Seven thrillers, a few good reads

There's this ungodly stack of books sitting next to my computer. I haven't posted in 12 days, but I've been reading.

There's two non-fiction books I've completed that I'm going to hold off posting on for another day or two or three. As for the rest, I'm still slamming through a stack of thrillers and mysteries, trying to reduce my to-be-read pile.

So let's get to it . . .

Book 22: Wild Thing by Josh Bazell

Josh Bazell's debut novel, Beat the Reaper, was crazy wild. We're talking the mob and a shark tank and a former hit-man on the lam.  

The hit-man, Pietro Brnwa, is back in Wild Thing. This time he's the wilds of Minnesota, trying to figure out if there's really some sort of Loch Ness monster lurking in an all but inaccessible lake. What I'd say? Crazy. Wild. And a hell of a lot of fun.

Book 24:  Raylan by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard is the king of cool. No one. Absolutely no one writes better dialogue. It's a form of poetry.

A lot of folks may be familiar with U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens from the tee-vee.  I haven't seen the series, Justified, but I need to. I really do. At least if it is as good as the novel.

Raylan is set in Kentucky and is more a series of vignettes -- sort of a week in the life of a U.S. Marshall -- than a cohesive narrative. That's OK. It's Elmore Leonard, which is to say it's as good as it gets.

Book 25:  A Quiet Vendetta by R.J. Ellory

Book 29:  Saints of New York by R.J. Ellory

I don't know what it is with R.J. Ellory.  One book I love. One book I hate.  That's been the pattern since I started reading the guy.  And it's the case here.

Didn't like A Quiet Vendetta one bit.  It's slow and preposterous. Preposterous, I can handle once in a while, but I can never forgive slow -- not in this genre.

Saints of New York is excellent.  A nice yarn about a driven cop haunted by his father's past. It's riveting read that will keep me coming back.

One small bone to pick.  Ellory is a Brit living in New York. Would someone please tell him that American's don't say "fortnight." Please.

Book 26:  All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley

Book 28: Feast Day of Fools by James Lee Burke

Two notable authors of the mystery/thriller genre. I've voiced my displeasure with each in the past.  I think they've both well past their sell-by date. One book is pretty much like the last, especially with Burke. Whether the setting is Texas or Louisiana you get the same book every time.

So here's the thing -- so many books, so little time -- and I taking a pass on these two in the future.

Book 27: Blood Is The Sky by Steve Hamilton 

I'm still reading through the complete oeuvre of Steve Hamilton and my attitude has not changed.  I love this guy's work. The novels are well-written with a touch of humor. Hamilton's skillful with character, pacing and setting.  What more could you ask? Maybe the next book in the series.

The Anniversary Man a rewarding thriller

Book 6: The Anniversary Man by R.J. Ellory

As a rule, I don’t like novels about serial killers. And I didn’t much care for R.J.Ellory’s first book, A Quiet Belief in Angels, which – that’s right – was about a serial killer.

Which makes me wonder why I ever read Ellory’s second book, The Anniversary Man, which is also about – altogether now – a serial killer. But I did read it, and although Ellory stepped to the plate with two strikes against him, he wound up delivering, if not a walk-off home run, certainly a nice stand-up double.

 Let’s dispense with the baseball metaphor and just say The Anniversary Man was a solid hit.

Conceit and characters make this book entertaining.  The conceit: someone’s killing people, on the anniversary of past serial killings and in a manner frighteningly similar to those past murders. 

The characters are a lonely cop, Ray Irving, and John Costello, a researcher for a New York newspaper  who survived an attack by the so-called Hammer of God killer when he was 15. His girlfriend was not so fortunate.

The attack left its mark on Costello physically and emotionally. He has a deep-rooted obsession with serial killers and is the first to notice that there’s a pattern to the seemingly random murders.

Costello and Irving form a shaky alliance to catch the killer. Naturally, as the death toll mounts, Costello is Irving’s main suspect.

Ellory manages to deliver a thrilling climax that is altogether fitting without being obvious.

I’ve got a friend urging me to read Ellory’s third novel. Looks like that’s going to happen.

Doors Open cements Rankin's reputation

Books 15 and 16 comprise the range of reading experience, from fast-paced pleasure to a slog through a messy fraud of a book.

The pleasurable read belonged to Ian Rankin. Doors Open was issued in 2008 in Great Britain, but it was just released here last month.

Doors Open is the story of a dot.com millionaire who has grown bored. His boredom leads him into planning an art heist with a banker and an art professor. The heist goes well, but -- as you would expect -- nothing else does in this thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Rankin is one of the leading writers in the popular thriller/crime/mystery genre and Doors Opens only serves to solidify his street cred among readers.


A Quiet Belief in Angels is the first book from R.J. Ellory. Frankly, I hope it is his last. It's a misogynistic, disturbing mess; over-written from the standpoint of content and style. Obstensibly set in Georgia before WW II, the characters don't sound like crackers. This is one of those novels where every adult in well spoken and far wiser than almost anyone you've met in real life.

And then there are the errors of chronology. Early in the book, when a particular event takes place, it's 1943 and our narrator is 15. One hundred pages later, recalling the same event, it was 1942 and he was 14. I could let errors of commission like that slide if the entire book weren't so bad.

Every woman in this novel -- every woman -- dies a horrible and disturbing death. Yes, this book does have something to do with a serial killer, but the fate of some of these woman goes beyond that.

The writing, stylistically, is turgid. It might be accepted as elegant by some with its nascent dawns, but try reading it. This is the first book in a long, long time that I considered abandoning before I was midway through. I stayed to the end and now I'm wondering why.