Tag: crime

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 10: Death Notice – Todd Ritter

Death Notice is the second of the two books I read for my Goodreads february book group. It’s another indie/self-pub and so I’ve decided to read through my current set of indies (which number about 6 or 7 at the moment). So expect to see some more soon.

Death Notice takes place in a small town with virtually no crime. The local cop is a single mum who at the beginning of the book considers it a big day when she has to investigate a van stolen from the local florist. In a back room in the offices of the town newspaper works a man called Henry who writes obituaries. He receives the “death notices”  (name, date, time and place of death) from the local funeral homes when someone dies, so he’s not surprised when he receives a fax one day with the notice for a local farmer. Not until that is he finds out it was sent before the man died.

I really enjoyed this book. It had its weaknesses – the prose itself was pretty flat and uninteresting and the dialogue was ok but either very matter of fact or cliched. However the book did manage to create characters that I cared about and was interested in, and what it really did well was plot. The plot was put together with immaculate precision. It had just the right amount of twists and turns, lulls and surprises. It’s possible that the ending might not work for some people on a purely plausibility level –  there’s a question of medical possibilities shall we say – but honestly I was more than prepared to give the book the benefit of the doubt and go with the story.

I’d say if you like crime thrillers and you’re not afraid of a bit of gore (the killings are nasty) then this is quite a lot of fun.

7/10 – a read if you like a good story with strong characters and don’t mind a bit of blood.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 9: Bet you can’t… Find Me – Linda Prather

Bet you can’t… Find Me is one of the February books on my Goodreads Kindle UK group. I chose it because of that and because I liked the sound of it, which is to say it sounded like a good crime thriller with a supernatural twist.

The story concerns Catherine Mans a professional psychic who helps the police solve murder cases. However she herself becomes the focus of an investigation when a series of murders with a connection to her past occur. She’s the prime suspect but the real killer, a much more powerful and dangerous psychic, starts taunting her and threatening those she loves. So it becomes a race against time to find the killer, face her past and protect her friends.

Bet you can’t… Find Me is my first completed “indie” ebook and it’s fair to say they have a somewhat dubious reputation. It is now easy for anyone to effectively self-publish through Amazon or iTunes or Smashwords and I’ve heard horror stories of novels which are full of typos and bad formatting and worse grammar. However I honestly approached this as just another book that I’d hopefully enjoy. It has a great looking cover, the reviews and ratings are positive and its premise is one I find intriguing so I started reading with no reason to think it wouldn’t be great.

Unfortunately… well it wasn’t great. And I don’t just mean it wasn’t my cup of tea. I really think it just wasn’t very well written. It would be very easy to slip into more of a writing critique than a review but I really don’t want to do that. Too much.

I think the biggest things for me were:

– Some fairly big plausibility problems. The police and federal agents act in a way I found hard to believe. Also, whilst it’s no problem for a novel to be set in a world where psychic powers really exist there was remarkably little scepticism about them so I wondered whether this was supposed to be a world where everyone knows they’re real – like vampires in the Anita Blake books for e.g. – but towards the end of the book characters do start expressing doubts. However by that stage we’d had a whole swathe of plot points essentially around the fact that the authority treat rogue psychics as a very real threat.

– And the plot itself whilst not really that complicated per se felt convoluted because of the way that it’s told. I definitely lost my place in some of the back story and its relevance to what was happening in the present.

– I thought the characterisation was ok at first, a bit stock but in a plot driven book that’s not too big a problem. However whenever love or attraction raised its head it felt like a lurch into a very different and much more sentimental place. Formerly fierce and feisty women and hard-bitten all-about-the-job cops suddenly become a bit gooey. There was a lot of blushing and fighting back of tears (when the object of affection was in danger). In fact even an attempt at a buddy-cop camaraderie fell into this problem.

I could go on listing problems but I don’t have the heart. I did finish the book but more because the spirit of RED is to finish pretty much every book. Plus it was a bit of a slog. I do think there’s potential here, lots of ideas but it needs work on the execution.

3/10 – a decent blurb and a great cover in search of a better book.




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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Straw Men – Michael Marshall (pages 9520-10015)

(May as well get this out there now too)

After enjoying Killer Move so much I started reading The Straw Men as the next but one book. M. had raved about it to me years ago but I’d always avoided it due to potential gore, violence etc but having read Killer Move I figured I could handle it. Unfortunately it was the book I was reading when I went home to see my dad after his heart attack (he’s still fine btw) and somehow that created bad associations for me so I abandoned it and didn’t start again until a couple of weeks ago.

The Straw Men follows three story lines initially. There’s the latest victim of a serial killer known as The Upright Man, a teenage girl he has abducted and, if true to form, will kill within a few days unless someone can stop him. There’s the story of Ward Hopkins ex-CIA and ex-various other similar careers who returns home to deal with his parents death in a car accident only to find that things are not quite as they had appeared. Finally there’s the shadowy, possibly mythical organisation known as ‘The Straw Men’. Who exactly they are, what their aims are and how they plan to fulfil them ends up connecting the other two story lines.

This is another excellent thriller from Michael Marshall. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Killer Move but it’s still very good. In particular the plot is very clever, the way things join up, the way Hopkins for instance figures out something about his parents by the state they’d left their home in (which to all the world looks normal) was smart and satisfying if you like that kind of thing. Also the plot rattles along as you’d expect but still with enough space for characterisation and relationship. There are some tough moments violence wise, a little worse than Killer Move in my opinion (though still not up to David Peace gruesome). One of the worst was a description of what unedited news footage of a terrorist attack would look like. I think that affected me because I know that such footage exists.

I feel like I have to justify why I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as Killer Move. It’s M.’s favourite Michael Marshall book (her favourite ever book is his Only Forward written as Michael Marshall Smith). Anyway I think the reasons I preferred the later book are as follows:

  • I was slightly spoiled – partly by some indirect remarks of M.’s which I correctly deduced plot points from, but mostly by reading the blurb on the back of the next book in this series. If you plan to read this book stay away from The Lonely Dead (or The Upright Man in the US) as it mentions the big reveal on the back cover.
  • I preferred the hero of Killer Move. Hopkins was fine. He was sympathetic, clever and very competent. But he was also a little bit of a stereotype, the ex-military/cop/security services guy investigating some dangerous mystery. Bill Moore, as I said at the time was an ordinary annoying man thrown into a gradually more complicated and dangerous situation. Also Bill had a wife he loved and Ward was alone (in that sense, he had a friend/colleague).
  • One of the characters disses Buffy in the first few pages – ok mostly kidding about this. (mostly!)

Having said all that if I’d read it first and not known anything about it maybe I’d have preferred it. Either way it’s still a great read.

8/10 – another great crime thriller from MM(S).

One oddity worth mentioning. I read the ebook of this (as I do with most new purchases now) and the story ends, there’s a section of ‘Acknowledgements’ (thanks to …) and then a section which in the table of contents is called “ebook extra”. Thinking this was like a dvd extra, deleted scene if you will, I thought I could see why it wasn’t in the original. This was a kind of coda explaining more clearly what had happened and how various characters ended up – most of which you could infer from what had gone before.

Except that it was in the original. It came immediately after what I had thought of as the final chapter. The acknowledgements came after that. weird.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 pages, The Way Home – George Pelecanos (pages 718-1026)

The Way Home is a book I picked because of a recommendation on TV Book Club and because George Pelacanos is one of the writers on The Wire – a show I’ve never seen but heard consistently good things about so often that I probably will one day.

The Way Home is another book about crime that’s not really a crime thriller. It follows Chris Flynn who as a young teenager gets himself in trouble with the law and finds himself in a youth prison. Later as an adult he becomes involved once again with the world of crime but this time attempts to keep away from it.

I enjoyed this book. It builds slowly but by the end I was gripped. What could have been written as a straight-forward crime thriller became a brooding meditation on the effects of crime on young boys and men – and their families.

But that sounds a bit analytical. The thing I enjoyed about this book was that it put a crime story in the context of a person’s relationships. It wasn’t just a question of “what will happen? will they get the bad guy?” it was “what’s this going to do to his mum, dad, girlfriend?”

I did get the feeling there were cultural references I was missing and the street language was unfamiliar to me. Which was fine but left me definitely feeling I was on the outside of this world looking in – as Brit, a white guy, a middle class man who’s never had or been in that kind of trouble. Maybe that was the point – after all reading is about looking through someone else’s eyes into their world right?

The ending’s one of downbeat optimism if that makes any sense – which it may if you read it.

8/10 – interesting read which gets better the nearer to the end you are.

Pages Read so far: 1026

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25 books reading reviews

25 Books, book 17 – The Girl on the Landing, Paul Torday

So it’s February 2010 and “25 Books” was my 2009 challenge. I’m not going to tell you (yet) how many books I read and how many points I accrued, but I will say that I’ve nearly finished book 2 of 2010. So obviously I’m a bit behind on the corresponding blog posts. My goal for 2010 is to try not to get more than one book behind (once I’ve caught up that is.)

So anyway…

The Girl on the Landing is the story of Michael and his wife Elizabeth. Whilst staying with a friend in Ireland he sees an intriguing picture of a girl on the landing of his friend’s house. On mentioning it the next day he discovers that the picture in question has no girl in it. This odd occurrence marks the beginning of changes in him, his marriage and his life in general.

I bought this book one day when I was browsing in Waterstones and liked the blurb on the back. I was in my “forget-the-list-lets-just-read-something-enjoyable” phase. It turned out to be a good choice but I wasn’t sure of that initially. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to relate to the main characters. Michael is very rich and his life seems to be like something out of a period novel about posh folk. He’s very rich and owns a large estate in Scotland. He lives in London and his pass-the-time job is working for an exclusive club of which he’s a member. I swear the first 50 pages or so I kept looking for clues of when it was set because I was sure it was going to turn out to be the 1930s.

That was a minor concern though and faded once I got into the story. The transformation in Michael as a person and the growing effect it had on his marriage I found interesting. I was rooting for them as a couple who, having been married for some time found themselves perhaps for the first time falling really in love.

However as the pace of the story picks up there’s a kind of is-it-real supernatural element mixed with almost a crime thriller. Both of these in different ways had me intrigued as to what was going to happen next and what it meant. I found it quite exciting and intriguing and the early part of the book had made me care about the characters so that was all the more affecting.

I can see how some might see it as a strange mix of genres but that honestly never bothered me.

8/10 – an odd mix of romance, thriller and ghost story – but one that worked for me.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 15 – 1974, David Peace

As you know I bought 1974 when I was in search of something I actually wanted to read. My theory was that having liked The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo – which is basically a crime novel – I’d probably enjoy this. The TV adaptation of it was celebrated and so it seemed a reasonably bet that the source material was going to be good too.

My only reservations were: a) would I be happy with merely a page-turner of a crime story? b) was my stomach strong enough for what I had heard was fairly dark stuff?

The answer turned out to be yes on both counts.

1974 – set in the eponymous year, is the story of a journalist, Eddie Dunford, a crime reporter, on the Yorkshire Post. He’s recently returned from an unsucessful spell in Fleet Street and just buried his father. What seems to be a pretty ordinary missing girl case becomes far stranger when the body turns up. She’s naked, has been sexually abused in a bizarre way and has the wings of a swan stitched into her back. Then there’s the sniff of local government corruption around the sale of (what should have been) council houses, the harassment of a settlement of gypsies and the seemingly unrelated story of a man who killed himself and then his sister – the so-called ‘Ratcatcher’ – the story of which made Eddie’s name.

1974 starts slowly but soon picks up pace and then it simply does not let up. I read the first 100 pages over a couple of days but I read the remaining 200+ in a single night. Many books are said to be un-put-downable, I definitely found this one so. Peace has a slightly stylised way of writing, which once used to I liked. Although given the strange nature of some of the crimes and incidents in this book I wasn’t always sure what was going on when he mixed in the dreams and thought-life of Dunford with the ‘real’ action. It was effective though.

It was also quite a challenge. Not just for my stomach – though it was gruesome – but also because it was fairly bleak regarding human nature. If you get to the end of this book thinking there were any purely ‘good guys’ then I’d be surprised. And despite that, and despite even the slightly far-fetched explanation (which I only partly guessed – damn!) I did really enjoy this book. But I also felt the need for something lighter next. I have got the follow up, 1977 (which by all accounts is even darker) but I’m waiting a while to start it.

9/10 – dark, disturbing but very gripping