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Saturday’s Child is a gritty view of the Northern underclass; hard men prowling the streets getting into scrapes and dodgy deals, making ends meet with menaces, and the other folk who survive amongst them. Banks does a credible job of portraying post...more
Saturday’s Child is a gritty view of the Northern underclass; hard men prowling the streets getting into scrapes and dodgy deals, making ends meet with menaces, and the other folk who survive amongst them. Banks does a credible job of portraying post-prison life and the world of inner city Manchester. Innes and Mo Tiernan are well penned characters, and the others are mostly more than stock support figures. In the main the story is well plotted and told. Banks has a keen observational eye and a nice turn of phrase, and the dialogue and scenes are nicely constructed. The tactic of having two first person narratives was a little jarring at first but worked well overall. Where the story started to unravel a little was in the second half. The relationship with Donna was under-developed and felt like a weak, convenient plot device that served a particular purpose, but went nowhere. And the ended felt limp and partial, with at least one major thread left hanging. I don’t mind open endings, but this felt forgotten as opposed to open. Overall, an enjoyable slice of modern day, gritty, urban, British noir.(less)
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The Arms Maker of Berlin is a curious book. It’s essentially an Indiana Jones-style hunt for important historical documents, with a tangle of individuals and groups also after the prize. It’s a book that left me a little conflicted. It really shouldn...more
The Arms Maker of Berlin is a curious book. It’s essentially an Indiana Jones-style hunt for important historical documents, with a tangle of individuals and groups also after the prize. It’s a book that left me a little conflicted. It really shouldn’t have worked. The prose was workmanlike and sometimes clunky. The characters were stock, and fairly thinly drawn, and the dialogue often wooden. And the plot was pure fantasy and ridiculous in places. And yet, despite all that it kind of works, in the same way as some Hollywood action films work – the Indiana Jones movies, for example. It has goodies and baddies (and it’s not always clears who is which), a splash of romance, some intrigue and mystery, a dash of suspense and violence, and a veneer of historical respectability. Which kind of compensated for the other shortcomings. There are lots of better crime/thrillers concerning the Second World War from Philip Kerr, Alan Furst, John Lawton and others, but if you like an Indiana Jones-style yarn this might be for you.(less)
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The Green Ripper is the 18th McGee novel in a series of twenty one. Macdonald writes elegantly in an easy and engaging style. His characterisation is excellent, and he has a keen eye for observing and commenting on different social phenomena. The fir...more
The Green Ripper is the 18th McGee novel in a series of twenty one. Macdonald writes elegantly in an easy and engaging style. His characterisation is excellent, and he has a keen eye for observing and commenting on different social phenomena. The first half of the story is well plotted and paced, unfolding in a way that draws the reader in. The second half though lacked any real credibility. Whilst how the religious cult operates and the motivations behind their actions seemed realistic, how they act with respect to McGee is a nonsense. The rule of the camp is to kill all interlopers. McGee is not only spared, he is invited into the group and becomes a confidant to all the other elite combat group members. Then when they discover the truth, he triumphs against odds of 11 to 1. All tense stuff, but it’s all but impossible for the reader to buy it. I was confident based on the first thirty pages or so that this was going to be a five stars book, but in the end it tailed off to be a slightly above average affair.(less)
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Ghost Town is a very well written and entertaining debut novel. Michael Clifford is an Irish journalist and columnist and brings all his skills as a seasoned writer to the book. The real strengths of the novel are its plotting, the characterization,...more
Ghost Town is a very well written and entertaining debut novel. Michael Clifford is an Irish journalist and columnist and brings all his skills as a seasoned writer to the book. The real strengths of the novel are its plotting, the characterization, the sense of place, and the contextualization. The story is told through a series of short, tight scenes, shorn of any flab. This works to drive the plot along and to create a high tempo and good tension. And although the plotline is relatively complex, told from multiple perspectives, Clifford makes sure that the reader never loses the thread of the narrative. All of the characters are well penned with sufficient back story to give them depth and make them interesting despite there being a number of central cast members. A real plus for me was that Ghost Town is very much a book about modern Ireland, clearly set in Dublin and Kerry, and detailing elements of the property crash and how it has affected the lives of many. One touch I particularly liked was the symmetry between the professional footballer turned media mogul slowly disintegrating (Slate’s boss), with the failed footballer putting his life back together (Molloy). Clifford does an excellent job of bringing the story to a climax; though a couple of aspects of the resolution were a little clunky though just about credible. Overall, this is a very solid and enjoyable book and a very good complement to Alan Glynn’s Winterland and Gene Kerrigan’s The Rage.(less)
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Buried Strangers is an engaging read. Gage writes in an assured, economical style heavy on dialogue and action. The political, social and economic relations of modern Brazil are laid bare without overly dominating the text; there’s plenty of context...more
Buried Strangers is an engaging read. Gage writes in an assured, economical style heavy on dialogue and action. The political, social and economic relations of modern Brazil are laid bare without overly dominating the text; there’s plenty of context without it being a geography/history lesson. The characterization is good, with Gage able to quickly sketch a portrait that appears in the reader’s mind’s eye. The storyline for Buried Strangers is contemporary and interesting, if more than a little unsettling. The pages just fly past. That said, the book suffers from too many awkward plot devices. For example, moving a pair of witnesses hundreds of miles away to where they were uncontactable, a mother living next door to her son, Silva’s cleaner’s son using an underground emigration network in a city hundreds of miles away. There’s coincidence and then there’s plot device coincidence. There’s 200 million people in Brazil and it’s a massive country, the chances of Silva’s cleaner’s son having anything to do with the case must be astronomical. I don’t mind having to suspend disbelief every now and then, but I like it to be near-credible disbelief. Moreover, the ending unfolded in a very quick, straightforward fashion, with no twists or turns, though there was some tension. Overall, an enjoyable read, which could have been great if it hadn’t been reliant on obvious plot devices. The next book in the series is Dying Gasp and it's on my to read list.(less)
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I’m a fan of Cotterill’s Dr Siri series set in Laos in the 1970s. Although the characters are all a bit eccentric, they are all believable, warm and sit together comfortably, and there is a lovely sense of place and time. Killed at the Whim of a Hat...more
I’m a fan of Cotterill’s Dr Siri series set in Laos in the 1970s. Although the characters are all a bit eccentric, they are all believable, warm and sit together comfortably, and there is a lovely sense of place and time. Killed at the Whim of a Hat had none of those things. The characters are a ragbag of caricature and are largely one-dimensional. They seemed forced and false. Moreover, told in the first person, the voice of Jimm Juree just didn’t click for me. The real let down of the book, however, is the plot. Neither of the two plotlines are well resolved, though the two unearthed bodies was more plausible than the death of the abbot, which really made little sense and relied on coincidence and Juree having a sister with way more resources and skills than the police could ever dream of. Just about the whole storyline was nonsense and didn’t stand up to a casual read, let alone scrutiny. Cotterill is a skilled writer and he can write with great warmth and wit, this whole story, however, felt forced and flat. I’ll persist with the Dr Siri novels and will maybe return to this if reviews of future books suggests a return to form.(less)
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I thought the opening chapter of Smoked was excellent. If the whole book had managed to keep up the same pace and style it would have been a cracker. As it was, the following chapters got bogged down in back story and manoeuvring characters into posi...more
I thought the opening chapter of Smoked was excellent. If the whole book had managed to keep up the same pace and style it would have been a cracker. As it was, the following chapters got bogged down in back story and manoeuvring characters into position rather than driving the story along, before picking back up in the second half. Once it does pick-up it careens along nicely to the end. Quinlan is particularly good at creating a set of larger than life characters that are well penned. Scenes are generally well told, especially those with action in, and the dialogue is credible. I can easily see the story converting to the big screen. Overall, a book that didn’t quite live up to the promise of the opening few pages but nonetheless an enjoyable read.(less)
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Bukowski’s prose is rich, whilst still maintaining a show rather than tell style, and there is much to admire in the writing. His short stories are often only a thousand words or so, but are vivid and engaging, and it’s clear why Time magazine labell...more
Bukowski’s prose is rich, whilst still maintaining a show rather than tell style, and there is much to admire in the writing. His short stories are often only a thousand words or so, but are vivid and engaging, and it’s clear why Time magazine labelled him the ‘laureate of American low life’. And even though the stories in South of No North clearly relate to his own life, especially those focused on Henry Chinaski (his childhood acne, his chronic alcoholism, his endless succession of jobs, his movement between cheap rooming houses, his womanising, his experience of writing, his marriage to a Texan poet despite having never met, his time in hospital), they are also, it has to be said, quite troubling. Through his writing he comes across as a full-blown misogynist, with women acting purely as sexual objects. There are three ways to a woman’s heart in Bukowski’s writing – ply them with drink (preferably a fifth of whiskey), just walk right up to them and kiss them, or rape them. In all three cases they will instantly fall in love with you, dump (or kill) their present boyfriend, and leap in bed with you until they realise that you are the bastard that they always knew you were. Queue big argument, storm out, five minutes of feeling sorry for one’s self, and then stealing the next woman to come along. That said, there is much to envy in Bukowski’s writing prowess and prose.(less)
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