It’s Fall, at least by the publishing calendar. That means the big hitters roll out big books, influential titles designed to stoke reader interest and fiscal results, summer tans fading, back to work, back to school. Time to get literary. The Diviners is a maddening novel, brilliant, funny, annoying, over the top. Don’t think of [...]
Blonde Lightning is TL Lankford’s follow up novel to Earthquake Weather. The setting is Hollywood during OJ Simpson’s low speed chase memorialized in our collective memory banks as a prelude to travesty. Mark Hayes has lost his job as a d-boy after the murder of his boss, but hopes to catch on with a low [...]
Tess Gerritsen doesn’t fit the profile of unknown author. She’s been a successful romance writer, conquered the medical thriller genre and seems to moving toward the traditonal thriller. Vanished is her newest novel, just released by Ballantine. The subject matter is reminiscent of Robert Crais’ work rather than Patricia Cornwell despite the fact one of [...]
All the noir elements are present in this fine novel from Peter Abraham. Nick Petrov is a PI with celebrity status. Armand Assante portrayed him in a movie. In film conscious LA that could carry a man for a lifetime of “hey, aren’t you the guy?” Nick is the guy, finder of missing women, a [...]
Since Kevin and Booksquare have picked up on the Wall Street Journal’s attempt at rationalizing publishing success, I’ll give it a shot. I read The Historian. My review of it is available at Backspace. The thing I enjoyed about the novel was the author’s blatant disregard for current fashion, the slow pace, which, like an [...]
I’ve been following Kevin’s thread about book reviewing, reasons to do it, pro and con. Kevin and I review a lot of books. Sources as varied as publicists for the New York houses and authors themsleves ponder the efficacy of reviews. Do reviews sell books? The jury’s out. They’ve been out for fifty years, sequestered [...]
Denise Mina returns to her Garnethill style with Field of Blood. Her main character, Patricia Meehan, known as Paddy, is a teenager working as a copyboy for a Glasgow newspaper. There is a second Paddy Meehan, a former spy for the Soviet Union, convicted of a crime he did not commit, only to be freed [...]
Here’s an interview with author Raelynn Hillhouse. The mass market paperback edition of her novel, The Rift Zone, is available now. Hello and welcome. Tell us whatever you’d care to share about your background. I lived in Central and Eastern Europe during most of my twenties and during that time I was involved in some [...]
Aspiring writers read plenty of books that reveal the secrets of writing success. Many of them enumerate the exact number of secrets revealed within, such as “Five Secrets to Writing Success” or “Fifty Three Habits of Successful Writers.” One of the habits of a successful writer is cashing royalty checks, a secret revealed here for [...]
In the middle of reading Belly I had the uneasy thought that Lisa Selin Davis, a woman I have never met, had written the story of my father’s life. Belly O’Leary, the main character, returns home to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Belly served four years in jail for taking bets in his bar, [...]