Tag: thriller

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book reading reviews

The Never List – Koethi Zan

I’ve been a bad boy – I read this book almost two months (TWO MONTHS!) ago and I’m only now writing it up. So sorry. Here we go:

I picked this book because it’s written by the wife of one of the presenters of one of my favourite podcasts – The Slate Culture Gabfest. She was on the show to talk about the book and it sounded intriguing. It was the kind of book I might read anyway and it was just about to come out so I thought I’d give it a go.

The Never List is the story of a woman who was abducted and kept in a cellar for years. However the story begins a decade after she was freed and her kidnapper was imprisoned. Now he’s up for parole and she wants to make sure he doesn’t get it. He’s also been writing to each of his victims and she believes this could be more than the apparent remorse it purports to be. This sparks the beginning of an investigation and an uncovering of a much bigger intrigue. It seems her abductor may have had connections to a crazy cult and may even be trying to direct events on the outside. Determined to stop him she sets off to find out more.

So this book functions on at least two timelines. We have the story of the investigation in the present but then we’re given flashbacks to what happened years before. So what is happening now and what had happened are both suspense parts of the novel.

I did enjoy this book. It was well written for the most part. I think the early sections especially work really well. Later on the plot takes over and it becomes a little implausible. Zan spends time telling us about how the hero became a virtual recluse, working from home and rarely venturing out, only opening her door to a very select few. She has to overcome this fear of the outside world in order to go on her investigative journey and whilst initially we see her struggling with this psychologically, it gets a little forgotten. She’s soon taking planes, renting cars, sleeping in hotels and generally running around the country as if that’s the most natural and easy thing in the world for her. Maybe not quite but it felt like her agoraphobic tendencies had been a bit forgotten.

The other thing that stood out to me was that there’s almost no description of what he did to his victims. It seems to have been physical torture rather than sexual abuse, although they are kept naked, but I’m not sure whether we’re meant to infer a combination of both. When I read Blacklands I said how I like the fact that the author respected the victims enough not to glamourize the perpetrator. I guess Zan may be doing the same her but given the genre it felt a little coy.

Finally there were some law enforcement issues that stretched credulity – an FBI officer who handed over sensitive information virtually on request.

So I guess I thought I was going to get a harrowing psychological examination of the impact of a crime, and it started out that way, but it eventually turned into more of a what-will-happen-and-how-will-they-catch-him thriller. A fairly decent one, plausibility issues aside, but a different book than what I was expecting. What I was expecting was the ending which I guessed so that was a shame.

7/10 – a pretty decent thriller.

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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 book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Killer Move – Michael Marshall (pages 4827-5182)

Killer Move

A couple of books ago I said it was easy to review a book that I’d hugely enjoyed. Here’s one I enjoyed just as much but it’s harder to review  because, I think I don’t want to give too much away.

Killer Move is a novel by Michael Marshall, a name he goes by when writing crime fiction. When writing his earlier SciFi novels, such as Only Forward, he went by Michael Marshall Smith. And, when he wrote The Servants, which you’ll remember I also loved, he was M.M. Smith.

Anyway this is the first of his crime books I’ve read. I’ve avoided them partly because I knew that there was some fairly grim subject matter in the likes of The Straw Men. I carry around in my head that I don’t like such things but let’s be honest I’ve read and enjoyed Let the Right One In and 1974, and at least read 1977, all of which have material that’s as dark as any you’d find.

Still, the reason I picked up this book rather than the earlier crime ones was the intriguing blurb about it, and the fact that it didn’t on the face of it seem to be dominated by gruesome murders. And in fact that’s true. Mostly.

Killer Move is about Bill Moore, a florida realtor who’s ambitious and trying to push his career to the next level. He’s actually got a very nice life – a lovely home, a successful wife who he loves and enough money for a comfortable lifestyle – but he wants more. One day he receives a business card with the single word “Modified” written on it. From then on weird stuff starts to happen to him and slowly his life starts to unravel.

The thing I really like about this book is the way it slowly builds. Things happen at a pace that mean that initially it’s just intriguing, then gradually it becomes stranger, more involved, more dangerous until you’re in a full-on thriller. By the time the gruesome stuff shows up – and it does – it feels like you’re too wrapped up in the story to really worry about it. Plus it has become integral to the story anyway.

But it’s more than just the finely tuned mechanism of the plotting, it’s the slow reveal and/or evolution of Bill’s character. This is an ‘extraordinary things happen to an ordinary person’ type of story and what’s interesting is that the person he is at the beginning – obsessed with success, listens to self-help podcasts, reads positivity blogs and attends branding seminars – isn’t particularly likeable, but he slowly reveals himself to be more interesting than he first appears. I loved the main character of Stark in Only Forward, but I loved him from the first page with his dry wit and cool persona, Bill I grew to like as he both showed more of himself and was changed by the experience.

That’s what sets Killer Move apart from say a John Grisham thriller, though they share a clockwork precision of plot, the characterization. There are characters you sympathise with, ones you instantly like (like Stark), or dislike, or are appalled and intrigued by.

And there is some tough stuff in there but more of it is implied than seen. Certainly it doesn’t have that unrelenting grimness and all-humanity-is-scum feel of 1977.

It would also make a terrific movie.

My only quibble is the title – Killer Move is so generic as to be meaningless and it really doesn’t connect with anything specific in the book. There is an obvious one-word title but I suspect that it was rejected because it doesn’t say enough about what kind of book this is.

9/10 – an excellent gripping read and one that slowly builds up both tension and character development.

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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.

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