The thriller genre used to feed off the Cold War. More recently, the ‘bad guys’ have tended to come from terrorists, Islamists, etc., and in most cases I’ve found such books to be excruciatingly shallow. The Good Son, seventh novel from thriller writer Michael Gruber, provides a welcome whiff of intelligence in the genre, for [...]
Rupert Thomson’s Once a Spy is a vibrant spy romp, the genre equivalent of that Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. An American spy, described by a colleague as a natural, begins to succumb to dementia and is saved from a hit squad by his down-and-out gambler son. The book begins [...]
Who would have thought the old-style puzzler mystery is still alive in the days of CSI and serial killers and jaundiced PIs? Freeze Frame by Peter May is just that. The fourth in a destined-for-long-life series featuring Enzo McLeod, a forensic analyst tackling cold cases from the files of a journalist, Freeze Frame is written in [...]
Beautiful Malice by debut novelist Rebecca James has arrived with an almighty marketing splash, one alas undeserved. Told in the first person and up close, it’s the tale of Katherine, a seventeen-year-old Sydney girl with a crippling secret, who is thrilled to be befriended by glamorous Alice. As the relationship builds, a dark undercurrent emerges [...]
So this is it, the conclusion (for author Stieg Larsson can write no more) to the Millennium thriller trilogy that has enlisted slavering fans since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At close to 600 pages pages, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is as meaty as the first two books. Once more it features [...]
This must be the season for wonderful thrillers. I had admired Steve Hamilton’s private eye series, featuring Alex McKnight, during its early years, but stopped following him some time ago. Glowing reviews of his new standalone The Lock Artist: A Novel drew me back and thank goodness for that, for this is one of the cleverest, [...]
What a dazzling premise! Charlie Huston posits for his sci-fi thriller Sleepless: A Novel an alternative early 21st century in which a tenth of the population has turned sleepless, a condition that torments and eventually kills the afflicted. Into a familiar, yet ghastly Los Angeles, Huston plunges Park Haas, the last honest cop, and his [...]
Also posted in Science Fiction |
Walter Mosley’s character-based crime fiction series are such pleasure to read. He has the uncanny ability to imbue every page, even in midst of a speedy plot, with the thoughts and memories of his core character, so much so that the prime joy of reading is in growing into the heart and mind of that [...]
The Twelve (sold in America as The Ghosts of Belfast) by Stuart Neville fizzes with energy from its first paragraph. Irish paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is dizzingly portrayed as an alcoholic has-been tormented by twelve ghosts of his brutal past, ghosts who torment him to exact vengeance on other Sinn Fein heavies. After the first action-laden [...]
Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s nomadic, taciturn action man, has recently been compared to Philip Marlowe. Marlowe he isn’t, but amongst the panoply of male antiheroes so treasured by us mystery/thriller readers, Reacher definitely stands out. The ultimate baggage-free male (literally and emotional), he’s unnoticeable until the world needs him, then becomes brutal, rational, efficient . . [...]