me nightmares.

I read the first 80 pages Sunday night, spent the night tossing and turning and waking up and staring through the bedroom doom into the living room and imagining some scary murderer coming through the door and hearing noises and sweating and hiding under the blankets (because they're so protective and all) and getting up for the bathroom and imagining the same scary murderer behind the shower curtain and running -- RUNNING -- back to bed and diving in and then checking to make sure that the scary murderer hadn't somehow switched places with Josh while I was gone and being relieved that he hadn't and then starting the whole cycle all over again.

Judging from The Mephisto Club, Tess Gerritsen's thrillers are much more thriller-y than most of the other thrillers I've read in the past.

Anyway, after that miserable night, I woke up, grabbed the book and finished it before I headed into work.  I devoured it.

The characters were well-developed (I suspect I would feel even more strongly about the main characters if I'd read the previous books), the mystery was complex and smart, the forensic science and police procedural aspects were complimented very well by the the connections made to folklore and religion (which were interesting enough to make me wish that the Author's Note had been longer), I didn't see a major plot twist coming (AT ALL) and the writing itself was strong.  Tess Gerritsen is a smart lady.

The Mephisto Club itself -- not to mention the people who populate it -- is interesting enough to warrant its own series.  At the very least, I hope that some of the members pop up in later Isles/Rizzoli books.  A good pick for those who already dig her books, as well as fans of the history/symbology aspects of The Da Vinci Code, fans of the forensic/detective genre and those who enjoy scary stories about eeeeeeeeeevil.

Mickey Spillane dies at 88.

From the New York Times:

Scorned by many critics for his artless plots, his reliance on unlikely coincidence and a simplistic understanding of the law, Mr. Spillane nevertheless achieved instant success with his first novel, “I, the Jury,” published in 1947.

...

Mr. Spillane referred to his own material as “the chewing gum of American literature” and laughed at the critics. “I’m not writing for the critics,” he said. “I’m writing for the public.” He described himself as a “money writer,” in that “I write when I need money.” 

“I have no fans,” he told one interviewer. “You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.” 

(Ahem.)

Dearly Devoted Dexter -- Jeff Lindsay

I have to make this quick, because if I don't hand the book over to Josh pronto, he's going to freak out.  (He finished the first one last night and is just itching for the sequel.)

Everyone's favorite friendly neighborhood serial killer is back in action:

And so I had learned how to dress neatly and smile and brush my teeth.  I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.  No one suspected what crouched behind my perfect imitation smile.  No one except my foster sister, Deborah, of course, but she was coming to accept the real me.  After all, I could have been much worse.  I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake.  Instead, here I am on the side of truth, justice, and the American way.  Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue.  And on those nights when the moon is loudest I find the others, those who prey on the innocent and do not play by the rules, and I make them go away in small, carefully wrapped pieces.

Poor Dexter.  His co-worker, Sergeant Doakes, has been tailing him -- Doakes has his own Dark Passenger, see, and generally those with Dark Passengers recognize others for what they are -- so Dex hasn't been able to get to his nighttime gig very often lately.  Instead, he's been spending lots of time sitting on the couch at his girlfriend's house drinking lite beer.  He's miserable.

I loved this book.  I really enjoyed the first book in the series, but I LOVED this one.  Dexter's voice is so original and funny (and sometimes scary and creepy, but that's as it should be -- the guy IS a serial killer, after all):

...details like that always ring a small bell and send a Mister Rogers whisper through my brain: "Hello, neighbor." 

Dex just doesn't care -- not because he's a jerk or anything, but because he doesn't have the capacity to -- and he's no Data.  He doesn't want to care.  He doesn't feel like he's missing out on anything.  He's fine with who he is.  His lack of empathy is part of what makes his narration so fabulous.  Keep an eye out for the bit where he describes someone else's victim as a "yodeling potato".  It was so, so wrong -- yet so, so right. 

Darkly Dreaming Dexter -- Jeff Lindsay

This book was lying around my house for two days before I noticed the smiley-face in the blood.

Dexter is a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police force.  He's just a regular guy -- he's very organized, showers regularly, has a nice girlfriend and a great sense of humor.  He also has a penchant for alliteration.  And for homicide.

Luckily for us innocent-types, he was raised by a Good Cop.  A man who recognized what Dexter was and who convinced him that if he had to kill, he might as well Do The Right Thing.  Harry also taught him how to blend in with humans -- how to hide what he really is -- he taught him how to be careful and how to avoid being caught. 

So Dexter is a vigilante of sorts.  He's a serial killer who only goes after the bad guys.

In some ways, he reminded me of Andrew Vachss' Burke -- he genuinely likes kids, so he tends to really go after people that hurt them.  He also reminded me a bit of Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory -- she, like Dex, doesn't quite understand people and has a mysterious past.  She doesn't kill people, though.  Then again, she doesn't try very hard to fit in, either.  (Have I mentioned lately how much I like that series?)

I was also reminded, strangely, of James Frey's novels.  Dexter does the capitalization thing -- James Frey had his Fury, Dexter has his Dark Passenger.  And I thought of Carl Hiassen, if only because the Florida of his YA novels is so different from Dexter's world:

I drove out of the Metro-Dade parking lot and got onto the nearby Turnpike, which took me south to the section of Tamiami Trail that is home to the Cacique Motel and several hundred of its brothers and sisters.  In its own way, it is paradise.  Particularly if you are a cockroach.  Rows of buildings that manage to glitter and molder at the same time.  Bright neon over ancient, squalid, sponge-rotted structures.  If you don't go at night, you won't go.  Because to see these places by daylight is to see the bottom line of our flimsy contract with life.

Every major city has a section like this one.  If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room.  When he's done, he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a medianoche sandwich.  Nobody would care, as long as he tipped.

I didn't find the writing particularly interesting, and I kind of felt like the killer was a cop-out, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  The sequel will be on my list for this summer's beach reading.

Legacies -- F. Paul Wilson

Alright.  I think that with this book, I have sated my current need for fun/no-brainer reading.  I was kind of disappointed (spoilers follow):

A) I thought it was the first Repairman Jack book.  Well, I sort of did.  I secretly knew the first one was Tomb, but I found Legacies at Annie's and I just wanted something to read, so even though I secretly knew it was the second one, I pretended like I thought it was the first one.  And then I was all disappointed even though I knew the truth the whole time.  Does that make sense?  Probably not.  I doesn't even make that much sense to me.

B) There were no supernatural goings-on.  That made me sad.

C) It was a little mushy in parts.

D) Jack's tendency to "pump his fist".  It's just dorky.  Also, I just don't like the word pump.  It freaks me out for some reason.

E) Right before one of the bad guys dies, he says something that is SO wrong, SO fucked-up and creepy, but I think the reader is supposed to feel bad for him.  Or something.  I don't know.  I guess that I sort of did.  But only sort of.  Ick.

F) Alicia Clayton's decision to destroy the blueprints of working 'broadcast power' was just crappy.  There are any number of ways that she could have made them public without crediting her horrible, disgusting, child-abuser father.  Couldn't she have just anonymously posted them on the Internet or something?  At the very least, the plans could have been destroyed in the fight at the end or something.  But her choice -- torching the lab -- was so horribly selfish.  (I realize that she had a miserable (to say the least) childhood filled with mega-huge abuse.  I do.  But on one hand, free power for the whole planet, and on the other, her father was a bastard and a half.  I probably shouldn't get so worked up about this, huh?)

However.  The scene where Jack goes to reclaim the donated Christmas presents that some jackass had stolen from the crack/AIDS baby clinic... dressed as Santa Claus.  He kicks the shit out of someone dressed as SANTA.  That pretty much made the whole book worthwhile. 

For the most part, I just love Jack.  He's a fantastic character, and the bits that annoyed me are far, FAR outweighed by the total entertainment value.  So I'll eventually read the others.  Starting with the FIRST one, thank you very much.

Acceleration -- Graham McNamee

For those of you that liked Nancy Werlin's The Killer's Cousin, I give you Graham McNamee's Acceleration:

This is a nightmare.

Working at the Toronto Transit Commission's lost and found.  Nine to five.  Monday to Friday.  A little slice of death, one day at a time.

For me it's a two-month sentence, July and August.  I wound have been happy bumming around till September, but Dad called in a favor to get me in here.  And at least I don't have to wear a uniform like my bud Wayne over at the Dairy Barn.  Wayne's planning to torch the thing on Labor Day (the uniform, not the Barn) before we head back for our last year of high school.

So I'm here under protest, a political prisoner of the capitalist overlord otherwise known as Dad.

During his term at the Lost and Found, Duncan finds a leather-bound journal that belongs to a would-be serial killer.  (Serial killer-in-training?  He's in the planning stages.)  For multiple reasons, Duncan decides that it would be a bad idea to pass the journal along to the police.  Action and suspense ensue.

Way fun, genuinely creepy.  And Canadian!

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- John Berendt

So, I thought that I hadn't read this, but as I was reading, so much of it was so completely familiar that I started to wonder.  I know that I saw the movie ages and ages ago, but I was recognizing complete chunks of dialogue.  Surely I couldn't be remembering that much from the movie?  (Sometimes I find it a little scary to think about how much information gets packed into a brain in one lifetime.  And about how hard it can be to access that information sometimes).   

Regardless of whether this was a first-time read or a re-read, I completely enjoyed it.  Berendt's depiction of the people of Savannah was affectionate, but at the same time, their real personalities--complete with faults--seemed to come through intact.  It didn't seem hazy.  I loved Miss Harty, the woman that brought him on a tour of the town squares and the cemetery:

"Savannah's always been wet," she said, "even when the rest of Georgia was dry.  During Prohibition, filling stations on Abercorn Street sold whiskey out of gas pumps!  Oh, you could always get a drink in Savannah.  That's never been any secret.  I remember when I was a child, Billy Sunday brought his holy-revival crusade to town.  He set himself up in Forsyth Park, and everybody went to hear him.  There was great excitement!  Mr. Sunday got up and declared at the top of his voice that Savannah was the wickedest city in the world!  Well, of course, we all thought that was perfectly marvelous!"

As a huge fan of Joan Aiken, I was especially interested in any mention of her father:

"Aiken loved to come here and watch the ships go by," she said.  "One afternoon, he saw one with the name Cosmos Mariner painted on the bow.  That delighted him.  The word 'cosmos' appears quite often in his poetry, you know.  That evening he went home and looked for mention of the Cosmos Mariner in the shipping news.  There it was, in tiny type on the list of ships in port.  The name was followed by the comment 'Destination Unknown.'  That pleased him even more."

"Where is Aiken buried?" I asked.  There were no other gravestones in the enclosure.

"Oh, he's here," she said.  "In fact, we are very much his personal guests at the moment.  It was Aiken's wish that people should come to this beautiful place after he died and drink martinis and watch the ships just as he did.  He left a gracious invitation to that effect.  He had his gravestone built in the shape of a bench."

An involuntary reflex propelled me to my feet.  Miss Harty laughed, and then she too stood up.  Aiken's name was inscribed on the bench, along with the words COSMOS MARINER, DESTINATION UNKNOWN.

Luther Driggins, the man who glued string to flies and carried them around town with him and was rumored to have a jar of poison so toxic that if poured into the Savannah water system, it would kill every single person in the city; Chablis, the drag queen with a mouth that might even impress Brian Michael Bendis (the man who, as far as I know, invented the word 'fucktard'); Big Emma, a woman that was famed for refusing to let her chauffeur drive her Mercedes limo--he had to sit in the back while she drove.  These are a few of the people that populate this book.  And I haven't even mentioned the story that pulls everything together--the murder of Danny Hansford, the 'walking streak of sex' by Jim Williams, a prominent antiques dealer.

I am totally looking forward to reading Berendt's new book--I'm next on the list for the library copy.

In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb.  Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.  The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life--to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H club.  But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises--on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles.  At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them--four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.  But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again--those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

So I read it.  And I'm all confused.

First, I kick myself for being such a huge wimp and avoiding it for so long.  It was fantastic.  I was late for work yesterday because I started discussing it with a co-worker and completely lost track of time.

I had been scared of reading it because somehow, I was under the impressing that Perry Smith and Dick Hickock entered the Clutter home specifically to massacre the family.  You know, for kicks.  But they actually entered the house for a reason--they were under the impression that there was a money-filled safe there.  Of course, there wasn't.  And they killed the entire family.  For what amounted to about forty dollars.  But the idea of a couple of guys going in to a secluded farmhouse just to kill people vs. the idea of two guys going into a secluded farmhouse to rob people... it's slightly different.  Less scary (to me).  Less Manson-esque, maybe. 

Although, Dick Hickock was quoted a few times as planning to "cover the walls with hair".  So he, at least, seemed pretty sure of the outcome.  Which is odd because he wasn't the one that pulled the trigger.  Well, maybe.  That was kind of in question--he said that Perry Smith killed all four Clutters, then Smith said that Hickock actually killed two of them, but later Smith changed his story and said that he killed them all.  But Smith said that he changed his story to lessen the pain for Hickock's mother.  So nobody will ever know the truth, really.

I seem to be rambling horribly here.  What I really want to know is this:  Did Truman Capote have a closer relationship with Perry Smith than Dick Hickock?  Because Perry Smith, the man that actually admitted to killing the entire Clutter family, comes off as much more sympathetic.  Dick Hickock just scared me.  I kind of felt bad for Smith.  Which was strange.  It felt strange to feel sympathy for someone that said this:

Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me--and these were his last words--wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn't long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed.  I wasn't kidding him.  I didn't want to harm the man.  I thought he was a very nice gentleman.  Soft-spoken.  I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

So I wondered if the book was colored by Capote's emotions at all.  He did mention, though, that even Dewey, the man in charge of the investigation felt that "Perry possessed a quality, the aura of an exiled animal, a creature walking wounded".  Whereas he's quoted as saying that Hickock was "a small-time chiseler who got out of his depth, empty and worthless."

Perry Smith killed the Clutters.  Dick Hickock ran over dogs for fun.  Dick Hickock wanted to rape Nancy Clutter and Perry Smith wouldn't let him.  Dick Hickock lettered nine times in high school while Perry Smith was almost getting killed by nuns in an orphanage. 

So yes.  I feel all confused and torn.  (Not about what happened to the Clutters, just Hickock vs. Smith).

The Cutting Room -- Louise Welsh

This book is pretty short (less than three hundred pages), but it took me longer to finish than it should have.  The fault is all mine.  I've probably mentioned this before, but I'm a bit more squeamish than I should be about sex scenes.  I think that maybe I'm just not used to them because I read so much YA fiction.  Or it might be because I have such a vivid imagination that a little goes a lot way.  Sometimes I feel like I'm intruding.  Or maybe I'm just totally immature. 

Graphic sex scenes seem to affect me the same way that they did when I was twelve--I read The Godfather at that age and it took me at least six tries to finish the Sonny-and-the-bridesmaid-at-Sonny's-wedding scene.  But honestly, how many times do you really need to use the word 'cock' in one novel?

I know that any of you that are out there that read (or have already read) The Cutting Room will now know that I'm a huge wimp, but what can I do?  I am a huge wimp.

My issues aside, I liked the book quite a lot.  The mystery itself was great:

The somewhat promiscuous Rilke works as an auctioneer for a small auction house in Glasgow.  He gets a call from a woman who wants to quickly liquidate her recently dead brother's estate.  Even though Rilke's firm is small, she gives them the job with the promise of a large bonus if they finish within her time frame.  She also asks Rilke to personally clean out a room in the attic--and to use discretion when dealing with the contents.  While packing up the attic, Rilke discovers an extensive library of pornography, as well as an envelope of decades-old photographs.  They appear to be snuff photos.  (Same as a snuff film, but photos).  Rilke finds himself unable to let them go--so he starts looking into the past of the man who owned them.

As you may be able to tell from the description, it's a pretty gritty book.  I didn't have things figured out by the end, even though there was a decent amount of foreshadowing.  Well, really the foreshadowing didn't point to anything specific--just that events would turn out differently than expected, so I didn't feel too dumb.  The characters were real; they had their own motivations.  Rose, Rilke's boss at the auction house, was especially wonderful, as was Anne Marie, an art student that made extra money posing nude for men with Polaroids. 

In some (many) mystery novels, all of the characters' motivations end up being tied up into the mystery itself.  In this one, the mystery was secondary (if that) to everyone but Rilke.  For the most part, everyone else was concerned with their own life first.  It felt a whole lot more realistic to me than the usual run-of-the-mill mystery novel.

Strega -- Andrew Vachss

Leave it to Andrew Vachss to get me out of my (very short) reading slump.  I blazed through the rest of Strega last night, Xenosaga II be damned!

We meet Immaculata, who is fabulous.  I love her.  I loved the description of her introduction to Max, I loved the bits with Mama--she's just wonderful.  Wolfe (love her too) and Terry are also introduced.

I love books about revenge!  Revenge revenge revenge!

I do think that it dragged a bit in the middle.  But when they finally catch up with the bad guys, hoo boy.  Max is my hero.  As is Pansy, actually.  And I love the Mole.  Yep, basically the whole crew.  I love them the same way I love Dortmunder's crew.  Burke's crew is just far, far scarier.

Flood -- Andrew H. Vachss

After jumping into the middle of the series and reading Hard Candy, it was a joy to go back to the beginning.  It was kind of like seeing Episode 1 (except that it didn't suck--AT ALL).  I loved being introduced to the characters for the first time:  Burke, Max the Silent, Mama, Michelle, the Mole and of course, Pansy:

The dog is a hell of a lot better than a burglar alarm.  The cops wouldn't rush into this neighborhood in the middle of the night anyway, and with Pansy on the job the burglar would still be there when anyone showed up.  She's a Neapolitan mastiff--about 140 pounds of concentrated hatred for all humanity except me.  My last dog was a Doberman named Devil.  She bit some clown and I got hit with a $100,000 lawsuit, so she had to run away from home.  She never had a license and I'm about as judgment-proof as a man can get, but this lawyer I refer cases to sometimes told me that I should give my next dog a name that wouldn't sound so negative.  I thought of naming her Neapolitan Homicide and calling her Homo for short, but the lawyer told me you never know who is going to be on a jury, especially in New York--so I compromised and called her Pansy.  A lot of my clients don't like the dog, but that doesn't amount to a whole hell of a lot of people.

Burke's current client is a woman named Flood--also a name I recognized from Hard Candy, although she didn't appear in that one--a martial arts expert who is tracking down the man who raped and murdered her best friend's child. 

In a lot of other series books, the first book involves the main character meeting all of the other regular characters.  In that way, it didn't feel like a first book--the only secondary character that Burke meets for the first time is Flood.  He already knows the others.  Michelle is already flirting with The Mole.  Burke and Max the Silent are already brothers.  As the reader, you just get dumped into Burke's world.  Which really works--it makes everyone and everything more real.  So picking up a book in the middle in the series isn't a big deal--a patron actually just returned the new one (#15 Down Here--she really liked it) and she said that it was her first Vachss book. 

But this first book gives more background information about the other characters and about Burke.  And personally, I kind of have a thing about reading books in order. 

I ordered the second book from Alibris.  I can't wait!  I'm really curious about the later books.  Not just because I want to know what'll happen with the characters, but also because it'll be interesting to get Vachss' take on all of the changes that have happened in New York (pre-9/11, even).

The Postman Always Rings Twice -- James M. Cain

Eventually, I want to read all of the noir classics.  I love the genre, period.  That was part of the reason that I picked this one up.  It was also because I'd come across the fact that Camus' The Stranger was inspired by it--so I figured that I needed to read Postman first.  (Secretly, I've always avoided Camus because I thought I wouldn't like him--I have no idea why--but if he cited this book as inspiration, I'll have to read him soon).

If you've seen the movie, you know the story.  (From what I can remember, by the way, the movie is a very faithful adaptation).

Frank Chambers, a drifter, shows up at the Twin Oaks Tavern/filling station.  The owner, Nick Papadakis, gives him a job.  Enter Nick's wife:

Then I saw her.  She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in gather up my dishes.  Except for the shape, she really wasn't any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.

You can guess where things go from there.  My favorite, favorite line came just after Frank and Cora decide to act:

I kissed her.  Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars.  It was like being in church.

It's just such a perfect end to a conversation about murder.