Made in Britain, by Gavin James Bower
Made in Britain follows three young protagonists who are growing up fast in an unspecified Northern town in Britain. It is a short snapshot of their lives. The three characters are in that GCSE final year at the same school – they know each other and have wildly different feelings for each other. They are each on the cusp of adulthood and all have their own problems to deal with at home and in their social lives. The backdrop of the book affects the reader as well as the characters. The local and national news are awash with a spate of killings in the area – gang related they say. Our characters happen to chance across one of the bodies, headless and in a ditch. The area is rife with cheap drink, drugs of all flavours and most of all a sense of failure that covers the book and the fictional town like a blanket. Our young characters are growing into their parents, who in their eyes have failed.
This is a dark novel, a disturbing novel but one that sets you thinking and stays with you after reading. The length of the book is short, making for a one or two session read which again makes its punch all the more clear. Prince Charles, that lover of Burnley, would do well to read this.
The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda, by Ali H Soufan
A big cargo plane loaded with heavily armed troops and their armoured trucks along with a bunch of foreign paramilitary police has landed at your main national airport. They demand to be allowed into the country with all their weaponry and try to insist that you do not escort them or monitor their activity. They treat your laws and enforcement agencies with arrogant disdain, assume that all their suspects are guilty as sin regardless of evidence, seize criminal evidence from your law enforcement officers and regard their own ambassador to your country as an enemy of the state for respecting your sovereignty. Yes, this is the FBI, it’s the Yemen, and its well before September the eleventh.
During the pre-2001 period the same pervasive behaviours poison the relationship between and amongst the various US investigative agencies. Unsurprisingly they are seen, bottom to top, treating each other with suspicion and mistrust and failing for whatever reason to share information or piece together what they collectively know.
The Wine of Solitude, by Irene Nemirovsky
A few years ago, Irene Nemirovsky seemed to appear from nowhere. Her masterpiece Suite Francaisse, published posthumously, had seemingly been lost – a victim of war and turbulent times. Luckily unlike its author, who perished in Auschwitz, it was able to be resurrected and resume its rightful place on the bookshelves of cultured readers everywhere. ‘Masterpiece’ and ‘genius’ were words bandied around by book reviewers, and when read it didn’t disappoint. It is a deep, beautiful, sorrowful and moving book that I have never forgotten.
Since then, more volumes of her work have appeared as if somewhere there is a huge trunk full of manuscripts just waiting to see the light (if only). Some have been almost as good as Suite Francaisse but none until The Wine of Solitude have touched me in quite the same way.
Lost at Sea, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
O’Malley is best known for his Scott Pilgrim series, but Lost at Sea was his first original work, published in 2003. I recently stumbled upon a 2008 second edition. I love the Scott Pilgrim film but wasn’t overly impressed by the graphic novel series, as I thought it was far too drawn out and featured (like life, I know) too many inconsequential elements. Lost at Sea is a smaller, self-contained story with an intriguing premise, so I thought I should give it a go.
Our protagonist is a 18-year old girl called Rayleigh who claims to have no soul. You see, it was stolen by a cat. She doesn’t talk to people much and finds almost everything about life hard to deal with. Raleigh finds herself in a car with some of her classmates on a cross country road trip. She barely knows them and doesn’t even remember why she’s in the car with them. What’s worse, everywhere she looks, she sees cats. Read more
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
Peter F. Hamilton’s introduction to this striking yellow and purple Gollancz 50 edition (to celebrate 50 years of the science fiction and fantasy publishers) of Dan Simmons Hyperion, clarifies that the novel mirrors the structure of The Canterbury Tales. I work in Canterbury and had no idea. Shamefully, I’ve never read Chaucer’s opus, although I am familiar with it. My first thought was a negative one. Is Simmons trying to ape one of reputably the greatest fictions in the English language? I need not have concerned myself. Hyperion is one of the top 10 titles for a very good reason, and not because it is attempting a re-telling of the Tales.
It is the 28th Century and the human hegemony (indirect imperial dominance by the threat of force) has spread across the galaxy using space ships and instant travel devices called farcasters. However, the Ousters, a mysterious offshoot of the early Earth emigrants, and the AI community are upsetting the balance. Into this, a cast of pilgrims are making their way to the planet Hyperion on a quest to visit the Time Tombs and to possibly face the Shrike, a God-like killing machine with inexplicable powers.
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The Drop, by Michael Connelly
Here’s a tip – next time you’re in a book shop, if you see a book called The Drop, don’t think, just buy it. Two volumes by that name have crossed my desk this year; the first being a breathtaking gangland thriller from Geordie writer Howard Linskey. So, from dazzling debutants to time-honoured Titans, the second comes from Michael Connelly, one of the very best crime writers in the business.
Connelly’s The Drop is the sixteenth in the Harry Bosch series, and sees Harry investigate two cases simultaneously. The first is the apparent suicide of the son of a local political high-flyer. Said high-flyer is a powerful thorn in the side of both Bosch and the LAPD in general, ensuring headaches aplenty for the grizzled detective. The second case is the rape/murder of a young woman, Lily Price. Occurring in 1989, this case has lain cold until now, when new evidence has thrown up a suspect – who was just eight at the time of the killing. Is Bosch really seeking a murderous child, or is the truth potentially even more hair-raising – throwing doubt on the findings of the Regional Crime Lab? Read more
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
The Golden Mean is the balance a ruler has to strike between aggression and temperance. Alexander the Great lacked that balance and isn’t well know for anything other than his extreme ambition and his extreme aggression. Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean is a fictional account of Aristotle’s years as Alexander the Great’s tutor and his attempts to instill balance into Alexander’s psyche.
The plot is thin, but it doesn’t really matter. Although there are some rather too graphic scenes, involving in particular some gory surgery and dissections of small animals for the benefit of some Lord of the Flies like adolescents, this is not a book about things happening. Its Aristotle’s personal, rather dispassionate account of his relationship with his wife, Philip the 2nd and especially with the teenaged Alexander. It’s a little like reading a diary or a journal where the author records his observations but reserves any feelings.
Nevertheless, what really counts in this book isn’t the relationships either. The Golden Mean looks like a paperback historical novel, it’s published as a historical novel, but it isn’t a historical novel. It’s a poem. A poem without verse or rhythm, but a flow of words that carries you along with it and has a slow quality all of its own.
If you like that sort of thing, you’ll like this. I must admit I’m not too keen myself, but all the same, this looks like a winner.
The Adventures of Hergé, by Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental & Stanislas Barthélémy
The Adventures of Hergé is a delightful biographical comic about Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin.
According to Jose-Louis Bocquet and Jean-Luc Fromental, Hergé first discovered his love of drawing in 1914 when his mother gave him some crayons in order to keep him quiet and out of trouble. This incident serendipitously coincided with Hergé witnessing an informal performance from a powerfully voiced family friend who would end up immortalised as Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale herself.
Given its format, The Adventures of Hergé goes on then to provide a necessarily whistle-stop tour of the important events in Georges Remi’s life. After [presumably] spending his childhood more dedicated to art than to schooling, Remi eventually gets his big break in 1925 when a friend of his in the Belgian Scouts movement helps him to get a job at Le XXe Siécle, a conservative magazine. It was here that Remi adopted the penname Hergé and here, in 1929, that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was first serialised. Tintin quickly captured the imagination of readers, first in Belgium and then eventually worldwide, and so the escapades of the boy reporter came to dominate Hergé’s life.
The Beautiful Indifference, by Sarah Hall
A Carlisle man once visited Iceland on business and was invited to dinner with his hosts. After the meal ended one of them, a refined lady of a certain age, stood up and declared, “Aas gangan yen.” This was a surprise, as he’d last heard the phrase a few days earlier from the mouth of a hardened local farmer unable to make his evening pint stretch any further. But then, the Cumbrian dialect owes much to the Old Norse spoken by Viking settlers over a thousand years earlier.
The Beautiful Indifference is a collection of short-ish stories by Sarah Hall, whose roots are deep in her Cumbrian home. Two of these stories are set in this tough borderland and these, for me, are the most alive. They capture a raw, unrefined sense of place and character. The area has seen more than enough conflict and hardship, reflected in the lives of its people and the fortifications laid down over centuries. But the author is just at home in with other settings – London, Finland, Africa. She has an acute understanding of situation, of what it means to be in these different environments.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, edited by Jann S. Wenner
On October 1st 1970 Rolling Stone published Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘The Battle of Aspen’, a raging account of Joe Edwards’ run for Mayor of Aspen, Colorado under the Freak Power banner. It was his participation in Edwards’ mayoral campaign that would inspire Thompson’s own run a year later for Sherriff of Pitkin County and it was this article that marked the beginning of his thirty-year involvement with Rolling Stone.
In 1971 Thompson went on to contribute several articles to Rolling Stone. The most notable of these was arguably ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan: The Murder of Ruben Salazar’, which concerned the stirrings of Mexican unrest in East Los Angles and also marked the introduction into Thompson’s writings of fiery lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, who would eventually be better known as Dr Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. However, it was in 1972 that Thompson truly became a key member [or perhaps even commander] of the Rolling Stone team when he was assigned to the new [and bespoke] National Affairs Desk and the magazine began to feature non-stop coverage of the Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign.
After Thompson’s suicide in 2005, the then editorial team at Rolling Stone put together a special tribute edition based on “memories and vignettes from nearly a hundred of his friends, colleagues and co-conspirators.” This special edition was then turned into Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, a full-length and comprehensive biography. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone is designed to be a companion volume to this biography, effectively providing an opportunity for Thompson’s articles to serve as an autobiography chronicling the manic development of both his personal life and his unique writing style.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone collects thirty-nine of Thompson’s articles, including six that have never been reproduced before. Those chosen articles cover a scintillating range of topics, from politics to boxing, crime to upper crust life in Palm Beach. While all of the articles are excellent and serve to highlight the best of Thompson’s new journalistic style, there are a number of standouts. Amongst those is of course ‘The Battle of Aspen’ but also the lesser known ‘The Campaign Trail: The Banshee Screams in Florida’ [or Hunter Thompson versus Ed Muskie] and ‘A Dog Took My Place’ [concerning the Pulitzer divorce]. While many of these articles are familiar, they all stand the test of time and are certainly worth revisiting.
Any Human Face, by Charles Lambert
In 1983 Alex is asked by his mentor and lover Bruno to hold on to a few bags for him for a few days. When Alex returns to Bruno’s place after taking the bags to his own apartment he finds Bruno murdered and mutilated. Scared, Alex decides he has to get rid of the bags, which turn out to contain photo’s and sells them to a young photographer. In a plot line that initially appears unrelated, a young girl, who is not named, is kidnapped at an unidentified time for reasons that are unclear to her and the reader.
In 2008, Andrew Caruso owner of a second-hand bookshop in Rome finds some bags which used to belong to a lover of his who died, apparently by suicide, years ago. The bags contain mug-shots, photos of crime-scenes and other photographs, clearly from police archives. In honour of his former lover Andrew decides to show the photographs in an exhibition, but shortly before the show is due to open official looking men enter Andrew’s place, confiscate everything they can find and take Andrew away to an unknown destination. Why are these photographs so sensitive after all these years, who is afraid of having them shown in public, and how will Andrew get himself out of this mess he unwittingly landed himself into?
Below Zero, by CJ Box
As I write, my “to be read” pile boasts the new Michael Connelly, a Lee Child, Roslund & Hellstrom’s highly rated Three Seconds, a Karin Slaughter, and an extremely tempting chunk of Faber’s 2012 catalogue. And yet, I find myself reading three CJ Box efforts on the spin. Below Zero is the third of my Box marathon, and the ninth in the Joe Pickett series.
Following the events of Blood Trail, Pickett is in exile in Baggs, out in the Wyoming hinterland where game wardens’ careers go to die. He is away from his home and family for lengthy stretches, and it is during one such absence when his eldest daughter receives a text message from April, his foster daughter, killed six years ago during a shoot-out with survivalists. As the content of the messages becomes increasingly dark, and the evidence April really is still alive becomes harder to dismiss, Pickett takes to the road in order to save his foster daughter, and in doing so succeed where he failed once before.
At Sea, by Laurie Graham
This is the type of novel you don’t come across much anymore. It’s quirky and eccentric, beholden of the old style English language most typical of the well-to-do do in the 1930′s, where one is inclined to express how splendid everything is, cleverly mixed into a modern-day cruise ship holiday.
Packed with mirth and a flagrant sarcastic wit, Lady Enid is accompanying her husband Bernard Finch, initially portrayed as a handsome and charismatic Professor, who lectures about ancient history and leads tour parties to historical places of interest amid the countries the cruise ship visits. Read more
Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, by Kim Newman
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most enduring literary characters ever penned, famous the world over. Less time, however, is given over to his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, who features in only two of Conan Doyle’s original stories. In Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles Kim Newman aims to redress the balance.
Echoing the writings of Watson, the book is split into short stories, each more humorous and outlandish than the last, building into a showdown with the great detective in ‘The Problem of the Final Adventure’, a companion piece to Conan Doyle’s ‘The Final Problem’ in which he tried to kill Holmes off. The language brilliantly parodies that of the original books, but these tales are debauched and full of Moriarty’s wonderful plots to deceive and steal; the more challenging the feat, the more ingenious and determined his efforts to solve it. Like Holmes, he is outwitted only by Irene Adler. Read more
The Company Man, by Robert Jackson Bennett
The Company Man, by Robert Jackson Bennett, begins with a staple of the crime novel; the dredging up of a mutilated John Doe. As narrative hooks go, it’s a deservedly well practised choice, but The Company Man has a more impressive lead-in. Bennett plays you with the inevitable curiosity surrounding the discovery of any murder, so much so it takes a moment to see you’ve been sucker punched. Did it just say airships? Apart from being a crime novel The Company Man is also an alternative history, set in the fictional city of Evesden in 1919.
This all-American west coast city is itself a mystery, founded by a lumber entrepreneur who knows a good thing when he finds it, and the genius in a cave who proved to be a very good thing. So, like some frontier version of Apple, the McNaughton Corporation was born, and an industrial metropolis around it. Just as towns sprang up across America wherever oil, or gold, or some other precious resource was plumbed, so too do people immigrate in startling numbers to the new technological heartland of the world.
Blood Trail, by CJ Box
It seems like only yesterday I finished Free Fire, the previous instalment of the Joe Pickett series. That’s because, at time of writing, it was. I remember my maternal grandmother once holding forth on the joy of finding an author with a rich back catalogue to delve into. Regular visitors to us here at Bookgeeks will know by now that 2011 has brought me that particular joy, in the form of CJ Box.
Blood Trail is the eighth in the Pickett series. Joe, having passed the big four-oh, is still to be found working without portfolio for Spencer Rulon, the maverick governor of the state of Wyoming. Predictably enough, when trouble rears its head, Rulon calls upon Joe, together with a horde of other law enforcement officers, to investigate. Said trouble takes the form of a murdered hunter found in the woods, eviscerated, skinned and decapitated in an apparent nod to the preparation of game animals. The evidence suggests the work of anti-hunting extremists, a theory which gains credence when a prominent anti-hunting campaigner throws himself into the mix.
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
In 2011, A Visit from the Goon Squad was awarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It would be easy to think, as the winner of such an infamous and prestigious award, that this book would therefore receive praise by all who read it. This, however, is not the case. Search the web for reviews of this book, and you will be sure to find a wide variety of opinions as to its enjoyment factor and literary merit. From a personal perspective, I found A Visit from the Goon Squad to be sharp, witty, and droll, with its finger on the pulse of the issues facing modern-day western culture. It cleverly addresses the realities of children being born into a digital world, and an aging population coping with changes in society, as well in their own lives.
Set primarily in the USA and revolving around the music industry, in the first chapter, the reader is introduced to Sasha, a single New Yorker in her thirties who is out on a date with a man she met online. Jennifer Egan has a way with words that drew me in right from the first sentence. With stylish narration, as the chapter progresses, the scene moves back and forth between Sasha’s date and a counselling session with her therapist, Coz. This sets up a format for the book that some readers love, and some just don’t. Read more
Darkfever (Fever 1), by Karen Marie Moning
MacKayla (Mac) Lane is 22 years old and has a good life in Ashford, Georgia. Living with her parents, she has a job in a bar and studies part-time. She rarely faces more difficult decisions than what to wear today, and what colour her nails should be, with her biggest worry being that her favourite colour will be discontinued. That all changes when she receives word that her sister Alina has been murdered in Dublin, where she had been studying in Trinity College.
Devastated and heartbroken Mac travels to Ireland to find out what exactly happened to her sister, and who killed her since it seems that the local police is not getting anywhere with the investigation.
As soon as Mac arrives in Dublin her live changes. She finds that she is seeing monsters around her; monsters that other people don’t seem to be able to see. And it isn’t long before she discovers that she isn’t what or who she thought she was either.
Free Fire, by CJ Box
Another month, another CJ Box. From the month of September comes Free Fire, the seventh in the Joe Pickett series. Still reeling from the dark events that drew In Plain Sight to a close, Free Fire finds Pickett cast out of his role as game warden by joyless bureaucrat Randy Pope. To make ends meet, he works as a ranch hand for his father-in-law. His pay is dwarfed by that of wife Marybeth, and he yearns for the fulfilment and autonomy of his former life.
Such is Pickett’s professional situation when the plot kicks off; and what a plot it is. A sociopathic killer guns down four people in cold blood, and reports directly to the authorities, handing over the murder weapons and admitting culpability. But, much like true love, the course of law enforcement never did run smooth, and the killer walks. Thanks to a legal loophole created by national park boundary legislation, it is impossible to prosecute him. As part of the ongoing investigation into these events, Governor Rulon approaches Pickett with a clandestine proposition; Joe must travel to Yellowstone without official portfolio, and establish the facts of the case.
Of course, all the staples of a fine CJ Box book are included. Joe’s vindictive mother-in-law Missy continues to blight his existence with her assaults on his marriage; Joe finds ever more inventive ways to destroy state-owned vehicles; the striking natural beauty of Wyoming is covered in-depth (with Old Faithful enjoying a starring role); and Nate Romanowski, Joe’s partner and all-round avenging angel, stalks about the tale with his trusty .454 Casull, dispensing justice in a manner that continues to make Mike Hammer look like a sissy.
Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon & Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman
Travel writing is something that seems to appeal to the kind of people who enjoy clinging to a motorbike and setting themselves unnecessarily complicated challenges. Probably the most widely read of this canon is Long Way Round, this recognition due to the television series that accompanied it and the fame of the riders themselves. A 20,000 mile trip around the world by a pair of actors was always going to be intriguing for those of us unable to embark on such escapades, and so it proved to be.
However for anyone who has delved a little further into this sub-genre there is another tome that holds a more significant place in the adventurer’s heart – Jupiter’s Travels. Ted Simon’s travels are referred to by McGregor in Long Way Round as an inspiration, and indeed they even meet the author himself. Though for this reviewer that is very much where the similarities in the trips end.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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