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0062394401
| 9780062394408
| 0062394401
| 4.03
| 8,679
| Jun 06, 2017
| May 04, 2017
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it was amazing
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She Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Leonard not only left a literary lega
She Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Leonard not only left a literary legacy of bandits like Ordell Robbie in Rum Punch and lawmen like Raylan Givens in Pronto or Karen Sisco in Out of Sight, but advised writers of tips he'd picked up in the trade. My favorite is:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." If Jordan Harper (male, born and educated in Missouri, based in Los Angeles) has never read Leonard's work, he could've fooled me. Published in 2017, his debut novel is terse, tough, tender and suffers no parts I wanted to skip. The story opens not with a prologue (Leonard's Rules advised against prologues), but with Chapter 0: Crazy Craig, in which readers are briefly introduced to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel. Crazy Craig spends life confined to a Supermax cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, from where he commands not only Aryan Steel soldiers but their affiliates, white power gangs like Peckerwood Nation or Odin's Bastards all over California. Death warrants sent out to the gangs any number of ways when someone is deemed to need killing, Crazy Craig has issued a greenlight on an ex-con as well as the ex-con's woman and child. Eleven-year-old Polly McCluskey is introduced at Fontana Middle School. A strange fifth grader, Polly often expresses herself using a teddy bear as a surrogate. Raised by her mother Avis and new stepfather Tom Huff, Polly hasn't seen her biological father Nate McCluskey in eleven years, not since he was sentenced to Susanville for armed robbery. Naturally, when dear old dad appears at her school with a stolen car and tells her to come with him, Polly figures he must have busted out. Her brain telling her to run, her legs obey her father. Stopping first at a sporting goods store, Nate quickly checks them into a motel room in Rancho Cucamonga. One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly. He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly. "Come on and take it," he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up. "Want you to take a swing at this," he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn't. "Forget the bear," her dad said, his like you better not mess around. "Show me what you got." Waiting for dark, Nate goes to check on Polly's mother and stepfather. He finds (view spoiler)[Tom in bed with his skull caved in and Avis knife-dead on the bedroom floor, a butter knife in her hand, having died fighting (hide spoiler)]. Nate also finds an ashy beer can in the living room and knowing how Avis felt about smoking, calculates that whoever committed this killing hung around the house for a while. Waited for Polly to come home from school. The answer to whether Aryan Steel is hunting Nate's daughter is "yes." When Polly figures out her mother is dead, she tries jumping out of the stolen car. In some more quick figuring, Nate determines Polly's best chance of survival is to stick with her. Protected in prison by his brother Nick, a stickup man and killer many shades harder than Nate, Polly's father managed to stay out of trouble even after his brother died live on the evening news in a police chase. Nate's lucky stroke continued, winning an appeal and granted an early release. Good fortune turns bad when Ground Chuck Hollington, brother of Aryan Steel's president, approached Nate a week before his release. Offered a job working for the Steel, Nate declined, and Ground Chuck announced that he wasn't offering but telling. The fight is brief, Ground Chuck is felled by his own shank and Crazy Craig puts the greenlight on Nate, Avis and Polly. Detective John Park, San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, is assigned the Huffs' double homicide and with Polly missing, proceeds in his manhunt with Nate McCluskey as his only suspect. Hiding out in L.A. where the soldiers of La Eme outnumber Aryan Steel, Polly's dad explains the situation to his daughter, who far from being a cuckoo, is on the genius end of the bell curve. Nate's plan is to inflict so much damage on Aryan Steel that the death warrant on Polly will be lifted. He solicits the cooperation of Charlotte, a Missouri transplant who got swept up with Aryan Steel and feels responsible for the greenlight on Polly. On the run, father and daughter bond over Mexican food and fight training. "You take the left hand, your choking arm, and you grab your right bicep. It's just for leverage," he said. "I'm going to choke you now. When you feel it, just tap my arm. What are you going to do?" "Tap your arm," she said. "Right. When you squeeze a choke, you squeeze with your whole body. Like this." The arm around her throat tightened slowly, and his chest pressed into her back all at once. And there wasn't any pain or anything like that. It was just that the world started to get smaller and farther away. And it was only right before the world disappeared all the way that she understood what was happening. She tapped his arm. The pressure on her neck went away and the world came back. "You okay?" She nodded. At least maybe she did. She felt a stranger in her own body. "Tap sooner than that. You don't need to go to sleep to see it works. Did it work?" She nodded like yeah. So weird that nothingness was so close to her, always, and she'd never even known. She wondered what else she didn't know, and the sugar rush intensified. "We're starting with chokes," he said, "because you're small. Chokes, you don't have to be big and strong. See, all you're doing is squeezing those two little arteries at the side of your neck that go up and feed the brain. And even a little girl like you is strong enough to squeeze them." He turned around. "Now you do it to me." She Rides Shotgun shares qualities with the contemporary pulp fiction of Don Winslow, author of The Dawn Patrol and Savages: The Golden State, brutal violence and electrifying prose that jumps off the page like a casino neon reflecting in a grimy puddle, language that breaks convention as savagely as the bandits in the story. Where Jordan Harper clears space between himself and the Don Winslow novels I've read is that he doesn't try to replace story and characters with style and formatting, but invested me in his characters. His prose sent a charge through me, like breaking news being wired into a teletype-- She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she'd picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he'd opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn't a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first. Beyond the author's electric prose, though, is a story about transformation. Like all terrific open road adventures, it has a beginning, middle (there's actually a chapter titled Interlude: Whale Ship Cannibals which actually made me break into a grin, never having read an intermission in a novel before) and end. Harper takes no shortcuts, introduces no character or story element he doesn't later use and fills the novel with stark and harrowing description. My favorite involves Polly and Nate torching an Aryan Steel chop shop, but rescuing a fighting cock that the girl discovers caged up there. It's a lean, endearing and thrilling read and one of the best debut novels I've read. Merged review: She Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Leonard not only left a literary legacy of bandits like Ordell Robbie in Rum Punch and lawmen like Raylan Givens in Pronto or Karen Sisco in Out of Sight, but advised writers of tips he'd picked up in the trade. My favorite is:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." If Jordan Harper (male, born and educated in Missouri, based in Los Angeles) has never read Leonard's work, he could've fooled me. Published in 2017, his debut novel is terse, tough, tender and suffers no parts I wanted to skip. The story opens not with a prologue (Leonard's Rules advised against prologues), but with Chapter 0: Crazy Craig, in which readers are briefly introduced to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel. Crazy Craig spends life confined to a Supermax cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, from where he commands not only Aryan Steel soldiers but their affiliates, white power gangs like Peckerwood Nation or Odin's Bastards all over California. Death warrants sent out to the gangs any number of ways when someone is deemed to need killing, Crazy Craig has issued a greenlight on an ex-con as well as the ex-con's woman and child. Eleven-year-old Polly McCluskey is introduced at Fontana Middle School. A strange fifth grader, Polly often expresses herself using a teddy bear as a surrogate. Raised by her mother Avis and new stepfather Tom Huff, Polly hasn't seen her biological father Nate McCluskey in eleven years, not since he was sentenced to Susanville for armed robbery. Naturally, when dear old dad appears at her school with a stolen car and tells her to come with him, Polly figures he must have busted out. Her brain telling her to run, her legs obey her father. Stopping first at a sporting goods store, Nate quickly checks them into a motel room in Rancho Cucamonga. One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly. He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly. "Come on and take it," he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up. "Want you to take a swing at this," he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn't. "Forget the bear," her dad said, his like you better not mess around. "Show me what you got." Waiting for dark, Nate goes to check on Polly's mother and stepfather. He finds (view spoiler)[Tom in bed with his skull caved in and Avis knife-dead on the bedroom floor, a butter knife in her hand, having died fighting (hide spoiler)]. Nate also finds an ashy beer can in the living room and knowing how Avis felt about smoking, calculates that whoever committed this killing hung around the house for a while. Waited for Polly to come home from school. The answer to whether Aryan Steel is hunting Nate's daughter is "yes." When Polly figures out her mother is dead, she tries jumping out of the stolen car. In some more quick figuring, Nate determines Polly's best chance of survival is to stick with her. Protected in prison by his brother Nick, a stickup man and killer many shades harder than Nate, Polly's father managed to stay out of trouble even after his brother died live on the evening news in a police chase. Nate's lucky stroke continued, winning an appeal and granted an early release. Good fortune turns bad when Ground Chuck Hollington, brother of Aryan Steel's president, approached Nate a week before his release. Offered a job working for the Steel, Nate declined, and Ground Chuck announced that he wasn't offering but telling. The fight is brief, Ground Chuck is felled by his own shank and Crazy Craig puts the greenlight on Nate, Avis and Polly. Detective John Park, San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, is assigned the Huffs' double homicide and with Polly missing, proceeds in his manhunt with Nate McCluskey as his only suspect. Hiding out in L.A. where the soldiers of La Eme outnumber Aryan Steel, Polly's dad explains the situation to his daughter, who far from being a cuckoo, is on the genius end of the bell curve. Nate's plan is to inflict so much damage on Aryan Steel that the death warrant on Polly will be lifted. He solicits the cooperation of Charlotte, a Missouri transplant who got swept up with Aryan Steel and feels responsible for the greenlight on Polly. On the run, father and daughter bond over Mexican food and fight training. "You take the left hand, your choking arm, and you grab your right bicep. It's just for leverage," he said. "I'm going to choke you now. When you feel it, just tap my arm. What are you going to do?" "Tap your arm," she said. "Right. When you squeeze a choke, you squeeze with your whole body. Like this." The arm around her throat tightened slowly, and his chest pressed into her back all at once. And there wasn't any pain or anything like that. It was just that the world started to get smaller and farther away. And it was only right before the world disappeared all the way that she understood what was happening. She tapped his arm. The pressure on her neck went away and the world came back. "You okay?" She nodded. At least maybe she did. She felt a stranger in her own body. "Tap sooner than that. You don't need to go to sleep to see it works. Did it work?" She nodded like yeah. So weird that nothingness was so close to her, always, and she'd never even known. She wondered what else she didn't know, and the sugar rush intensified. "We're starting with chokes," he said, "because you're small. Chokes, you don't have to be big and strong. See, all you're doing is squeezing those two little arteries at the side of your neck that go up and feed the brain. And even a little girl like you is strong enough to squeeze them." He turned around. "Now you do it to me." She Rides Shotgun shares qualities with the contemporary pulp fiction of Don Winslow, author of The Dawn Patrol and Savages: The Golden State, brutal violence and electrifying prose that jumps off the page like a casino neon reflecting in a grimy puddle, language that breaks convention as savagely as the bandits in the story. Where Jordan Harper clears space between himself and the Don Winslow novels I've read is that he doesn't try to replace story and characters with style and formatting, but invested me in his characters. His prose sent a charge through me, like breaking news being wired into a teletype-- She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she'd picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he'd opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn't a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first. Beyond the author's electric prose, though, is a story about transformation. Like all terrific open road adventures, it has a beginning, middle (there's actually a chapter titled Interlude: Whale Ship Cannibals which actually made me break into a grin, never having read an intermission in a novel before) and end. Harper takes no shortcuts, introduces no character or story element he doesn't later use and fills the novel with stark and harrowing description. My favorite involves Polly and Nate torching an Aryan Steel chop shop, but rescuing a fighting cock that the girl discovers caged up there. It's a lean, endearing and thrilling read and one of the best debut novels I've read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Feb 10, 2018
not set
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Feb 17, 2018
not set
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Jan 29, 2025
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0593331540
| 9780593331545
| 0593331540
| 3.87
| 24,084
| Apr 19, 2022
| Apr 19, 2022
|
liked it
|
My introduction to the fiction of Sascha Rothchild is Blood Sugar. Published in 2022, this debut novel is the first person account of Ruby Simon, a No
My introduction to the fiction of Sascha Rothchild is Blood Sugar. Published in 2022, this debut novel is the first person account of Ruby Simon, a North Miami Beach psychiatrist narrating the events of her life, which have led to her being questioned by police in the death of her husband Jason, the fourth person authorities now know died within feet of the Yale grad. The story is reminiscent of James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith, in which a gleefully sinister murderer stays a step ahead of being exposed by the polite society he's hiding in plain sight from. It's about time a woman got in on the action, but the novel lacks description and falls short of greatness due to excessive summary. Rothchild maps out her narrator's life with the color and volume of a Thomas Guide. Much of it is compelling. Born and raised in Miami, Ruby is introduced at the age of five, pulling a 7-year-old classmate drowning in the Atlantic Ocean under the tide to finish Mother Nature's job. The boy is revealed to be a bully terrorizing Ruby's older sister, Ellie. Ruby establishes that she's no sociopath, capable of empathy and loving relationships. Nor does she seek to satisfy a bloodlust, though twice more in her life--sexually assaulted by the father of a high school friend, and later, standing on a street corner with an abusive client--rids the human race of these monsters. The law catches up with her when her diabetic husband expires in their bed. The novel peaks as Ruby locks into a battle of wits with her fiancé's estranged mother Gertrude, who abandoned Jason at age 2, another awful human being begging for a drawer at the morgue, a psychological abuser who retains long distance control over her son. Rothchild has an imaginative dedication to murder by numbers--I love the way she uses the environment of Miami in at least two of her killings--and also lends her narrator a healthy sex life, both without writing graphic violence or sex. That she loves and understands her genre is never in doubt. While the writing is very often pedestrian and on-the-nose, Rothchild has an excellent grip on psychology and shares her perspectives on modern living through her narrator. Since most people lie, even in therapy, even in blind studies, even to themselves, it's nearly impossible to know true average number of sexual partners. But I'm certain growing up in Miami skews what might seem outrageous in other parts of America as totally within reason. Miami is hot and steamy, filled with attractive people wearing tiny clothes, drinking rum, dancing to sultry salsa music all night long, gay and straight and every tick of the pendulum in between. There is no slut shaming in Miami. Instead sex is openly celebrated. It's the prudes who feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. However, I did develop my own sex rule. I would not sleep with more men than my current age. There was Carlos first. Then Mikey the water polo player, Kevin the vegan. Max the professor's assistant. Plus Jake, Melody's boyfriend. And a few more over the years. When I write all their names on a list, it seems like a lot of men. But when I step back to do the math, it doesn't. I've been sexually active since I was fifteen, so by my mid-twenties, having dated on average one to three men every year, that adds up to sleeping with over twenty men. When I think about it that way, my list doesn't seem so long at all. Unlike The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Tom Ripley is moments away from being exposed as a fraud or murderer, Rothchild climaxes her story too soon, devoting the last quarter to Ruby's impending murder trial and the resulting media circus. Maybe the attention is important to a female killer, but remaining at large is far more suspenseful, detail after detail of a person's public life nowhere near as compelling as their private life. Rothchild also summarizes the entire book, which is the dreaded "telling" aspect of "showing vs. telling." Ruby tells about her childhood, tells about her career, tells about her killings, and tells us everything she's thinking. I didn't want a summary of Ruby's life, I wanted to experience it. I've been wondering where the female killers, con artists, or thieves are in crime fiction, and why so many are very proper Mabels limited to exposing dark secrets like Nancy Drew. Though Ruby Simon is a compromise to lovers of both coldblooded femme fatales and proper ladies who could be invited to brunch, I was satisfied. The descriptive version of this novel would've been four stars. The Cliff Notes version here is two-and-a-half stars. Bonus half-star to Rothchild for keeping me invested--I rushed, didn't skim--and making me excited to get back to the novel. For her follow-up, I hope her agent or editor works with her on showing a story instead of telling it, but as a debut, I recommend it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 06, 2024
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Feb 08, 2024
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Dec 17, 2023
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Hardcover
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0451496108
| 9780451496102
| 0451496108
| 3.59
| 2,049
| Mar 21, 2017
| Mar 21, 2017
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Melissa Scrivner Love is Lola. Published in 2017, this should've been in my wheelhouse: the power behind a tightly k
My introduction to the fiction of Melissa Scrivner Love is Lola. Published in 2017, this should've been in my wheelhouse: the power behind a tightly knit drug ring in South Central L.A. is the twenty-three-year-old Lola, girlfriend to the gang's public-facing leader. There are a lot of thrillers or mysteries about women investigating bad behavior, but a much smaller sub-genre feaaturing women behaving badly: the con artists, killers, or queenpins. Lola proudly belongs in this second class, but its summary prose and plot-heavy story had me skimming through it in a day. The first major problem with Lola is that Love--a writer on the TV series CSI: Miami and Person of Interest making her debut as a novelist--tags a lot of her dialogue with explanations about what's going on between the ears of her protagonist, translating plot or character development like a sign language interpreter would for the deaf. I don't want to read a summary, I want to experience an author's story through dramatization. Excessive telling also kills any momentum. This is not an enjoyable novel to read. Love has to know that the A-class of the drug kingpin sub-genre is Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul. The plot machinations her novel lean so heavily on are just not interesting: Lola's gang has been given territory in exchange for servitude to middle management of the Mexican cartel. Considered expendable, they're ordered to take out a rogue distributor and find out who his supplier is, but Lola's kid brother screws up the operation, giving the gang 72 hours to recover the cartel's product or they'll torture Lola to death. Unlike Don Winslow, Love doesn't possess the punchiness or pathos to tell a compelling story in this milieu. Given that disappointing a drug cartel guarantees many fates worse than death, Lola isn't confronted with enough tests. She isn't forced to make a tough choice. She isn't tasked with developing new skills. I skimmed through to the ending, spoiled by the presence of a number in the title. As readers, we know Lola is in no danger of meeting a tragic end and if she did, the reader isn't given enough reason to care. First paragraph: Lola stands across the craggy square of backyard she shares with Garcia. He mans the grill, rusted tongs and Corona with lime in hand, making the center of a cluster of men, their biceps bare and beaded with sweat. Crenshaw Six tattoos evident in their standard uniform of wife-beaters and torn cargo pants. If Lola were alone with Garcia, she would take her turn over the smoking meat, too, but as afternoon transform Huntington Park from light to shadow, Lola stays away from the heat. Her place now is at the center of a cluster of women, their necks craning toward any high-pitched squeak that might be gossip, each one standing with a single hip cocked, as if at any second someone might place a sleeping child there for comfort. Memorable prose: The only people who knock on front doors in this neighborhood are cops who've exchanged their battering rams for bad news. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 27, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Dec 16, 2023
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Hardcover
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3.43
| 16,210
| Apr 25, 2023
| Apr 25, 2023
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it was amazing
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Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. Death of a B Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. Death of a Bookseller is the debut novel by Alice Slater. Published in 2023, it's a first-person account of a young bookstore clerk and true crime fan in the northeast London neighborhood of Walthamstow. Given to morbid self-intentions, she becomes obsessed with a radiant co-worker, who narrates her segments of the story as well. I can't recall which page Slater made me abandon my distaste for first-person narration or switching points of view and enjoy what she was cooking, but she does it quickly with precise and often witty writing, a fascinating milieu, and a suspenseful story that kept me turning the pages. Brogan Roach works at her local branch of Spines, a bookstore chain whose arrival in the 1990s forced two local booksellers to shutter and in 2019, is now on its last legs. Roach lives in a flat above the bar her mother operates. She keeps a giant African land snail named Bleep as a pet and consumes true crime books, electing herself curator of that section at Spines. She dismisses the "Pumpkin Spice Girls" who flock to true crime like any new trend. A loner who surrounds herself with books and morbid explorations of death, Roach considers herself above the "normies." Laura Bunting appears to Roach like a vision, a pretty and confident and well-liked bookseller who transfers to her branch with a new manager and the male bookseller Laura is fixated on. Her mother the victim of a serial murderer, Laura writes poetry that champions the lives of victims. Without sharing her macabre family history, Laura takes offense to Roach's gothic obsession with death. The harder her new co-worker tries to win her approval, the more Laura ignores her. Bad idea. I have a sweet spot for any story about work and workplace dynamics. Slater doesn't stop there, identifying a favorite milieu of writers and readers alike--the bookstore--and on its most immediate level, Death of a Bookseller is a great book about books. Slater writes what I've thought about: management, perky co-workers, popular books or trending topics, and finally customers, who interfere with what otherwise would be a fun job. Her writing is sharp, substantive and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I've always fancied myself a death row bride. I'd rock up in black lace, a leather jacket, sunglasses. I liked the idea of writing to a serial killer in jail, striking up a friendship, finding out what made them tick. It was difficult to find cool serial killers to write to in the UK, though. They lacked the glamour of the Californian devils of the 1970s, the wry smiles and sarcastic waves to the press, the rock-star swagger, the achingly cool indifference to it all. There were loads of them in the '70s. It was like the Satanic American dream: girls with bare shoulders hitchhiked and climbed happily into the cars of strangers, housewives left their back doors unlocked, slept with their windows wide open and welcoming. But that was then. The golden age of serial killing was over, and the chances of me finding one to marry were slim. The toxic male-female friendship in the novel is really well written. Laura's co-worker Eli enjoys the attention Laura bestows him--and his girlfriend perhaps doesn't--while Laura wastes her youth on a man who's unavailable. Neither possess the maturity to shake hands and retire to their separate corners as colleagues. Slater also associates alcohol consumption and blackout drunks among people in their twenties struggling with adulthood, depression and palpable fear of going home to an empty flat and vacant lives. Psychologically, Slater takes all the best lessons from Patricia Highsmith. Her narrators are not very good people, but the more of their stories they told, the more empathy I felt for them. Finally, I understood them, and took a rooting interest in them escaping prison or death despite the best efforts of the other characters in the story to do them in. I finished the novel in four days, a good land speed for me, and anticipated getting back to it every day. This is the easiest five stars I've given a novel in months and recommend it highly. The Christmas and New Year's Eve setting the novel stalks toward was an accident and made the book that more enjoyable to me, particularly as Roach shares her thoughts on the consensus best book of the year (it's not Yellowface). The book of the year was Flower Crowns of the Arctic, like I give a shit. Another mass-market paperback with a pseudo-smart title for book clubs full of Lauras to fawn over. It was about some girl's dead mother, and climate change. Laura had written a neat little recommendation card for it: a sweeping novel about the way things can feel broken beyond repair, how things can feel ruined, and how we must heal before we can move on. Laura xox. Sentimental bullshit. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2023
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Dec 30, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||||
1789096111
| 9781789096118
| 1789096111
| 4.41
| 11,164
| Oct 19, 2021
| Oct 19, 2021
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of James Kestrel is Five Decembers. Anyone who's been searching for pulp fiction done the right way--lurid action, disi
My introduction to the fiction of James Kestrel is Five Decembers. Anyone who's been searching for pulp fiction done the right way--lurid action, disillusioned men in search of purpose, mysterious women in need of help, exotic locales--needs to stop reading my review and read this novel, recently published by Hard Case Crime with plaudits from Megan Abbott and Meg Gardiner among others. I went into the reading blind, unaware of when it was written or takes place, and was rewarded with one surprise after another. In short, this is a book that preserves everything I love about 1940s pulp fiction and replaces everything I don't love with a contemporary sensibility. Published in 2021 and the first under Kestrel's name (he wrote six crime novels as Jonathan Moore), the story begins in Honolulu of yesteryear, where Army veteran and police detective Joe McGrady is summoned by his captain from the shot glass he's searching for fulfillment in. Short staffed due to Thanksgiving, bachelor McGrady is assigned his first homicide, a dead body on the land of a dairy farmer. McGrady is the first on the scene and shortly after discovering a young man cut open, confronts a man trying to destroy the crime scene and shoots it out with him. McGrady discovers a woman's body on the scene and gets the impression the criminal he shot was not working alone. Present at the autopsy on Fort Shafter is a U.S. Navy admiral whose search for his missing nephew has come to a conclusion where McGrady's investigation begins. The detective discovers that the woman--who appears to be Japanese but has no identity as of yet--was killed after the admiral's nephew, as if whoever did it wanted her to see. McGrady is assigned a partner in Fred Ball, who's never detained a suspect he couldn't beat an answer out of, and following a lead to Guam, assures his lovely girlfriend Molly that he'll be home soon. Closing in on a suspect in Hong Kong, McGrady is caught in the city on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacks mainland China and takes over. Five Decembers reminded me of the movie Cast Away if instead of climaxing when Tom Hanks returns to civilization, tasked his character with solving the murder investigation he was working when he was shipwrecked. Not just any murder, but one our protagonist realizes changed the entire course of history while he was marooned, including his life and the lives of those nearest to him: the girlfriend who gave him up for dead, and the daughter of the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose father springs McGrady from a prison camp for his help finding the men who murdered his niece, hiding him in Tokyo until the conclusion of the war. Kestrel does everything extremely well in this novel. He paints a vivid picture of Honolulu and Hong Kong before and after World War II without bogging the reader down in historical research. He's intricate when it comes to police procedure in the 1940s while keeping a fast pace, plausibly sending McGrady across the Pacific on a killer's trail. After reading a plethora of thrillers that hinge on text messaging, it was so refreshing to read one revolving around telegrams. The dialogue is terse while containing emotional resonance. Kestrel clearly establishes the necessity each character has in their relationships with others. I looked forward to getting back to the book every time I put it down. For a long time, the novel I'd bring up if anyone asked what I thought would make a good TV mini-series was Kindred by Octavia Butler. FX on Hulu finally got around to that. My new great book begging for an adaptation is Five Decembers by James Kestrel. Opening sentence: Joe McGrady was looking at a whiskey. Memorable prose: The first night in Yokohama, he could have listened to Takahashi's pitch. Then he could've walked away. Back down the steel stairs, back to his place in the line of naked prisoners. None of the other men from the ship had been given any kind of choice. They had to take whatever the Japs decided to dish out. He could have taken it, too. Maybe he'd have survived. Or maybe not. But in either case his name wouldn't have been on the wrong Red Cross list. If people asked him what had happened in Japan, he'd be able to answer with some kind of dignity. And everything would be different. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 04, 2024
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Jan 19, 2024
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Aug 11, 2023
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Hardcover
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0593547500
| 9780593547502
| 0593547500
| 3.65
| 25,029
| Feb 14, 2023
| Feb 14, 2023
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really liked it
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Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. Published in Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know. Published in 2023, Rachel Koller Croft's debut novel Stone Cold Fox sounded the cash register bell for lots of what I want in a crime thriller, specifically one about a gleefully sinister woman. It often reminded me of a '90s film noir like The Last Seduction (1994) where a diabolical femme fatale takes down everyone who gets between her and the bag. This is a book that starts slowly and haltingly, but once it gets going downhill, hooked me in the way Season 1 of a thrilling TV series might. Croft is a screenwriter. It shows. Her first novel is un-put-downable. [image] The story is the first-person account of "Bea," a senior business development director who's shot to the top of a big advertising agency in New York, albeit with phony credentials and references. Bea's goal is to marry wealthy and against all odds, has snared the mark of a lifetime: Collin Case, Chief Marketing Officer of a huge consumer goods company that's been in his family for a hundred years. Young, good-looking, callow, he's fallen hard for the character Bea has tailored for his desire. The more Collin's mother Haven or his smitten childhood friend Gale Wallace-Leicester protest his union to this outsider, the more committed Collin is to living his life beyond their control. The story flashes back to a childhood Bea spent with "Mother," a self-destructive flim-flam artist who keeps the two of them moving from dope to dope. Bea tells herself she's nothing like her ruthless mother. When Gale Wallace-Leicester makes it her mission to expel Bea from the Case family, Bea returns these efforts with the backhand of Maria Sharapova. As Collin proposes to and marries her. Bea even turns what began as a rivalry with her fiancée's assistant Sylvia into an alliance, perhaps a friendship, her only one. Bea doesn't know what Gale knows about her sordid past, and can't shake the feeling that Mother is close by. Stone Cold Fox made a poor first impression on me. First-person narratives suffer when narrators come across as insipid. Bea is crass and materialistic, appraising people strictly by their physical attributes as if they were horses, and chasing affluence. She also narrates her story in a very plain manner that reminded me of a teenager at times. She shares thoughts with the reader like, Truthfully, when I get the opportunity to dance, I take it, because it's the only time I feel like I can actually be myself. Wow, thanks for that insight, Bea. I'll alert the Nobel Committee. Another narrative choice I'm prejudiced against is jumping around in time or swapping narrators. Croft stays in Bea's head, but moving back in time stalled the pacing a bit. After two hours of reading, I considered quitting the book. Croft checks a crucial box I ask of any author when I open their book: Do I want to know what happens next? The prose grows neither more luscious or significantly sharper, but the dialogue and interactions between the characters do. I savored watching Bea duel with Gale. Like a Patricia Highsmith novel, I had to keep reading to see if the narrator would be exposed and led away in handcuffs. What I loved about Stone Cold Fox is how strong the felonious protagonist is. Characters who are particularly bad at their jobs or make increasingly dumb decisions turn me off. High competency gets me turning the pages. I'm learning things. Bea is good at what she does. She recognizes how pampered and inbred the wealthy are, but doesn't respond with bitterness or entitlement for what they have. She uses that to her advantage. She gets to work. She knows exactly what she wants and how much work is required to take it, whether that means hacking social media accounts or breaking into a safe. I was with her. What initially irked me about Stone Cold Fox moving back and forth in time sets up an inevitable confrontation between Bea and Mother that was fun to anticipate. The enemies that Croft sets against Bea hail from a variety of backgrounds and are fun to watch get outfoxed. She writes a compelling male character in Collin Case, a decent man and good husband material whose shortcomings are convincingly portrayed as becoming a full-time job for Bea to manage, lest they fester and destroy the life she's carefully planned. I could visualize this novel being Season 1 of a TV series, with Sydney Sweeney and Cameron Diaz in the daughter-mother roles. I'm looking forward to what Croft publishes next, what looks to be a vampire novel that has The Hunger vibes. First paragraph: I decided that I would marry Collin Case after the fifth time we fucked. His performance had been consistently adequate, both in the bedroom and while we were out socially. We had been on seven dates, each more lavish than the one before it, raising the stakes suitably during our early courtship. Collin always selected an upscale bar or restaurant in a desirable neighborhood where people made no mistake about who he was, and therefore we were treated appropriately. He didn't tip like a Rockefeller, but I'd wager Rockefeller didn't even tip like a Rockefeller. Old money is old money for a reason and it's not to brighten some downtrodden server's day. So I didn't really care about Collin's standard 20 percent, since it was neither overtly cheap nor blatantly embarrassing. There was nothing blatantly embarrassing about Collin. Don't get me wrong, there was nothing terribly exciting about him either, but I knew that taking up with a man like Collin Case wouldn't exactly lead me down a path of intrigue and excitement and hot sex, which was precisely the point. Memorable prose: I actually made it a point to care about his well-being. I knew intimately that if you couldn't rely on your own mother, you're inevitably fucked-up forever about where to go for any sort of help. You just let any and all issues fester on the inside until you explode or melt down or spiral into a deep pit of despair, like Collin. Or use it as fuel, like I did, but most people weren't like me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 11, 2023
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Dec 13, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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Hardcover
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0812998626
| 9780812998627
| 0812998626
| 3.28
| 107,751
| May 16, 2023
| May 16, 2023
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really liked it
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My 500th book review is for The Guest by Emma Cline. Published in 2023, this is the author's second novel, her follow-up to The Girls. Like that book,
My 500th book review is for The Guest by Emma Cline. Published in 2023, this is the author's second novel, her follow-up to The Girls. Like that book, its power isn't in what happens but what the reader is allowed to imagine happens or has happened. It features many of the characteristics of the so-called "hot sad girl" novel--in which a beautiful but alienated young woman drifts through her existence, often with the assistance of drugs or alcohol--but subverts tropes by making the reader an active participant in the story rather than act on us. Alex (no last name, no ethnicity implied) is a twenty-two-year-old woman whose existence has been reduced to the favors she can elicit from men. After spending almost two weeks living comfortably with an art dealer in his Long Island beach house, Alex is expelled. With no money, no friends (or people willing to remain her friend), and an erratic ex-con she stole from texting her, Alex chooses to live by her wits for six days until she can crash her lover's Labor Day party, at which she's certain all will be forgiven. One of the visceral qualities of The Guest is how Cline reduces Alex's world to the whims of whatever patron she's attached herself to for survival. One social miscue or errant look could mean being forced onto the street. It's never spelled out what this woman's trade is. Alex reaps all the penalties of sex work--subject to the gratitude of her clients as well as their wrath--with none of the rewards, like a bankroll, or a pimp who invests in her. She doesn't use bathrooms as much as she pilfers them, for painkillers first and foremost. It's a feral existence. Often taking place on or near a beach, The Guest meets some of the standards of a summer or beach read, but rather than dispense candy, challenges the reader. This isn't the Hollywood version of a con woman on the make, it's the French New Wave version. Cline follows Alex around with absolute freedom, even if it leads to mundane encounters or repetitive conversations with men capable of little more. Her style is the literary equivalent of natural lighting or handheld camera: clean prose, rejection of plot, and a willingness to go off on tangents. I found this liberating and ultimately, very exciting. First paragraph: This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day. Memorable prose: She hadn’t ruined anything. Misfortune hadn’t touched Alex; it had only come close enough that she felt the cold air of a different outcome hurtling past. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 13, 2023
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Dec 02, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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Hardcover
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1101903732
| 9781101903735
| 1101903732
| 3.86
| 6,412
| Mar 30, 2016
| Apr 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Bill Beverly is his debut novel, Dodgers. Published in 2016, this is a stark, imaginatively rendered, compulsive rea
My introduction to the fiction of Bill Beverly is his debut novel, Dodgers. Published in 2016, this is a stark, imaginatively rendered, compulsive read. If Don Winslow were more journalist than scenarist, he might write a book like this. It's a road story, not legitimately a Los Angeles one, and I think the novel is far better for it. Sometimes, books set in a specific culture are prisoner to the culture they're trying to portray. They're too confined, waiting to break out or breathe. In setting four young men--two of them children, really--cross country to commit a murder, Beverly gives the novel momentum. And nothing tells us about the nature of a person like a long road trip. In the first of several cues that the author delivers with no elaboration, "East" is a fifteen-year-old in an L.A. neighborhood referred to only as "The Boxes." He's co-manager of a "house," seeing goods in, money out, supervising the entry-level runners standing watch, as well as the customers, dope addicts referred to as the "U." East has seen people shot, but never pulled a trigger himself. Two of his runners fail to provide warning and when the house is raided by police, East watches a young girl die in the crossfire. He's spared a severe reprimand by virtue of being nephew to the organization's boss, Fin. Fin gives East a new job, accompanying three boys on a trip to Wisconsin to kill a judge scheduled to testify against him. Michael Wilson, 20, is a motormouth whose specialty is getting the party out of polite situations. Walter, 19, is an overweight college boy whose specialty is brains. Ty, 13, is a killer, responsible for getting the party out of any impolite situations. He's also East's half-brother and though they share a mother, are not on speaking terms. To keep a low profile, the boys are sent off on the job in a minivan with fake IDs, no contraband and no cell phones, just a number to call for guns when they reach Iowa. For uniforms, they're bought L.A. Dodgers gear. Because white people love baseball. East has never been out of Los Angeles before. In the center seat, he had an overview--he could watch the streets, watch these boys. Michael Wilson's head bobbed as he drove, talking, talking. Talking all the time, to everyone, even himself, a flow: he made music of it, he breathed through it. His sunglasses rode up top, and his head swung side to side, his white eyes dancing this way and that. So busy, East thought, working so hard. Walter, his head was lower down, bushier. He bugled off the seat into the middle and against the door. East had known some fat kids before, smart ones, worth something. But you couldn't work them in the yard. Not outside, a standing-up job. But Walter was getting tight with Michael Wilson. Giggling at him. "Never thought you'd be driving a fuckin' florist's vam," he proposed. Michael Wilson lifted his hands from the wheel. "It don't smell like flowers." East didn't mind the van. He liked the seat, the middle view, the drab shade. The carpet was blue. The seats were blue. The ceiling was a long faded grayish-blue, little pills of lint in the nap. Where he sat, the smoky windows were an arm's length away. They wouldn't roll down; they only popped out on a buckle hinge. That would do. Everything was an arm's length away. The less said about what happens once the boys leave L.A., the better. Dodgers reminded me of Stephen King's The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) if instead of a journey to see a dead body, four boys were going to make a dead body. It's not as poignant and it's not at all nostalgic, but it's not the typical caper either. Beverly seems more inspired by life than TV. This is an extremely polished, well-edited novel. There's nothing cluttering it up, not even the treats I enjoy but that writers can so easily overdo. I can't recall one pop culture reference. I can't recall one call-out to another author. Things happen for a reason. Dialogue is exchanged for a reason. Characters have clearly defined personalities that carry them through to the end. Each speaks differently, moves differently. Character is further revealed by their reaction to the obstacles on the job. We experience new things in the moment East experiences new things. Beverly trusts the reader. We understand what a "U" is without the author stopping to give an urban etymology lesson. He sprinkles the book with John Steinbeck-like flourishes of wisdom, impressions on how the world works and how to get along in it. -- He was no fun, and they respected him, for though he was young, he had none in him of what they hated most in themselves: their childishness. He had never been a child. Not that they had seen. -- All the land--people talked about America, someday you should see it, you should drive across it all. They didn't say how it got into your head. -- The molding a group of boys you'd maybe met yesterday into the people your life depended on. And never to know whether you'd succeeded. Only to await the moments of test. Like this one. -- You could be wrong about anything. -- Perry trusted him. But maybe trust was a trick. Maybe trust was the act that not trusting put on when there was no better alternative. Beverly teaches American literature and writing at Trinity Washington University in Washington DC. ...more |
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1
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Jun 30, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Dec 29, 2022
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Hardcover
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4.08
| 52,496
| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
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really liked it
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My introduction to the fiction of S. A. Cosby is Blacktop Wasteland. Published in 2020, this novel jumped off to a strong start with the things I savo
My introduction to the fiction of S. A. Cosby is Blacktop Wasteland. Published in 2020, this novel jumped off to a strong start with the things I savor in crime fiction: a strong protagonist with a unique skills set, a distinctive location, punchy writing and a propulsive story. While I rarely if ever read blurbs, the accolades by every crime writer from Dennis Lehane to Craig Johnson seem genuine for once. I thought the story settled into inevitable tropes with an ending never in question for a second, but Cosby writes some of the sharpest, most amusing similes I've read this side of Raymond Chandler and overall, I enjoyed the novel. Set in present day, Beauregard "Bug" Montage is owner/ operator of Montage Motors, a shop in fictional Red Hill, Virginia. Times are lean after a larger (and white owned) mechanic moves in and is able to underbid Beauregard. To help support his wife Kia and three children (his grown daughter is by another woman), Bug picks up quick cash street racing the customized '71 Plymouth Duster he inherited from his father, a notorious wheelman. Having spent five years in juvenile detention for mowing down three men with the Duster, men who were shaking down his father, as well as a close call driving in a heist that went sour, Beauregard has pledged to Kia to stay clean. Between a child who needs college money, another who needs braces, a toxic mother requiring hospice care and less money coming in than ever, Beauregard accepts work from a former partner, a redneck named Ronnie Sessions who has information that a jewelry store is expecting a shipment of uncut diamonds. Ronnie boned their previous job, in which a racehorse they stole died in transit because dumbshit Ronnie didn't know the animal required special medication. Beauregard refuses to sell the Duster, the last piece of his father he feels that he has left, and finds no other way but resorting to a life of crime to pay the bills. The mountain of bills on the desk had gotten higher. It was like financial plate tectonics. He sat down and began going through them. He divided them into two different piles. Thirty days past due and final notice. He had a credit card with about $200 left on it. He could use that to pay the light bill. But that would burn up his budget for supplies. He wasn't robbing Peter to pay Paul. They had both ganged up on him and were mugging him. Blacktop Wasteland is Cosby's second published novel and is pure crime fiction, like Michael Crichton was pure science fiction. Unlike Crichton who trafficked in high concept thrillers helped along by some characters, Cosby writes vivid characters helped along by some plot. His protagonist is Black, rooted in a meager existence if not poverty, born and raised in the South, in a culture where cars--gasoline-powered American cars--still signify power, and how men drive offers freedom or escape. If Cosby is a gearhead, I didn't get that impression from the novel, which moves at a professional clip without descending into a user's manual. My only complaint is how routine the second half of the novel became, adhering to genre expectations and the inevitable introduction of a crime boss who the protagonist has no choice but work one last job for. This boss doesn't feed people to pigs, which I've seen on film more times than I needed to, but he's along those same despicable lines and is as unbelievable as Bug is believable. Daniel Woodrell writes crime fiction that while at times hazy, is also more believable, deeply rooted in rural culture. Cosby's direction seems more like a deliberate choice and not a defect in the book, though. Blacktop Wasteland succeeds because of how unique it is compared to recent rural crime thrillers I've read. Instead of colorful locals, the focus is on a person of color whose experiences as a Black man have shaped his experiences and his view of the world. More than his race, Beauregard is a prisoner to his skills set, which offers his family a possible escape from poverty but also sets him down the same road that doomed his father. There was a lot more for me to chomp on here than the standard crime thriller and to genre fans, I highly recommend it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 10, 2023
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Mar 21, 2023
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Dec 22, 2022
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Hardcover
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1542034264
| 9781542034265
| 1542034264
| 3.51
| 9,939
| Aug 01, 2022
| Aug 01, 2022
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Amina Akhtar is Kismet. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir
My introduction to the fiction of Amina Akhtar is Kismet. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. I finished the prologue and one chapter in roughly 20 minutes before abandoning it. I don't read books to hate them and wanted to love this one as I start my jag into recently published crime fiction. But this is the fourth skunk in a row recommended by CrimeReads. Actually, skunks are cute. They defend themselves like any other creature but in a particularly malodorous way. Skunks are misunderstood. Kismet concerns Ronnie Khan, a young woman who relocates from New York to Sedona, Arizona with a co-worker named Marley Dewhurst, and gets indoctrinated into the healthy living lifestyle and larger wellness community of the region. Some ravens visiting Ronnie in her dreams lead her to bury a body she's made dead in the prologue, but really, if you lived in the version of Sedona characterized in this novel, you wouldn't need dreams, birds or dreams of birds to drive you to murder. Nothing in the first chapter of this novel adheres to any organizational intelligence. Ronnie has agreed to not only move in with a blow-up doll she vaguely knows from work (that would be Marley, in case the name didn't give it away) but move cross country with her to a region she's never been. Was Ronnie offered a better paying job? Is she getting over a trauma? Is she impulsive? No, she just moves to Sedona, because that's funny, right? While suffering on a hike with Marley (apparently, no one in New York is accustomed to walking), Ronnie discovers a dismembered corpse. Right there on the trail, a man's head on an agave plant. Marley tells Ronnie to drink more water. Because the more Marley repeats healthy living mantras, the funnier the book will be, right? Why Ronnie would leave New York with a nitwit she doesn't even like is more mysterious than how the head got there. The writing is bad bad bad bad bad, telling telling exaggerated points telling. Meditation time was over. "Let's get lunch!" Marley chiriped. She was completely unfazed by the human body parts they'd seen just that morning. Ronnie tried to shake it off too. But she couldn't help it. She felt sad for the person and terrified that things like that happened in this cheerful tourist town. [image] I guess I don't cotton to comic or "darkly comic" novels written as if everything is a joke. Whatever the humor, that really needs to originate from the character and resemble what someone would do or say if they encountered a ridiculous situation. Things can't just pile on because they seem funny without laying a foundation in truth first. That's my comedy opinion, anyway. Caroline Kepnes and Alex Segura are among the crime writers who provided blurbs. Every bad novel ever published traditionally has one or more blurbs from other published authors lauding it, though. The bright spot here is the cover design by Shasti O'Leary Soudant. Red bluffs, a bloody swimming pool, a raven and ominous storm clouds. I should've taken that as a warning. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 29, 2022
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Dec 29, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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0802159982
| 9780802159984
| 0802159982
| 4.10
| 2,244
| 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Chris Offutt is Shifty's Boys. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the bes
My introduction to the fiction of Chris Offutt is Shifty's Boys. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. This is the third swing and a miss from the book nuts at CrimeReads. I skimmed Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski and abandoned Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor. With Shifty's Boys I gave up halfway through, but darn gorn liked enough of it to add an extra star. These are books, do involve crime and are professionally edited. I didn't notice any spelling errors. Beyond that, these authors haven't given me much of a reason to keep turning pages of their books. The story involves an army CID officer named Mick Hardin who's been wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. Reaching the last leg of his rehab, Mick has claimed his wife in Rocksalt, Kentucky can take care of him and receives permission to return home. In fact, Mick's wife has left him. He moves in with his sister Linda Hardin, newly elected town sheriff, who prefers living alone and wishes her brother would go back to the army. Mick is summoned by Shifty, the matriarch of a backwoods heroin peddling family to look into the murder of her boy Fuckin' Barney, who was found shot dead in town. That's his name: Fuckin' Barney. Shifty's Boys isn't a cozy mystery but it is very easy going. It makes some of Elmore Leonard's novels feel meticulous. Like Leonard, Offutt surfs the rhythms of day-to-day living pretty honestly. His characters are eccentrics. There's a deputy sheriff with an inordinate interest in Kentucky trivia. There's a cab driver who dreams of being a race car driver. There's the inventor who's working on the town's solar energy problem (the hills don't allow sufficient sunlight in to power solar panels). The chief reason to read or finish reading books like this is to simply hang out with the characters. Nothing of import happens, kind of like real life. I'd literally be more interested in a novel about a dog stuck in a tree (one of Offutt's small town developments) than follow an amateur detective who for lack of anything on TV looks into the death of a hillbilly heroin dealer. It feels credibly "small town" (I like how "ought" is spelled "ort" in one passage of dialogue) and the author's procedural detail is on point, but there are zero stakes. Mick Hardin pokes around and asks questions without any threat to his physical or existential well-being because this allows Offutt to introduce more characters. While cute, I didn't adore these characters nearly as much as the author seems to. There's nothing remarkable here about the story or characters. Army veteran who's real observant with crime scenes. A female sheriff. Dueling hillbilly drug families. This seems like Rural Crime Fiction 101. It's every episode of Justified without Timothy Olyphant or Carla Gugino to stare at. It's most every Jack Reacher novel, albeit dialed down to a 2 without Lee Child's explosive body count or cockadoodie conspiracies. I didn't hate Shifty's Boys, I just wasn't provided any reason to continue reading it and not watch Justified. [image] ...more |
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1
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Dec 26, 2022
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Dec 27, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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1641293454
| 9781641293457
| 1641293454
| 3.66
| 3,653
| Mar 22, 2022
| Mar 22, 2022
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the be
My introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. Set in the fictional Arkansas town of Denton, as near as I can tell, the story involves a deeply troubled high school star football player environmentally, culturally and lots of other ways predisposed to violence standing up to his mother's abusive boyfriend, who lives with them in their trailer, and the efforts of the new football coach to cover up the boy's crime. I abandoned this at the 20% mark. In his ten rules of writing, Elmore Leonard cautioned against overdosing on patois and Cranor demonstrates why, including chapters in which the football player tells his story in his own dialect. His vernacular reads like rural Black but it's soon clarified that the boy and his family are white, hailing from a part of Arkansas closer to Memphis where the poor white folks speak the same as the poor Black folks. Whatever the dialect is or who's using it, I quickly grew exhausted by it. This is the sort of thing that gets tiring in between quotation marks, much less entire chapters. Now it game time, and Coach still letting me run through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. Even say he gonna let me walk out on the field at halftime for Senior Night. But I ain't told Momma. He'd wanna walk too, and I'll be damned if He get to walk out there like He my daddy. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain't blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the fight song when Billy Lowe run across the goal line. There’s a wide gulf between despicable characters I need to keep an eye on and despicable characters I can ignore. This novel is full of the latter. I did not like the characters, not because I disapproved of them, but because their problems weren’t compelling. The football player is a menace, despised by his teammates for assaulting them in practice or during games. The coach is a doormat who was fired for posting a losing record at his previous job and has lost the locker room of his new one. The kids he wants to mentor think he’s a joke and so did I. He's under the thumb of his manipulative wife, who hates Arkansas and wants to win at all costs so they can find opportunity elsewhere. I also didn't get the sense that any of these characters lived and breathed or even knew a lot about football. Not that I want a book to read like a John Madden play-by-play but based on their preparation or performance on the gridiron, they don't seem very competent at football. These characters could just as well been a wrestler and wrestling coach and wrestling coach's wife for all the football IQ they muster. The description from the publisher compares the novel to the work of Megan Abbott, but in Abbott's expertly tailored noir fiction, where immortality is afoot in gymnastics or drill team or high school STEM programs, I learn something about those activities and the psychologies of those competing in them at the highest levels. I didn't feel this author had done his homework enough to competently place me in the world of small town football or invest me in his characters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 25, 2022
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Dec 25, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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0525950559
| 9780525950554
| 0525950559
| 3.77
| 2,456
| 2008
| Feb 05, 2008
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it was ok
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I pulled L.A. Outlaws off the library shelf on a whim because I enjoyed T. Jefferson Parker's latest novel, A Thousand Steps, I can't get enough of cr
I pulled L.A. Outlaws off the library shelf on a whim because I enjoyed T. Jefferson Parker's latest novel, A Thousand Steps, I can't get enough of crime novels set in Southern California, particularly as I write one, and the synopsis for this one, published in 2008, seemed compelling. A bandit calling herself Allison Murietta is on a crime spree, holding up fast food restaurants and donating the proceeds to charity. Allison, who is actually a history teacher and mother of three named Suzanne Jones, snatches a bag of diamonds and her life gets even more complicated as rookie sheriff's deputy Charlie Hood starts romancing her. Parker writes about law enforcement with aplomb. The paragraphs he devotes to grand theft auto, or smuggling at the Port of Long Beach were interesting. His characters weren't. Their backgrounds are fleshed out sufficiently but narrative voice alternates oddly between Allison/Suzanne's first-person accounting and Hood's third-person investigating. The latter is pointless because the reader already has the information Hood is seeking. The opportunity to make Allison/ Suzanne the focus or generate suspense while she's sleeping with the "enemy" is fumbled away. What's here is a dime-a-dozen tale of stolen gems and the maniac killer pursuing them. ...more |
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1
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 03, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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0517118580
| 9780517118580
| 0517118580
| 4.23
| 110
| Jan 01, 1969
| Oct 23, 1994
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it was amazing
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This is my re-read of James M. Cain's classics, compiled here in one hardcover volume. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are novella
This is my re-read of James M. Cain's classics, compiled here in one hardcover volume. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are novella-length works each 88 pages in length, while Mildred Pierce draws 222 pages. Some contemporary authors struggle to finish one story in less than 400 pages, so I was able to read all three of these in a week. Cain is my Vitamin C for the generic and often dull assignments of book club, where the selections satisfy some of the requirements of a book and little else for me. Cain, on the other hand, doesn't write books, he writes stories. My kind of stories. Stories loaded with lust, greed, morbid self-intentions and Los Angeles, in this case, Depression-era Los Angeles, when the American Dream was blown to dust and it was every man or woman for themselves. It was anything goes. Cain though shows great discipline in not giving over to the hard-boiled adornments some of his contemporaries did. Mildred Pierce isn't a hard-boiled novel at all, even though a fine one was lurking there in the weeds for him to exploit. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) [image] Because there is no literal postman or ringing in the story, I always assumed that "the postman always rings twice" must've been something Cain heard and simply thought would make a terrific title. Upon reread, I think the title has a meaning that does apply to the story, one dealing with fate and how everyone takes their turn to pay. Written from the point of view of drifter Frank Chambers, I didn't relate to how quickly things escalated between Frank and his boss's wife Cora, even from a standpoint of lust and greed. I did love how Cain painted the lovers psychologically, with Frank not only wanting but needing to ramble on down the road, while Cora knew the wanderer's life was not for her. Something had to come to a head. Cain suggests that the only judges on earth are a jury of your peers, and your own conscience, with the former being much easier to fool than the latter. I cracked up a little then myself, and put my head on her shoulder. "That's just where we are. We can kid ourselves all we want to, and laugh about the money, and whoop about what a swell guy the devil is to be in bed with, but that's just where we are. I was going off with that woman, Cora. We were going to Nicaragua to catch cats. And why I didn't go away, I knew I had to come back. We're chained to each other, Cora. We thought we were on top of a mountain. That wasn't it. It's on top of us, that's where it's been ever since that night." There's a beautiful motif in this novella of a swim in the Pacific Ocean as a sort of natural lie-detector test, able to divine the truth from Frank and Cora: do they love each other enough to save the other from drowning, or is fear of each other what binds them together? The surf not only establishes that this is a Los Angeles story but is a wonderful device on the part of Cain. [image] Double Indemnity (1936) [image] I struggled more with this novella than I did with The Postman Always Rings Twice to suss out why the narrator--all-American insurance salesman Walter Huff--would descend into a vortex of sex and murder with his client's wife, the awkwardly named Phyllis Nirdlinger (changed to Phyllis Dietrichson for the classic Billy Wilder film in 1944). A hobo I can see coming in hot, but a respectable insurance salesman with everything to lose? Walter tells the reader he's seen so much mayhem in his profession that none of it is real to him anymore, but it doesn't seem plausible to me. Cain ultimately writes a darker and more vivid character in Phyllis, but so much of it ends up being told to the reader rather than shown. In the eighty-five years since this novella was published, I've also seen the femme fatale portrayed as a devil woman enough times that I wanted more complexity to her character. Where this story succeeds for me is Walter's mastery of the insurance business, how that plays into his scheming and how his company knows immediately that Phyllis' husband didn't commit suicide or fall accidentally from a train but was murdered. I stared into the darkness some more that night. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman. The woman was a killer, out-and-out, and she had made a fool of me. She had used me for a cat's paw so she could have another man, and she had enough on me to hang me higher than a kite. If the man was in on it, there were two of them that could hang me. I got to laughing, a hysterical cackle, there in the dark. The plot is dependent on so much antiquated technology that it felt as if I'd traveled to another time to read how a murder might be committed in 1936, with telephones and doorbells, train schedules and porters, a dictaphone, the radio or picture show schedules and even a house servant being important considerations. I thought it added to the story's allure, though. Told in Walter's voice, the specter of death hangs over the proceedings from the first paragraph to the dynamite conclusion. Mildred Pierce (1941) [image] Ask me what my favorite novel is, I'd say Mildred Pierce. Is the prose brilliant? Not in any obvious way. Is the dialogue just like how people talk? Not really. Is there something compelling happening on every page? Absolutely. And it is a rare novel I can truly say that about. What delights me is how Cain had every opportunity to write a lurid hard-boiled tale, of a housewife whose husband leaves her in 1931 to raise two children and whose opportunity to open a restaurant simply requires he grant her a divorce. Rather than murder or inquests, Mildred Pierce is haunted by her need for the love of her ungrateful daughter Veda, one of literature's purest and most ruthless sociopaths. This need flattens Mildred as evenly as Frank or Walter's schemes, but it's a scheme of the heart. Leaving Veda alone was something that hadn't entered her mind, but after she cooled off she thought about it. However, she was incapable of leaving Veda alone. In the first place, she had an honest concern about her. In the second place, she had become so accustomed to domineering over the many lives that depended on her, that patience, wisdom, and tolerance had almost ceased to be a part of her. And in the third place, there was this feeling she had about Veda, that by now permeated every part of her, and colored everything she did. To have Veda play the piece about rainbows, just for her, was delicious. To have her scream at her was painful, but bearable, for at least it was that she was being screamed at. To have her lying there on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and not even thinking about her, was an agony too great to be borne. Mildred has none of the privileges that Frank or Walter do. She has two children to raise and two mortgages to pay with no education, no job experience and no one putting any money on the table, in no less than the Great Depression. When a job recruiter tells her she has no chance, I believed her. Mildred has no necessity for sex or money, but the approval of her oldest daughter, a need that builds her to tremendous heights and then threatens to destroy everything she's worked for. Cain has honed his expertise in matters like real estate or hospitality and melded it with a firm understanding of human emotion and the need for love. [image] I'm sure my ardor for these three stories is bolstered a bit by how many times Hollywood turned and returned to them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 03, 2022
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Nov 11, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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Hardcover
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033048138X
| 9780330481380
| 033048138X
| 3.56
| 1,458
| 1999
| 2001
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Sep 05, 2022
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Paperback
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059308490X
| 9780593084908
| 059308490X
| 3.11
| 22,431
| Aug 03, 2021
| Aug 03, 2021
|
really liked it
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"Slow burn" is a term that's overused and can describe almost any book. The Bible is a slow burn. But Megan Abbott's eleventh novel The Turnout could'
"Slow burn" is a term that's overused and can describe almost any book. The Bible is a slow burn. But Megan Abbott's eleventh novel The Turnout could've been titled Slow Burn and gotten away with it. Published in 2021, the story takes place in an American ballet school owned and operated by the twin daughters of a renowned ballet instructor, as well as the husband/ brother-in-law who is a former dancer too. What the book is, where it's going and when crime is going to come into play are drawn out. The author tested my patience, but rewarded it also. Dara & Marie Durant's mother was founder of the Durant School of Dance. Their father was an electrician. Their childhood centered on ballet and the Victorian house where the four lived and few visited. The exception was Charlie, a prized pupil of their mother's handed off to Madame Durant at age thirteen when his mother relocated to England. Charlie moved in and never left, marrying Dara, the darker and steelier of the sisters. Marie fluctuates between childlike and childish innocence. She lived with Dara & Charlie in their childhood home, three against the world after their parents died in a car accident when they were teenagers. The Durant School of Dance is now theirs, with over a hundred girls and boys from the ages of three to fifteen. While Marie instructs the youngest, Dara drives the advanced students. Charlie, who suffered a broken C2 neck bone in his youth and can no longer dance or teach, handles the books and helps manage parents. As the novel begins, the Durants have begun the school's annual preparations for The Nutcracker: eight weeks of auditions, rehearsals and costume fittings culminating in sixteen performances with the Mes Filles Ballet Company. The Nutcracker pays their bills. The Nutcracker is a necessary evil. The Nutcracker. The story was so simple, a child's story, but full of mystery and pain. At her family's holiday party, a young girl named Clara finds herself transfixed by her dark and charismatic godfather, Drosselmeier. He gives her a miniature man, a Nutcracker doll she sneaks into bed with her, dreaming him into a young man, a fantasy lover who ushers her into a dream world of unimaginable splendor. And, at ballet's end, she rides off with him on a sleigh into the deep, distant forest. The end of girlhood and the furtive entry into the dark beyond. All the girls wanted to be Clara, of course. Clara was the star. There were crying jags and stiff upper lips and silent sobs among the dozens forced to play one of many Party Girls, Angels, Candy Canes. They wanted to wear Clara's stiff white party dress, her flowing white nightgown. They wanted to hold the grinning Nutcracker doll like a scepter. This yearning, so deep among the young girls, was like money in the bank. Every year, fall enrollment increased twenty percent because of these girls wanting to be Clara. Soon after, their winter enrollment increased another ten percent from girls in the audience who fell in love with the tutus and magic. Never, their mother used to say, that vaguely French frisson in her voice as she collected the fees, do I feel more American. Eight months previous, Marie moved out on Dara & Charlie to squat in the third floor attic of the dance school, a space accessible by an iron spiral staircase where their mother often hid to avoid her discontented husband. Marie articulates her decision no more clearly than "it was time." Dara takes this act personally, feeling abandoned by her twin. Charlie offered that Marie would be back, but that hasn't bared out. Soon after auditions for The Nutcracker are complete, an old space heater Marie was using to camp in Studio B starts a fire that guts the smallest of their three rehearsal spaces. Charlie interviews two contractors before he gets to Derek, recommended by the mother of their new Clara and vouched for by their insurance agent. A big personality, Derek knows how to flatter. He upsells the Durants from merely smoke-lacquering the studio and cleaning the ducts to getting rid of the burnt storage room behind Studio B, raising the ceiling and expanding the studio to twice its size, with the insurance company covering it, of course. Bursting with too many students, Charlie and Marie go for the idea of expansion. Dara dislikes Derek from the start. A muddy, noisy, course presence in the ballet school, Derek's behavior gets a bit flagrant, watching Dara, asking her about her house and the ménage à trois between her, her husband and her sister. Then she catches Marie getting fucked by the contractor on the studio floor. Assured by Marie that the sex is consensual (and spectacular), Dara bristles at Derek crudely inserting himself into their lives. Construction delays suggest he might not be out of their business anytime soon. Then Derek mentions that Marie was never paid for her interest in the house and never quit-claiming herself off the deed, may be entitled to money. Anyone familiar with the noir genre can anticipate what happens next. What was initially frustrating to me was how long The Turnout took to get there. What is this? Caper? Murder mystery? Stalker thriller? Somehow, "horror" has been lobbed in to describe this novel and I do not concur with that categorization at all. This is a crime thriller, very much in line with the author's terrific bibliography, but that wasn't clear to me until page 200/340. Polaroid snapshot paragraphs fail to develop the characters or scenario clearly. In hindsight, this feels deliberate. I'm glad I rolled with it because this turned into supremely good noir. Megan Abbott has hatched criminal conspiracies on a high school drill team (Dare Me), a gymnastics squad comprised of teenage Olympic hopefuls (You Will Know Me) and among women who met in high school STEM (Give Me Your Hand). This is an author who clearly sat at the front of the class as opposed to ditching it to hang out at the mall. (I'm banking on archery being Abbott's next milieu.) Setting The Turnout in a ballet school preparing for The Nutcracker distinguishes this thriller from any other I can think of. Her research is on point. The way she intersects performing arts and crime is sophisticated. You never wanted the studios to be too warm. A little chill helped keep the energy up, to offset the natural heat emitted by bundles of young girls. But now it was so frigid that, before class began, the youngest girls shivered in their leotards, skin dimpled, huddling together for warmth. Rows of them, pink and paler pink--like a rabbit's ear. "Hey!" Derek said when Dara and Charlie arrived, all their studio layers wrapped around their bodies like mummies, "how's that furnace holding out on you over on Sycamore?" Here he was again, talking about their house. "It's fine," Charlie said, walking past Derek, his eyes catching on the state of Studio B, which seemed to have remained in the subfloor stage for days and days now. What work were they doing? Derek turned to Dara. "Those big Victorians gotta land you a heating bill in four digits," he said. Dara didn't say anything, draping her coat over her arm, navigating the cords, the chaos. "Or maybe I'm wrong," he said finally. Men like this, she thoughts, had to fill the air, fill the space. Any room they were in. "Maybe you never even have to turn on the heat." Lifting a power cord from her path, leaning close as she tried to pass. "I bet you don't.: He put his hand on her coat, her coat on her arm. "I bet your house is hot, hot, hot." Abbott is a gifted observer of how people bounce off each other, how a young couple who don't know a Phillips from a flat head screwdriver become dependent on their contractor, exposing their finances, their relationship and their family history to a man who's at best a con artist scamming the insurance company. The relationship between Dara, Charlie & Marie is compelling as well. I've observed domestic arrangements between siblings or friends emotionally dependent on each other and wondered what was going on. Abbott is my kind of author, sneaking into houses and telling us what she found in there, behind those closed doors. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2023
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Feb 24, 2023
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Apr 23, 2022
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Hardcover
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B0DTRJZCRX
| 4.02
| 34,965
| Dec 07, 1999
| unknown
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really liked it
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My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in December 1999, Void Moon is a standalone n
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. Published in December 1999, Void Moon is a standalone novel by Michael Connelly that's a departure from his L.A. police procedurals as well as my amateur detective jag. It's set firmly in Elmore Leonard territory, featuring an ex-con named Cassie Black whose path to the straight life is complicated by her need for One Last Job. You could fill a shelf at Blockbuster Video with the One Last Job subgenre, but this one is a work of high wire suspense with two terrific adversaries and all the detail I savor in a Connelly novel. Set on the eve of the millennium, the story introduces Cassie Black acting distracted. She tours a California Craftsman bungalow in Laurel Canyon that's hit the market due to the young owners moving to Paris with their six-year-old daughter. Cassie clearly has no intention of buying the house and seems more curious about the girl. Employed as a saleswoman at "Hollywood Porsche," Cassie's mind isn't on the twentysomething screenwriter she takes on a test run on Mulholland Drive. During an appointment with her tough but fair parole officer Thelma Kibble, Cassie shares her interest in relocating to Paris and nearly has her parole status elevated to High Control. Cassie phones an associate named Leo Renfro she hasn't spoken to since her five-year prison term in Nevada. She asks for two passports and work. Cash. One job. Leo is half-brother to a man who Cassie was intimately involved with before her imprisonment named Max Freeling. Leo fields Cassie a hot prowl in Las Vegas, burglarizing the hotel room of a mark who's checked in with $500,000 cash in a briefcase. The job would take her back to the "Cleopatra," the site of Cassie's arrest and also the place Max met his fate, falling out--or being helped out--of a penthouse on the twentieth floor. Cassie takes the job and prepares. She bought screwdrivers, iron files, hacksaw blades and hammers, bailing wire, nylon twine and bungee cords. She bought a box of latex gloves, a small tub of earthquake wax, a Swiss Army knife and a painter's putty knife with a three-inch-wide blade. She bought a small acetylene torch and went to three hardware stores before finding a small enough battery-powered and rechargeable drill. She bought rubber-tipped pliers, wire cutters and aluminum shears. She added a Polaroid camera and a man's long-sleeved wet suit top to her purchases. She bought big and small flashlights, a pair of tile worker's knee pads and an electric stun gun. She bought a black leather backpack, a black fanny pack and belt, and several black zipper bags of varying sizes that could be folded and carried inside one of the backpack's pockets. Lastly, in every store she went to she bought a keyed padlock, amassing a collection of seven locks made by entirely different manufacturers and thereby containing seven slightly different locking mechanisms. Leo is a superstitious man who consults the stars before making plans. He warns Cassie of a void moon on the night of the job, a sixteen-minute period when the moon will move from Cancer to Leo at four o'clock in the morning. He considers this bad luck time and warns Cassie not to make her move during the void moon. Her bad luck begins in Las Vegas buying special equipment from a contact she used on her last job, a man named Jersey Paltz who works for a lighting wholesaler that supplies the casinos. Picking up on Cassie's desperation and the news she's working alone, Jersey complicates her job. Using a key card an insider at the Cleopatra leaves for her, Cassie rigs the mark's room with cameras that will allow her to monitor his movements and detect the combination to his closet safe. She's trapped in the closet during the void moon and almost makes her escape before the mark stirs awake. The story then jumps to the aftermath, with the mark shot dead and the hotel's chief of security Vincent Grimaldi hiring private investigator Jack Karch to recover the money, which the boss puts at $2.5 million. Grimaldi wants to keep the cops out of this because the money was a bribe by Cuban gangsters in Florida looking to win a bid on the aging casino. Karch--a Las Vegas local whose father was a stage magician--has been resigned to missing persons work or burying problems for casino bosses in the desert. Grimaldi did him a favor six years ago when Karch caught Max Freeling on a job and the thief dove out, or was pushed out, a penthouse at the Cleo. Karch sees an opportunity to secure his independence. Using video surveillance from the casino, he tracks the mark to Cassie to the vehicle she parked at a neighboring casino. This leads Karch to Jersey which eventually leads him back to Hollywood Porsche, where Karch gets Cassie alone by pretending to be a customer. Cassie reached her right hand up and gripped the top of the windshield brace. Her mind was moving as fast as the car as she tried to come up with a plan, an escape. "Actually, Lankford's not my name," the man next to her was saying. "I got it off a book I found on a shelf at Leo Renfro's last night. It's called Shooters and I started taking a look at it. I thought it was about a guy in my line of work but it wasn't. But, hell, when your boss came up to me in the showroom and asked my name, it's all I could come up with on short notice, you know. My name is Karch. Jack Karch. And I've come for the money, Cassie Black." Through the terror building inside Cassie a thought pressed forward. Jack Karch, she thought. I know that name. Void Moon reminded me of those kitchen magnet sets that have keywords you can arrange into the sentences of your heart's content and stick to the fridge. "Woman," "cat burglar," "Porsche showroom," "Mulholland Drive," "Y2K," "sleazy private investigator" and "astrology" are some of these words. Most everything Michael Connelly plugs into the novel was cool or compelling to me. Details are sharply researched. (There's actually far more information here about GPS tracking in 1999 than I wanted). I am a sucker when it comes to lists and could read about Cassie's kit or how she trains for high-line burglary all day. In the small bungalow she rented on Selma near the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, she spread her purchases out on the scarred Formica-topped table in the kitchen and readied her equipment, wearing gloves at all times when she handled each piece. She used the shears and the torch to make lock picks from the bailing wire and hacksaw blades. She made a double set of three picks: a tension spike, a hook and a thin, flat tumbler pick. She put one set in a Ziploc bag and buried it in the garden outside the back door. The other set she put aside with the tools for the job she hoped would be coming from Leo very soon. She cut half a sleeve off the wet suit and used it to encase the drill, sewing the sound-deadening rubber tightly in place with the nylon twine. From the rest of the wet suit she could quietly carry her custom-made burglary kit. While I swear I've seen this plot done in a Kim Basinger movie called The Real McCoy, Void Moon gets close to being as good as the best Elmore Leonard I've read to date. It's both taut and colorful. Connelly lacks Leonard's facility with dialogue and the novel isn't one I'll reread, but I loved the way he withheld information rather than telling everything about Cassie in the first three chapters. He puts her on a collision course with a terrific adversary in Jack Karch and mines a criminal underworld in which nobody can rely on help from the police. It's a superb western caper in that way and very exciting. While reading, I imagined Diane Lane as Cassie Black. She was attached to play the character in a movie that almost went before cameras in late 2003 with Mimi Leder directing. Al Pacino was set to play Jack Karch. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 14, 2022
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Feb 16, 2022
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Dec 24, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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0976715732
| 9780976715733
| 0976715732
| 3.90
| 186
| Dec 01, 2007
| Dec 01, 2007
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really liked it
|
A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir is a terrific collection of 24 original short stories that generally involve women, some drawn very bad
A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir is a terrific collection of 24 original short stories that generally involve women, some drawn very bad, who dip their toes in illicit activity. Published in 2007, the contributors who I was familiar with are Sara Gran, Daniel Woodrell, Naomi Hirahara, Alison Gaylin and Christa Faust. Their stories are among the best, but one of the things I love about books like this--compiled by Megan Abbott, who pens an introduction--is discovering writers I was unfamiliar with. Five stars for: -- The Chirashi Covenant, Naomi Hirahara. My favorite story concerns Helen Miura, a Los Angeles woman who married while interned in a "relocation center" during World War II. Helen is the daughter of a fisherman and a master with a knife, skills which come in handy when her lover, a Caucasian realtor, turns obsessive. I love a female character with a rarified skill set and Hirahara's glimpse into the Japanese American community of L.A. always make her stories pop. Her contribution to Los Angeles Noir was one of my favorites in that book too. -- The Big O, Vicki Hendricks. Noir + Florida = jackpot. An unnamed narrator gets tired of her boyfriend smacking her and flees with their infant son. She hides out at the Touch of Class Trailer Park in Lake Okeechobee, "the Big O," where a drug peddler, his stash and an incoming hurricane present an opportunity. I loved the details, the voice and the sleazy atmosphere Hendricks conjures. I drove down the strip, reading names that would've been attractive if I'd seen them in the Yellow Pages. Lakeside Haven, Quiet Waters Retreat, Jenny's Big O Fish Camp, Water's Edge RV--sure, there was water, a canal that flowed behind the trailers, but the fifteen-foot dike behind the canal, surrounding the lake like an Indian burial mound, didn't give a peek at Lake Okeechobee. The berm, as they called it, kept the lake from drowning thousands at every hurricane, like I heard happened in the Twenties, when the water flowed over farms. Even so, I was wondered how all these tin cans had made it through the last hurricane season. I pictured them in a big blow, rolling and bouncing into each other, corners smashed and contents banging around like pebbles in a rock tumbler. I'd seen the wreckage of a trailer park near the coast, a few homes untouched through sheer luck, amid fifty or more smashed and resting on their sides, soggy insulation hanging out in clumps. But here were many survivors, thank god--cheap, crusty boxes, perfect housing for an unemployed alcoholic single mother. -- The End of Indian Summer, Stona Fitch. Kate Hands is a Cherokee who works as a waitress at a roadside coffeeshop in Oklahoma called the Redskin Cafe. She hooks up with a cocky truck driver who fills her ears with all sorts of assurances. When he turns to beating her, Kate draws on two qualities she inherited from her mother--her knowledge of flowers and the ways of men. -- Cherish, Alison Gaylin. Myra Wurtz is a movie theater usher who becomes obsessed with a male screen idol she feels a special connection with. Myra believes he wants her to get rid of the co-star he's recently backed out of an affair with and who threatens his marriage. Gaylin gets into the head of her crazed lone assassin, who seems like she stepped out of an Edwin Hopper painting. -- Uncle, Daniel Woodrell. The unnamed narrator lives in fear of her vile uncle, who's in the habit of capturing and raping women whose canoes deposit them on the banks near their land, bullish that the law won't come out that way to ask him too many questions. Fans of Winter's Bone will recognize the stark Appalachian setting and its tyrannical men, along with another young woman trying to survive both. Uncle culled these girls from down on the river, which they came here for, and flows just yonder over our ridge and down a steep hill. They come here from where there are crowds of people bunched in tight to loll along our crystal water in college shirts and bikinis, smoking weed and drinking too much, laughing all the way while their canoes spin on the river like bugs twirling in a spider's web. Mostly they don't know what they're doing, but the river is not too raging or anything. Everybody thinks they can do that river when they stand looking at it up at Heaney Cross, where they rent the canoes and the water is smooth. Uncle dicks them when he catches them, on the smelly damp hay in the old barn, with the open spots above leaking light on his big behind bouncing white and glary on some girl whose eyes won't blink anymore. -- Round Heels, Vin Packer. An unnamed narrator recounts the one that got away, or perhaps she was lucky got away, in New York of the early 1950s. While this could be classified a "psycho ex-girlfriend" tale as opposed to noir, the tableau that Packer (a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker) draws of the lesbian community in NYC of the '50s is wonderful and she packs an impressive amount of suspense into her story. -- The Token Booth Clerk, Sara Gran. At 5 pages, this is not only one of the shortest stories in the book but also the least "noir." The unnamed narrator is a token booth attendant in the New York subway. Fiercely antisocial and caustic, she becomes obsessed with tracking down a friendly female neighbor who moves out of their building after one too many shouting matches with her boyfriend. Gran disregards every staple of noir to quickly and vividly draw a real person. If I were a creative writing instructor, A Hell of a Woman would be my textbook. It's fascinating to study how writers of different skill levels interpret their assignment: a female noir story 5-7 pages in length. The best writers resist familiar surroundings or outcomes to turn on historical or cultural details that set them apart. Some, like Gran and Hirahara, barely write what would be considered female noir at all. It's just compelling literature. I'd ask my class which stories were their favorites and why and the assignment would be to write their own female noir story. I'm available to teach at your school if you're interested. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 18, 2022
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Jul 26, 2022
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Sep 20, 2021
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Paperback
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193156115X
| 9781931561150
| 193156115X
| 3.97
| 11,360
| 2002
| Sep 01, 2002
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it was amazing
|
Thank you to Melki for not only discovering this lost valuable of Los Angeles noir but penning a stellar review that put it on my radar. Published in
Thank you to Melki for not only discovering this lost valuable of Los Angeles noir but penning a stellar review that put it on my radar. Published in 2002, The Contortionist's Handbook is my introduction to Craig Clevenger. This is the first person account of "Daniel John Fletcher," née Steven Benjamin Edwards, originally John Dolan Vincent, a forger in his mid-20s whose drug addiction routinely leads to overdose which leads to 72-hour psychiatric evaluation for suicide risk. Clevenger spares no detail when it comes to the pharmaceutical and psychiatric care of an addict, as well as the fine art of making people disappear. Due to a hospital's legal obligation to determine whether an overdose patient attempted suicide and is a risk to themselves, "Danny" has to meet with a psychiatric evaluator before being cleared to return home to his girlfriend, a cocktail waitress named Keara. He not only has to convince the evaluator that he's "not a head case," but maintain the false identity he's operating under, answering questions in the way he's trained himself, using body language in the way he's trained himself. During his interview with a weathered psychiatrist in his mid-thirties, the narrator fills the reader in on how he came to be a "contortionist," the job title he prefers to "forger". John Dolan Vincent and his sister were raised by a single mother, a coffeeshop waitress. His father was away often, claiming to be digging for gold, but most likely in the hoosegow. John is polydactyly; his left hand has a duplicate metacarpus (ring finger). From a young age, he suffered crippling migraines his father referred to as godsplitters and as an adult lead John to self-medicate with drugs. At the age of 9, John's father bought him a book on sleight of hand, which he used not only to hide his extra digit but perfect the art of shoplifting. With barely one parent at home and an indifferent school system, he began a career forging documents. Maybe you stiffed somebody for a lot of cash. Maybe that somebody wears three-hundred-dollar sweatsuits and runs his business in a coded ledger out of a pawnshop back room or pool hall or bar. Maybe you slept with some other guy's wife while he was doing time. The worst life has to offer doesn't scare him anymore and he wants to find you when he's out. Or maybe he's a career pencil pusher, hairline making a retreat to the back of his skull halfway through his third decade and he's had one too many anonymous parking lot dings on his precious convertible and been yelled at by his boss once too often and ignored by the waitresses in the short skirts and you are his breaking point. You need to disappear. Maybe find somebody your age, with your stats, with no family, friends or police record who's at death's door and will sell you his name for a few hundred bucks. But the odds are against you finding someone like that. So you need to work from the beginning. Find a name. Check tombstones, obituaries, estate sale Bibles. Find something familiar but not obvious, distinct but forgettable: Norton, Dillon, Harris. Occupations: Cooper, Porter, Taylor, Donner, Thatcher, Barber, Farmer. Materials: Wood, Silver, Steel. Flora: Branch, Fields, Weed. Fauna: Wolf, Bird, Crow, Hawk. Titles: Sheriff, Sage, King, Pope, Priest. Colors: Brown, Black, White, Green. A name people have heard before, won't think twice about, won't remember. You're not looking for a baby, you're looking for parents. As a guidebook for someone looking to disappear, or forging identification documents in Los Angeles, The Contortionist's Handbook leaves no stone unturned. No doubt the Internet and changes in how local and federal government departments operate have made much of this information obsolete, but for purposes of researching how a forger would go about their work in the late 20th century, this novel was a goldmine. Do's and don'ts. What an artful forger has in their workshop. What materials they need to acquire. How many different types of ID there are. I love good lists within a book and Clevenger drops these in to great effect. My wallet: a DF monogram--three dollars from a swap meet vendor--mink oiled and left in my windowsill for a month, then run through the rinse cycle. Driver's license, video rental card (I rent documentaries I don't watch to go with the magazine subscriptions I don't read--I have to change hobbies a lot), credit card, ticket stub (The Divine Horsemen w/fIREHOSE at the Variety Arts Center), receipts (ATM, liquor store, strip club, gas station), work ID, Jen/Karen's picture, an unused codeine prescription and business cards (mechanic, used record store, dry cleaner). The cops went through it, forgot it. The novel is a character study and lacks a strong narrative. There's dialogue throughout and good dialogue (I particularly liked the narrator's account of two freaky ex-girlfriends and his more compassionate, current one), but Clevenger doesn't involve his narrator in a caper in the way that a writer like Elmore Leonard would. The B-story is the A-story. I didn't like the title and through no fault of the author's, the cover is terrible. But Clevenger's acumen when it comes to detailing the underworld of his forger--including the strip clubs or dives of L.A. he'd frequent when needing to socialize anonymously--impressed me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 30, 2021
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May 06, 2021
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Hardcover
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0062389920
| 9780062389923
| 0062389920
| 3.46
| 24,818
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Laura Lippman is Sunburn, published in 2018. Lippman had been on my radar for some time due to her work as a staff w
My introduction to the fiction of Laura Lippman is Sunburn, published in 2018. Lippman had been on my radar for some time due to her work as a staff writer (along with author Megan Abbott) on HBO's The Deuce. Like a lot of crime fiction writers, her background is in journalism. This is a book that should be on my ferris wheel: a noir love story set in Delaware. Delaware? I don't even know what's going on in Delaware, but sign me up, especially if deadly dames might be involved. I abandoned this at the 25% mark. It's a short book but one I became numbed out of my skull by. The novel jumps from the point of view of character to character to character to character. This device isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me. I've read authors with the facility to tell stories from multiple narrators in compelling ways. Marcy Dermansky alternates between the perspectives of teenage twins in her debut novel and I was up past midnight to find out what would happen next. Sunburn is dreadfully, awfully, spirit numbingly boring. Repulse me, offend me, amuse me, but please do not bore me. Lippman tells about a redheaded dame named Polly Smith. If that name seems forgettable, Polly's exploits sure are. She has deserted Gregg, her doofy husband, and their four-year-old daughter during a beach vacation, leaving notes for each with a promise to be in touch. Headed for D.C., Polly hitchhikes (in 2018? Okay ...) to a one-horse town in Delaware, where she gets a job bartending. Polly attracts a stranger named Adam who has apparently been hired by her mysterious first husband. There's also a lesbian private eye named Sue Snead dispatched by Gregg. Sue didn't grow up dreaming of being a private detective, but that was only because she didn't realize girls could be PIs. Sure, she read Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, but did anyone notice that those girls never got paid? Sue wanted to be Mannix or Barnaby Jones or Paul Drake, the investigator that Perry Mason sued. Instead, she started out as a middle-school English teacher. But she was scared to have any kind of social life as long as she was teaching, even a secret one. She decided she had to find another gig. Around this time, her cousin, who had a small insurance agency, asked her to follow a guy claiming a back injury. Just that easy, Sue found her new vocation. She started in another PI's office, apprenticing until she could get her own license. She loves her work. It is a perfect job for people who are curious enough, but nor randomly promiscuously curious. An incurious person--this target's husband, for example--could never do it. But a supercurious person would also fail. You have to be willing to leave some doors closed, to focus on the task at hand. Some people are like rabbit holes and you can fall a long, long way down if you go too far. [image] There are so many compelling ways to introduce character, their needs and desires, their preferences or sexuality. Stating for the reader that they have a butch haircut might be the laziest way possible. Lippman tells and tells and tells about what each of these characters are all about. It reminded me of being seated next to a dear old grandmother on an airplane and listening to her tell about her babies. This one changed her name because that's perfectly legal and she's a wild one, walked right out on her family while on vacation. This one is a lesbian. And and and ... I could care less. Sorry. It's not that the problem with Sunburn is how bad a novel it is. The problem is it's not finished. I didn't feel it was even getting started. It reads like pre-writing, like junk that a writer unloads and with a lot more work, might resemble a rough draft someday and ultimately, a good novel. There are moments for characters to engage in snappy repartee, expose their jealousy or indulge their lusts, but Lippman makes it as compelling as a notecard that announces what scene is going to go where. The environment is illustrated blandly. The characters are going through motions. There's no story here yet. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 14, 2022
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Nov 14, 2022
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Mar 28, 2021
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.03
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it was amazing
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Feb 17, 2018
not set
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Jan 29, 2025
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3.87
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liked it
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Feb 08, 2024
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Dec 17, 2023
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3.59
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it was ok
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Apr 27, 2024
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Dec 16, 2023
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3.43
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it was amazing
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Dec 30, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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4.41
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it was amazing
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Jan 19, 2024
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Aug 11, 2023
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3.65
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really liked it
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Dec 13, 2023
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Jul 22, 2023
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3.28
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really liked it
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Dec 02, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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3.86
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it was amazing
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Jul 2023
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Dec 29, 2022
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||||||
4.08
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really liked it
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Mar 21, 2023
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Dec 22, 2022
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3.51
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did not like it
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Dec 29, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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4.10
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it was ok
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Dec 27, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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3.66
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did not like it
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Dec 25, 2022
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Dec 15, 2022
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3.77
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it was ok
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Dec 03, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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4.23
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it was amazing
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Nov 11, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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3.56
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not set
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Sep 05, 2022
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3.11
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really liked it
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Feb 24, 2023
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Apr 23, 2022
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4.02
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really liked it
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Feb 16, 2022
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Dec 24, 2021
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3.90
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really liked it
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Jul 26, 2022
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Sep 20, 2021
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||||||
3.97
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it was amazing
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Dec 30, 2021
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May 06, 2021
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3.46
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did not like it
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Nov 14, 2022
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Mar 28, 2021
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