THE SEA ON FIRE by Howard Cunnell
 |
THE SEA ON FIRE
Howard Cunnell Picador (www.picador.com) £12.99 |
Kim is a man in his mid-thirties who has spent the vast majority of the latter half of his life travelling the world and diving some of its most beautiful spots. Nowadays he is living in Brixton with his wife and three daughters, the call of the sea a constant background noise. When his friend and long-time diving partner Garland Rain turns up and offers him a three-week job as a dive guide in the Red Sea, Kim jumps at the chance and, despite his wife’s disapproval, heads to Egypt and the freedom of the sea. Their boat, the Shang-Tu, belongs to a man named Teddy King, a small-time crook who thrives on cruelty, violence and drugs. It doesn’t take long for the party to start, and Kim quickly finds himself drawn in, much to the disgust of his friend. As the trip progresses, it soon becomes clear that the people on the boat have no intention of following rules and procedures, so it’s no great surprise when one of the divers disappears.
Told from the first-person perspective of Kim, The Sea on Fire starts slow and, with only a handful of exceptions, remains slow throughout. For perhaps the first third of the novel, it’s difficult to treat these characters as fictional, as Cunnell introduces us to Kim and Garland and the lifestyle they have chosen for themselves. For this first section, it’s a book about diving written by a man with a deep love of the subject and it reads like an autobiographical account of a young man in love with life, with the sea and with the art and science of diving. The reader only really becomes aware that this is a piece of fiction when the boat journey starts and partying commences. From that point onwards it is clear to everyone, except our narrator, that things can only go horribly wrong, and from around the halfway mark, The Sea on Fire is as suspenseful as any thriller, despite the slow pace.
For the most part, the novel is an examination of the end of freedom that usually comes with the responsibility of parenthood, the forced settling down and, for most, the end of many things young people take for granted – the freedom to travel, to have dangerous hobbies, to not need to work simply to pay bills. It’s clear from the outset that Kim feels this deeply, and his life in Brixton with a wife and three children leaves him feeling claustrophobic, pining for the open sea where he feels he belongs, and the sense of freedom he feels while submerged in the water. It’s no real surprise, then, that he falls for the party atmosphere on the boat, the abundance of alcohol and drugs, and the presence of the young and willing woman with whom he spends his nights; it’s a return to his natural state, to the person he believes he has never quite stopped being. There are, of course, consequences – the disappearing diver and the stain it is likely to leave on his and his partner’s reputations is the least of these; there are greater consequences on his return to England, and his internal struggle makes this a compelling read. At first, Kim seems a strange character to tell the story, but he has, without doubt, the most interesting story to tell, and the only story likely to appeal to non-divers.
Cunnell has managed to squeeze plenty into a book barely three-hundred pages in length: Kim’s internal struggle and his rapid descent into chaos; the disappearance of the diver and the aftermath which, despite my original statement that The Sea on Fire is a slow book, still manages to pack a considerable punch and forms the central plot around which the rest of the novel is built; there is also a message about the conservation of the world’s reefs, the damage that is done every day by careless divers and the consequences this will have for the reefs, the wildlife that relies on them, right up the food chain to the people causing the damage in the first place. It’s a unique and very interesting novel (and I should probably mention the fact that I am coming at this as someone who has had no prior interest in diving) and it is clear that, in some ways, parts of it are autobiographical, in that Kim and the the author share the same passion for the sea and the ecosystem it supports.
The Sea on Fire is a bit of a departure from my normal reading preferences. It’s a slow novel that builds towards a suspenseful climax. It is probably best described as a “literary thriller”, but that does serious injustice to the vast bulk of the book, which is a story about divers and their craft. Cunnell manages to keep it interesting throughout and, despite the slow pace of the story, it is a quick and entertaining read, even with the sometimes over-technical discussions. Cunnell has done an excellent job of bringing his characters and the Red Sea to life and leaving the reader with an almost cinematic view of this beautiful part of the world. It’s a surprising little gem, and won’t disappoint.
THE INQUISITOR by Mark Allen Smith
 |
THE INQUISITOR
Mark Allen Smith (www.markallensmith.com) Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.co.uk) £12.99 |
Geiger is a man without a past; his life started with his arrival, several years before, in New York. Before that, a black hole. After chance leads him to the local Mafia boss, he decides to go into Information Retrieval – torturing subjects to extract information required by paying clients – and discovers that he is very good at it. Geiger rarely draws blood, but he has a knack for knowing truth from lies, and for understanding exactly how to get the information he needs. When a client presents a twelve-year-old boy as the subject instead of the expected adult, Geiger acts quickly without considering the consequences for himself or his partner, Harry: he grabs the boy and runs. But the client has the resources to track them down, and the motivation for getting the boy back and finding out what he knows; everyone else is expendable.
I will freely admit that when I read the blurb for The Inquisitor and learned that the author started out life as a screenwriter, I set my expectations for a very specific type of thriller. You know the type – two-dimensional characters and a very cinematic experience; a Jason Statham movie in book form. So I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The central characters spring from the page fully-formed and with complete backstories, and the book reads like a well-structured novel, rather than the dialogue- and action-heavy converted screenplay we might have expected.
Geiger is a man of few words, and something of an enigma, even to himself. As events progress, we begin to see glimpses into his past, and the events that formed him. Throw in the fact that he has been seeing a psychiatrist since his “rebirth” and Geiger suddenly seems more human than he pretends to be. Given his line of work, he is clearly a man of few scruples, but he does have a strict moral code for which he is willing to sacrifice everything. It is in his relationship with his business partner, Harry, and, ultimately, his fast friendship with the boy, that we see the humanity behind the stone facade and find someone worth rooting for. His choice of name shows us something of the man’s personality:
At first he’d used the name Gray, then Black. One day, passing a Barnes & Noble bookstore, he spotted a book about the artwork of H. R. Giger. The byzantine images appealed to him, as did the name with its twin g’s. For visual symmetry, he added an e and so became Geiger.
Smith offers a taut thriller with dark undertones. The events take place over the course of 24 hours and this compact time-scale allows the author to ratchet up the tension very quickly once the introductions are out of the way. It’s a fast-paced and, most importantly, believable piece of fiction. Smith manages to keep things down-to-earth and on a tight rein: Geiger is no superman, and as the story progresses he becomes more ragged, to the point where we wonder how he keeps moving. The author manages to tell his story without levelling half of New York and, with the exception of one or two little surprises, presents a straightforward tale that is engrossing, entertaining and uncomplicated. Which is not to say that it’s predictable; far from it, but you won’t find any convoluted twists or high-concept macguffins designed purely to confuse the reader. At its heart, The Inquisitor is a tale of evil versus evil – let’s not forget what Geiger does for a living. It’s a daring concept for a first-time author, but it succeeds due to careful plotting and characters who are immediately engaging and intriguing.
The Inquisitor is Mark Allen Smith’s first novel. Well-written and well- (if simply-) plotted, it serves to introduce the character of Geiger and sidekick Harry to the world. It is unlikely, in this reader’s humble opinion, that this is the last we’ll see of either of them. Geiger presents as a cross between Jack Reacher and Sheldon Cooper. While The Inquisitor may not appeal to fans of The Big Bang Theory, fans of Lee Child’s series would do well to give it a shot: it’s an excellent first novel, and brings with it the promise of more to come.
ANGELMAKER by Nick Harkaway
 |
ANGELMAKER
Nick Harkaway (www.nickharkaway.com) William Heinemann (www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/imprint/william-heinemann) £12.99 |
Every so often, I run across a book that catches me completely by surprise; a book that I picked up on a whim, having never heard of it before, that strikes a chord and immediately becomes a firm favourite. Nick Harkaway’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, was just such a novel, from its eye-catching hardback cover (the “Signed by the Author” sticker was a sweetener, I’ll happily admit) when I saw it on the shelf at my local Waterstone’s (or is it Waterstones?), to the interesting and intriguing blurb that I found inside, to the sheer delight I encountered when I started to read. Needless to say, I have been waiting with great anticipation for Harkaway’s second novel and I’m happy to say that it has been a worthwhile almost-four-year wait.
Angelmaker tells the story of Joshua Joseph (“Joe”) Spork, a quiet, unassuming man who makes a living repairing clockwork and enjoying the quiet life. Joe has a past that makes this more difficult than it seems, for he is the son of Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, at one time London’s most notorious gangster, and the leader of the legendary Night Market. When Joe’s friend, Billy Friend, turns up on his doorstep with a piece of erotic automata, and a mysterious book and assorted oddments, Joe is intrigued, and contrives to meet the client from whom Billy has obtained the items.
The book, the key to a doomsday device built shortly after the Second World War, invites trouble to Joe’s doorstep, from the Legacy Board – in the guise of Messrs Titwhistle and Cummerbund – to the mysterious, and sinister, Ruskinite monks. Joe soon finds himself the most wanted man in Britain and, with a somewhat motley crew – including a woman slipping towards the end of her eighties who might just be the only person alive who knows exactly what’s going on – he confronts the forces of the mighty Shem Shem Tsien, International Bastard of Mystery, in an attempt to save the world.
With his second novel, Harkaway moves away from the science fiction setting, while retaining all of the wit and verve that made The Gone-Away World such a success. Angelmaker is more in the mold of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville or Christopher Fowler: the novel is set firmly in a modern day London, but there’s also a city beneath; the literal underworld, where the city’s shady characters and forgotten souls spend most of their time. This is the world of the Tosher’s Beat and the Night Market, and represents a world that Joe is trying to forget, although his eventual return seems inevitable from the outset. Angelmaker is an adventure story, a spy thriller, old-fashioned gangster noir and black comedy rolled into one with a hint of satire for good measure.
The characters are beautifully drawn, real people in a world that’s slightly off-kilter: the old woman who was, once upon a time, one of England’s deadliest agents; the fast-talking lawyer with a gift for the dramatic; his sister, with her outrageously sexy toes and her slightly skewed views on equal rights; the evil and cracked Shem Shem Tsien, who wants to become God, but who feels the need to surround himself with bug-zapping lights because of a piece of fiction he once read; the oddly-mismatched Titwhistle and Cummerbund, Angelmaker’s answer to Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar (“hilarious though they are to look upon they are less funny than Typhoid Mary and more serious than the whole of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs”). And holding everything together the easy-going Joe, a man starting to feel old:
Even now – particularly now, when thirty years of age is visible in his rear view mirror and forty glowers at him from down the road ahead, now that his skin heals a little more slowly than it used to from solder burns and nicks and pinks, and his stomach is less a washboard and more a comfy if solid bench – Joe avoids looking at it.
Joe is quite typical for the hero of this type of novel: slightly disconnected from the world, more interested in the clockwork with which he spends his days than the people around him and, as a result, less attuned to subtext, even when it’s thrust in his face (quite literally):
Joe gives her his hand, and she places his hand, palm down, on her chest and leans firmly towards him…With the heel of his hand Joe can feel the curve of one breast. He has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate. It’s lovely. He tries to be polite and not notice.
As you might expect from a man as opinionated as Harkaway (go on, check his Twitter feed, you’ll see what I mean), his jokes are timely and extremely cutting. One example of many: as the bees, harbingers of the end of the world, spread across the globe, governments act, moving quickly into the realms of the ridiculous overreaction:
Bee-keepers are told they must register, must submit their hives for inspection. No, of course, these are no ordinary bees, but it pays to be safe. It helps to rule people out. Any bee-keeper, after all, might be a sympathiser, a fifth columnist.
What Angelmaker most resembles, to my mind, is a vast and sprawling Neal Stephenson novel, the perfect companion piece for his Cryptonomicon. It takes a similar form: the two time streams, one present day (or as near as damn it), the other Edie’s story of her time as a much younger woman working for Science 2. Where Stephenson spends chunks of the book describing the technology and the cryptographic techniques, Harkaway finds himself with a much less solid proposition, cleverly avoiding any in-depth detail as to how the book, the bees, the attendant clockwork actually work. But for everything else, he is a fiend for detail and it is refreshing to find an author unafraid to follow the tangent, even if it is at the temporary cost of dramatic tension. And go back to what I said about Joe and typical heroes in this type of novel; tell me Randy Waterhouse doesn’t fit this exact mold.
Angelmaker is that rare beast: the sophomore novel that lives up to – if not surpasses – the promise of the author’s first. It’s a wonderfully-written book – Harkaway has a knack with the language that makes this huge novel very easy to read and enjoy. It has more than its fair share of dark and shocking scenes and more than a handful of genuine laugh-out-loud moments, and even one or two places where both things are true at the same time. It’s clear to see the novel’s influences, but this is something new, something different and completely unexpected. It’s goes in a much different direction than The Gone-Away World (although there are connections enough for the sharp-eyed reader), which might disappoint a small contingent looking for more of the same, but it does achieve a similar end: it’s a beautiful showcase for a talented writer, a unique voice and inventive mind who can, it seems, turn his hand to anything.
At this early stage, I’m more than happy to call Angelmaker one of the best books you’re likely to read this year. We can live in hope that the wait for the next one won’t be quite as long.
EASY MONEY by Jens Lapidus
 |
EASY MONEY
Jens Lapidus Translated by Astri von Arbin Ahlander Macmillan (www.panmacmillan.com) £12.99 Released: 2nd February 2012 |
When Jens Lapidus’ debut novel, Easy Money, landed on my desk, it came bearing a quote that is almost inevitable these days on the English translations of Swedish novels – the quote that compares this writer to Stieg Larsson. What caught my eye about this quote, though, is the fact that it came from none other than the Demon dog of American crime fiction, and one of my personal favourites, James Ellroy.
Easy Money – originally published in Sweden in 2006 – takes an in-depth look at Stockholm’s underworld through the eyes of three men for whom that shady empire is home. Jorge is Chilean, and is doing time for possession of cocaine with intent to sell. When Jorge pulls off the impossible – hops over the twenty-three-foot wall that surrounds Österåker prison – he disappears into a world where his knowledge of the cocaine business can make him king. He just has to stay free, and stay alive, for long enough to put that knowledge to good use.
JW is a wannabe – a country boy living it large in the big city, hiding his background in order to fit in with the rich set who sleep all day and party all night in Stockholm’s most fashionable area. He drives a gypsy cab on the nights he isnt partying to afford the parties and soon graduates to dealing cocaine when his boss sees potential in him. JW has ulterior motives for being in the city – several years earlier, his older sister followed the same course and disappeared without a trace. JW hopes to achieve what the police could not, and find what happened to her.
Mrado is a member of the Yugo Mafia. He’s a big man who lives on a diet of protein bars and steroids. He’s a racketeer, running a large chunk of the city’s coat-check business. Mrado, a Serbian who fought at Srebrenica, fears no man, but he has a weak spot – a daughter that he sees one day every other week, and even that under protest by his ex-wife. As the lives of these three men converge, moving towards the largest cocaine shipment Stockholm has ever seen, violence erupts, and they find that they may have more in common with each other than it would seem at first glance.
Lapidus presents us with a realistic vision of what Stockholm’s underworld might look like – the various factions battling for a piece of this or that business in a city barely big enough to hold them all. He does this through alternating chapters told from the point of view of each of the three protagonists. It’s a complex world, and the interrelationships between these men – never fully revealed to them, but revealed piecemeal to the reader – is equally complex, and Lapidus uses small, exciting chunks to build a story that is, for the reader at least, much more than the sum of its parts. The comparisons with Larsson are undeniable and, in my opinion, well-founded: this is a side of Sweden that most Swedes probably don’t know exists, a side that the Swedish tourist authorities would much rather wasn’t advertised; it portrays Stockholm as a dark and violent city peopled by rich brats, and gangsters and wannabes. Like the journalist Larsson, Lapidus is well-placed to provide a realistic look at this world– he’s a criminal defence lawyer who, according to his bio, represents some of the most notorious criminals in Sweden.
The novel reads like a tribute to Ellroy. The subject bears a close resemblance to some of the myriad plots that drive his Underworld USA trilogy, but most striking is Lapidus’ telegraphic, rhythmic writing style. The short, sharp prose that defines most of Ellroy’s work is beautifully reproduced here, despite the translation from Swedish to English.
Jorge knew how it was: Friends on the inside are not like friends on the outside. Other rules apply. Power hierarchies are clearer. Time inside counts. Number of times inside counts. Smokes count; roaches count more. Favors grant relationships. Your crime counts: rapists and pedophiles worth zero. Junkies and alkies way down. Assault and theft higher. Armed robbery and drug kingpins on top. Most of all: Your membership counts. Rolando, a friend according to the rules on the outside. According to the principles of the slammer: Playa batted in the major leagues, Jorge in the minor.
It’s impressive to read, and respect to both author and translator for pulling it off. The fashion-obsessed JW, his chapters littered with brand names, and club names, comes across as a cut-price Patrick Bateman: all of the ego, and none of the psychopathic tendencies. It’s difficult to know, though, if this mimicry of Bret Easton Ellis’ most enduring creation is deliberate or not.
Lapidus infuses the novel with a deep sense of place, and the story is littered with street names and place names. There’s an implicit trust that the author won’t mess around too much with the city’s geography, but it serves to ground the action in real places that can be found on a map, and to make the reader feel like they know at least a small part of the city. If you’re like me, it also serves as a tourist guide and makes the reader long to (re)visit.
Easy Money is an assured and brilliant debut – I’ll admit I was surprised that it was, indeed, Lapidus’ first novel, and not just the first to appear in English translation, as sometimes happens. It’s not difficult to see why it’s the fastest-selling Swedish crime novel in a decade, and why it’s already a very successful film (one, it saddens me to say, that has already been lined up for an American remake). It ticks all the boxes I look for in a good crime thriller: action-packed, gritty, dark, violent, funny and, above all, realistic. It introduces three unforgettable characters who you will love and hate in equal measure as the story progresses. The good news is that it’s also the first book in a trilogy (books two and three of which have already been published in Sweden, so with luck we won’t have to wait too long to get our hands on them). It’s worth mentioning again that credit is due to the translator – this is her first novel translation, which is something of a feat – who has taken a very difficult style and made it work beautifully. If you’re a fan of James Ellroy or Don Winslow, you can’t miss this. Jens Lapidus is definitely one to watch.
STOLEN SOULS by Stuart Neville
 |
STOLEN SOULS
Stuart Neville (www.stuartneville.com) Harvill Secker (www.vintage-books.co.uk) £12.99 Released: 26 January 2012 |
Stuart Neville fairly burst onto the crime fiction scene in the middle of 2009 with his first novel, The Twelve (released later that year in the US under the title The Ghosts of Belfast). The novel, bearing high praise from James Ellroy, occupied a similar space to the novels of John Connolly – that fine line between crime and supernatural fiction – dealing with an ex-paramilitary haunted by the ghosts of the twelve people he had killed during his career. Collusion followed a year later, focusing on policeman Jack Lennon who, while not haunted in the traditional sense, had more than his fair share of demons. Lennon is once again centre-stage for the events of Neville’s third novel, the dark and oppressive Stolen Souls.
Galya Petrova is a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian lured to Ireland by the promise of well-paid work as a nanny and English teacher. After working on a mushroom farm, she is chosen and taken to Belfast where she is pressed into service as a prostitute. On her first night she cuts the throat of a man who turns out to be the brother of a Lithuanian mob boss. Before the night is out, three men are dead, Galya Petrova is in the hands of a man with less than honourable intentions, and Arturas Strazdas – a man who has built an empire on drugs and prostitution – is leaving no stone unturned in an attempt to get vengeance for his dead brother. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a man who wants to spend a quiet Christmas with his daughter, and who finds himself in the middle of what looks like a gang war that is only just kicking off.
Neville takes us back to the familiar territory of his earlier novels, and into the bleak world of Jack Lennon as he navigates life in post-Troubles Belfast. Lennon doesn’t have much going for him – he’s a Catholic who joined the police force at a time when doing so was frowned upon at best; he formed a relationship with a young woman who turned out to be related to one of the leaders of a local Republican paramilitary organisation and ran when he got her pregnant. Now, eight years later, he is struggling to balance his career and his homelife, beset on all sides by enemies: his once-friend Dan Hewitt is working behind the scenes to make his work-life miserable, while his daughter’s aunt is constantly on the phone trying to talk him into handing custody of the child over to her mother’s family.
This is a bleak and violent novel, mirroring the situation in which Lennon finds himself. It takes place over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the unexpected snow which blankets the city adding to the sense of oppression and entrapment. Belfast itself is an important character part of the novel, bringing a unique atmosphere to the story. There is the sense that it’s a city not well-liked by any of the characters, natives and foreigners alike:
Herkus had liked Belfast at first, but now it grated on him. The rain, the small-mindedness, the damned pompous self-importance of its people who thought their petty little war was more important than anyone else’s.
Beneath the surface of the city, a feeling that Neville captures and expresses perfectly, is the threat of a violence that could be ancient history but is more likely lying dormant, awaiting an opportunity to return:
‘Or maybe Sam and the foreigner killed Tomas, and someone else took exception to that and held them to account.’
‘Tit-for-tat?’
‘Just like the good old days,’ Lennon said.
There is a beauty to Neville’s writing that shines through the violent, everyday subject matter. In some ways, Galya and Lennon are very similar people, both fitting the title of the book. Galya has been forced into a life of prostitution with no way of ever repaying her debts and returning home to her family, trapped in the soul-destroying life that others have chosen for her. Lennon’s suffering is, for the most part, self-inflicted and it seems there can be no way out for him either. Instead he moves through the city righting wrongs in an attempt to salve his own conscience, or buy his own redemption. There is little relief in this novel, scarce humour to lighten the constant tension, the tone of the book summarised in Lennon’s own musings:
Jack Lennon knew a human soul could bear an almost infinite amount of shame as long as it remained inside, and stayed hidden from others. Many bad people survived that way. In the quietest minutes of the night, he wondered if he was one of them.
Despite the bleak tone, and the philosophising, Neville has produced another brilliantly-plotted and well-paced crime novel. Like Collusion, it fails to quite reach the heights of The Twelve, but let’s face it, “brilliant” rather than “exceptional” is still something to shout about. Unlike many other Northern Irish crime writers, Neville has not only acknowledged the region’s recent history, but embraced it and made it a central part of the wonderful trilogy of which Stolen Souls is the perfect closing chapter. While it works as a standalone piece of fiction – canned history is included which will give the first-time reader enough to avoid being completely lost – it works best when read in conjunction with the first two novels. Stolen Souls cements Stuart Neville’s reputation as one of Northern Ireland’s finest exports, and a crime writer to keep on your radar.
11.22.63 by Stephen King
 |
11.22.63
Stephen King (www.stephenking.com) Hodder & Stoughton (www.hodder.co.uk) £19.99 |
It’s a daunting thing, sitting down to write a review of a full-length Stephen King novel, for someone who hangs on every word the man has ever written. The problem is that remaining objective – reviewing the work at a remove, as it were – is next to impossible. Regular reader(s) of the blog will know that that isn’t the type of blog I run and will, I hope, forgive me a little hyperbole here and there as I work through the monster that is King’s latest novel, 11.22.63.
The title of King’s latest novel is a reference to one of those dates that lives in the global consciousness as a day that defined the world in which we live. It may take a person a moment or two to parse the significance (especially since it appears in the US format of month, day, year), but it will come to them eventually. It is, of course, the date of the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA. King’s premise is simple, a question that most people have pondered at some point: if you could go back and change it (save Kennedy, assassinate Hitler, etc.), would you?
Jake Epping is an English teacher in a small Maine town. When the owner of the local diner – a man Jake knows only from eating regularly in his establishment – calls him and invites him to the diner, he reluctantly goes. Al has aged overnight, a process exacerbated by the cancer that is killing him, cancer that he did not have the previous evening, when Jake last saw him. Al spins a tale – a hole in time in the pantry of his diner that will take Jake back to September 1958, a visit that, no matter how long Jake spends there, will only take 2 minutes of 2011 time – and asks Jake for his help: go back to 1958 under an assumed identity, get a job, kill time for five years, and be in Dallas in 1963 to stay the hand that slew Jack Kennedy.
11.22.63 is pure King, from that familiar Down East accent, to the cast of characters that will become your friends during the course of the novel’s 700 pages, to that slightly off-kilter world that always leaves this Constant Reader slightly uneasy. No-one can tell a story like King can. In effect, this is a novel of three parts. The first section deals with Derry in late 1958. It took me a while to realise – even the tell-tale “There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first” bypassed me initially – what King was up to here, and why Al’s “rabbit-hole” came out in September 1958, rather than sometime closer to the date of Kennedy’s assassination. It was the name Norbert Keene that did it for me, the owner and manager of Derry’s drugstore; this is a city in the aftermath of the events of King’s earlier novel, It, and King uses this to his advantage, infecting a key character with the evil in which the city is drenched, and giving Jake a reason to be there for Hallowe’en 1958. King introduces some of the key players from It into the events of this novel, cementing the history of that fictional town in place. Jake’s description of the city is spot on:
On that grey street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”
When Jake finishes his work in Derry, he moves ultimately to the small town of Jodie, Texas where he becomes a part of the community and falls in love with one of his colleagues, the new school librarian, Sadie Dunhill. It is here that Jake first decides that he might not want to return to 2011. It is, in his own words, when he “stopped living in the past and started living.” This love affair, of course, is fraught with peril for the man from the future, and King proves once more that no other writer puts their characters through the mill with quite as much élan as he does.
The final section of the book deals with the run up to November 1963, and follows Jake as he watches Lee Harvey Oswald, attempting to close what he calls the “window of uncertainty” on whether Oswald was a lone shooter. As we move toward the event itself, King has a decision to make as to whether this was the case, or whether one of the many conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death provides a better version of the truth, and it is interesting to see which road he chooses. Here, King is firmly in James Ellroy territory, and it shows in the tone of the narrative, even though 11.22.63 contains a more complete form of prose, a language that is unmistakably King. This section of the novel is littered with real people, and King does his best to make them his own, a sometimes difficult proposition with people as infamous as these.
King has been very clever with his method of time travel, building some important rules into the process: the rabbit-hole always takes the traveller to the same time on the same date, so there can be no jumping back and forward through time when things get hairy. Time passes as normal in 1958 but, regardless of the duration, the traveller will only be gone from 2011 for two minutes. The most important, perhaps, is that each visit affects a reset, and any changes made during a previous visit will be lost. These three key rules play important – and sometimes devastating – roles throughout the novel.
To make matters more difficult for Jake, the past becomes almost a sentient being. It is, Jake tells us, obdurate, and it also harmonises with itself. What this means is that, as Jake starts to move through the Land of Ago, we start to see connections between otherwise unrelated characters or events – characters that share the same, or very similar names, or faces, or personalities. We also come to see quite early on that the real city of Dallas and the fictional Derry are almost one and the same, with the same underlying malice defining them both. The obduracy is something that Al warns Jake of before his first trip, but it is Jake who discovers that the bigger the change, the more difficult it is to make. The past, we come to see, does not want to be changed, and this fact leaves us worried – if not outright frightened – of what Jake will face when he tries to change one of the world’s most defining moments.
As with most of his novels, it seems that King finds it impossible not to drop self-references in to see who is paying attention, or to give Constant Reader a little thrill that they are getting more for their money than a King virgin (he has been doing it as far back as the early Castle Rock novels, seeding references to The Dead Zone into Cujo, for example). As always, it seems King is having immense fun with these “Easter eggs”. How about the late ‘50s red and white Plymouth Fury in the parking lot of the mill, the first car Jake sees when he steps back in time? The whole first section which seems, at first, to be a twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to one of King’s most divisive novels? There’s even a sly reference to The Dark Tower, when Jake sets eyes on a car called a Takuro Spirit, echoing Eddie’s observation in that alternate, Captain Trips-raddled version of Topeka, Kansas. And a tip of the hat to Ellroy’s own masterpiece in the form of a rogue FBI agent by the name of Dwight Holly.
As you would expect from a man known for his love of pop culture (he had a regular column in the American magazine, Entertainment Weekly, called “The Pop of King” which he used to talk about books, films, music, entertainment in general), the attention to detail he applies to late-‘50s/early-‘60s America is second-to-none. Everyone smokes, and it’s the first obvious sign that Jake is in a world of a long time ago: the smell of tobacco smoke is ever-present, and there are very few characters who don’t smoke during their interactions with him or, at the very least, have a pack of cigarettes close to hand. King is careful to avoid anachronisms, but the world he has created is made more real by what we see around us – the products for sale in the shops, the cars on the roads, the very pollution being pumped into the air. It’s obvious that 11.22.63 required a massive research effort, not just in getting the details of Oswald’s movements right, but also in reconstructing the pop culture of the era. King takes it in his stride and the result is a world that feels as real in 1958 as it does in 2011.
King, a native of Maine, has an obvious love for the place and one of the things he does well is ensure that the reader is there, breathing the air, eating the lobsters (or, in this case, the Fatburgers). He knows the people and their foibles, and he wants the reader to know them, too. The most important outward aspect of this is the accent, and as always, he takes some time to ensure that what you’re hearing in your head is the same as what’s coming out of the characters’ mouths:
‘Key’s inside the front door.’ Doe-ah.
And the ever-present
Ayuh!
Reading a King novel is often like sitting on a park bench with an old-timer, listening as he spins his tales and spreads his gossip, and 11.22.63 is no exception. It’s a powerful novel, King’s considered answer to the question “if you could change it, would you?” What it boils down to, though, is that the events leading up to that fateful day play second fiddle to the more important personal relationship between Jake Epping, known in the Land of Ago as George Amberson, and Sadie Dunhill. But King is a man who enjoys unsettling his readers – it’s something he does very well, so why not? – so you can expect the course of this love to run not exactly true, as it comes up against the force of the obdurate past.
11.22.63 is the latest in a long line of masterpieces from a writer who, at the age of 63, is still at the top of his game, and still producing mammoth works at the rate of about one every year. It is a beautifully-imagined and wonderfully written story that will appeal to a wide range of readers. It’s easy to dismiss King as a “horror writer”, but horror is only a small fraction of what he has produced in a career spanning almost 40 years; it’s easy to forget that the man responsible for one of the masterpieces of modern vampire fiction – ‘Salem’s Lot – or the mother of all post-apocalyptic fiction – The Stand – is also the brains behind Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. It’s also easy to forget, reading as much as I do, just how brilliant a writer he is when I’m not reading him. 11.22.63 is a solid reminder of the fact that no-one tells a story like Stephen King does. A perfect read, more than deserving of its place on my Top 10 of 2011.
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson
 |
REAMDE
Neal Stephenson (www.nealstephenson.com) Atlantic Books (www.atlantic-books.co.uk) £18.99 |
I first became acquainted with the work of Neal Stephenson when, in 1999, I discovered his massive novel, Cryptonomicon, in the “New Books” section of my local Waterstone’s. The blurb appealed to the nerd in me, and my internal masochist fancied the challenge of reading such a hefty novel. It was, for me, something of a life-changer, driving me towards post-graduate studies in cryptography and kindling an interest that is still strong 12 years later. Needless to say, from that point, Stephenson has become one of my “must-read” authors, and frequently challenges Stephen King for the top spot in my list of favourites.
He’s an author that’s difficult to categorise: Snow Crash, the work for which he is, perhaps, best known fits, without doubt into the realms of science fiction, as does his 2008 novel, Anathem. The Diamond Age is more in the steampunk vein while Zodiac is described by the author as “a 1930s hard boiled crime novel dressed up as a 1980s eco-thriller.” The Baroque Cycle, of course, is more difficult to nail down: it’s historical fiction, certainly, but it’s much more than that tag suggests, as you would expect from a work almost 3000 pages in length, and featuring, as characters both main and secondary, the likes of Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, James II and Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Reamde, his latest offering, has been described as perhaps his most commercial, if such a thing can be said of a book that weighs in at just over 1000 pages – not exactly the type of thing the casual traveller is going to pick up that airport. It’s very much a thriller, but in Stephenson’s own inimitable style.
Richard Forthrast is a 50-something Iowan who, as a younger man fled to Canada to avoid the draft. These days, he divides his time between Seattle – the base of his multinational games company – and the mountains of British Columbia where he is part owner of Schloss Hundschüttler. Richard is the creator of T’Rain, an online multiplayer game in the style of World of Warcraft that has made him millions, and is popular the world over. One of the driving factors behind the creation of the game was to accommodate “gold-farmers”, usually Chinese teenagers, for whom the transfer of funds from the game world to the real world is usually something of a pain. During the annual family reunion, Richard reconnects with his niece, Zula – an adopted Eritrean refugee – and offers her a job working with the man whose job is to manage the geography – and therefore the locations of gold deposits – of T’Rain.
When Zula visits Richard at the Schloss several months after taking up employment with his company, she discovers that her boyfriend is trafficking in stolen credit card numbers. When the man to whom he has sold them follows him back to Seattle, they discover that his laptop has been infected with REAMDE – a virus which encrypts the hard drive of the computer and leaves a note with instructions on how to pay the ransom and obtain the key – rendering the stolen credit card information unusable. To complicate matters, the credit card information, as well as various other key documents on the man’s computer, belong to the Russian mob who arrive heavy-handed, trying to find the person responsible. In an attempt to stay alive, Zula tracks the creator of REAMDE to Xiamen, a small island off the coast of mainland China, and soon finds herself on a private jet headed in that direction. From there, things go from bad to worse, and Zula discovers that her trip to China is only the first leg in a long and dangerous journey that will, eventually, bring her full circle and change the lives of everyone around her.
There are plenty of common themes here from Stephenson’s earlier work to have constant reader wondering if there is any link. The virtual world, which is completely different to that created in Snow Crash, is still a virtual world and there’s an oblique reference to the earlier novel acting as an inspiration for this world. The twin subjects of gold and cryptography are mainstays of Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon / Baroque Cycle duology, so it’s good to see them turn up hand-in-hand here. There are also new themes aplenty: Stephenson is very much interested in the whole social media aspect of our modern lives – even though it is something he himself uses sparingly – and this is an area he explores in some detail, which is understandable given the context of the novel. Stephenson also uses this opportunity to explore the differences between East and West and, amongst other things, the motives that drive terrorists to do what they do.
There are massive parallels here with what Stephenson, Bear, and everyone else at Subutai Corp, are doing at the minute with Foreworld and The Mongoliad. I’m guessing, following the recent announcement by Amazon that they will be publishing this ground-breaking work as a series of novels next year, that everyone is now aware of this project, but for those who have yet to check it out, I would urge you to do so. There is a section at the start of Reamde devoted to a description of T’Rain and how it came about, the rules of the game, and the “plumbing” put in place to support it. Anyone with passing acquaintance with The Mongoliad will immediately recognise PULP in APPIS, the creation of the Canon, and various other commonalities between this virtual world and the virtual world of Foreworld. But the game is so much more than what the players see on the screen when they log in. Stephenson takes a playful dig at the at the general world-building techniques used by the creators of the vast majority of fantasy games through Donald Cameron (D-Squared) and Devin Skraelin (Skeletor), who spend their time producing vast numbers of novels designed to support the game and generate interest outside the gaming community. The competition between these two men also gives us the “Apostropocalypse”, an entertaining interlude that should be heeded by all producers of fantasy fiction. The backdrop of the game also leads to some wonderful – and entirely nonsensical exchanges between characters as they rhyme off the names of spells and counter-spells that might be evoked in certain situations. Stephenson is nothing if not thorough.
As Zula and her Russian mob escort arrive in China, the pace ratchets up a couple of notches, and the thriller element is brought into full effect. In an action sequence that lasts somewhere in the region of 230 pages, Stephenson introduces further players including Chinese hackers, MI6 and a cell of Islamic jihadists led by a black Welshman by the name of Abdallah Jones, and leaves us at the end of this section with the players scattered, groups broken and reformed, and allegiances unsure. This is very much a character-driven adventure, and it is in his characters that Stephenson excels: each one is believable, relatable, likeable – if not as a person, then certainly as a character – and with rich back stories usually related in the form of long and entertaining tangents that take the main story nowhere except in the development of the character from whose point of view we find ourselves watching the action. These sometimes come with beautiful little nuggets that leave the reader wondering if the reference just made is real or imagined. The most obvious one here is the fact that the Russian mob leader’s right hand man, Sokolov, always carries a towel with him, leading the reader pause long enough to wonder if Stephenson is channelling the late great Douglas Adams, or if it’s all just a happy coincidence.
Behind everything lies T’Rain (which should be pronounced “terrain”, for those wondering). The vast majority of this massive novel takes place in the real world – or Stephenson’s version of the real world – but T’Rain is an important element and there is always the sense that a large and important part of our story will be resolved in this imaginary world. It leads to some interesting thoughts on social media that most people will most likely identify with: towards the end of the novel Richard finds himself in the mountains of British Columbia and marvels at the fact that he is completely uncontactable – a position in which very few people ever find themselves in this day and age; no-one can phone him, email him, get him on Facebook or Twitter or a hundred other sites that people may sign up to. Later, as he approaches civilisation again, he begins to worry about the backlog that is likely to greet him when he comes back within range of a cell-phone tower or a Wi-Fi hotspot – a worry that should seem trivial given his circumstances, but one that I suspect most people have had at one point or another in this fast-moving, Web 2.0-enabled world.
As usual, Stephenson’s finger is very much on the pulse of technology and he’s aware not only of the limitations of what we have today, but also of what’s just around the corner. His little jabs find their target every time:
To which the moneychanger responded immediately with “K”, that being the chat abbreviation for the unwieldy two-letter message “OK”.
Or (this one contains language not suitable for the faint of heart):
He could already picture the YouTube page, Dodge kneeling on a rug with a sack on his head, Jones behind him with the knife, and, underneath the little video pane, the first of many thousands of all-capital-letter comments sent in by all the world’s useless fuckwits.
He also scores a direct hit with this dig about the pace of modern life in general:
Beyond that the road tunnelled to two lanes and angled upward, then a few miles later began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.
So it was inevitable that he would close in on the tail of a gigantic RV no more than 30 seconds after he’d reached that part of the road beyond which passing was completely out of the question.
As the end of the book approaches (by which I mean about 200 pages from the end), the pace ratchets up another couple of notches as all of the players move into position, all converging towards a single point for a massive, Stephenson-style standoff that certainly won’t disappoint.
If you’re a fan of Stephenson’s work, then I’m preaching to the choir and you’ve probably already read it long before me. If you haven’t read his work before, then this is a good place to start – it’s definitely a much more commercial product than many of his earlier books while still retaining the uniqueness and character that makes a Neal Stephenson book a Neal Stephenson book. Like all of his books, you’ll come out smarter than you went in: it’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s advisable to have a dictionary/encyclopaedia/Google near to hand as you read. At times, you feel like you’re overhearing part of a conversation between people who, seemingly, speak a completely different language from you. No explanation is forthcoming because a) you’re really only a spectator and b) the main players already know what all this stuff means. That’s not to say you’ll be totally lost – you won’t – but it is useful to have reference material close to hand just on the off-chance.
Thriller is certainly a good description, but it’s much more than that, and so much more intelligent than what immediately springs to most peoples’ minds when the word is mentioned. It’s surprisingly fact-paced for a book its size, and Stephenson manages to maintain the reader’s interest for the duration – an astounding feat in itself. My first thought was that a book about Islamic terrorists was a strange topic for Stephenson to tackle, but it’s no stranger than anything else he has chosen to write about in the past. His work is definitely an acquired taste but, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, it’s a taste worth acquiring. A thousand pages is a big commitment to make in this fast-moving world, but Reamde is worth every second. This one is, hands down, my book of the year.
BLACK LIGHT by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano
 |
BLACK LIGHT
Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano Mulholland Books (www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk) £12.99 Released: 13th October |
When we first meet Buck Carlsbad, at the opening of Black Light, he is hard at work, taking down a mark – a ghost that has latched onto a living person. Buck has a gift, which he calls “The Pull” that allows him to suck these marks into himself and eventually regurgitate them into a silver urn, which he then buries in his back yard, effectively sealing them away forever. These marks, when inside Buck, enhance his ability to see the Blacklight, the world in which the dead live, a sort of layering onto the real world of all past versions of that world. Buck has no idea where his gift came from – orphaned at 7, he suspects that his parents were similarly gifted, but he has been unable to find out where they disappeared to, or why the left him to fend for himself.
When Buck is hired by a billionaire businessman to protect the first journey of a high-speed train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas that runs through an area of desert that Buck calls the Blacklight Triangle – due to the high instance of ghost activity in the area – he jumps at the chance. Buck has history in the Triangle, and suspects that this train journey may be the best bet he has of finding out what happened to his parents. Assembling a team, Buck boards the train along with an assortment of film and music stars, a camera crew, and the man slated to be the next President of the USA – and his Secret Service detail – and finds himself on a high-speed journey into hell with no-one to trust but himself.
“By writers from the SAW franchise”, the book cover tells us, something which excited me until I realised that Messrs Melton and Dunstan were behind four of the later entries to a series that – in my opinion – lost the plot about ten minutes into the third instalment. So, I started Black Light with a certain amount of trepidation. We’re thrown into the middle of the action, and we discover Buck’s Gift as we watch him use it to ensnare the ghost of a child killer who is haunting his wife. Buck is a character of some depth: he’s an orphan with this strange gift, and the only conclusion he can draw is that one or other of his parents has passed it on to him. He has a strange relationship with a young woman who is head-over-heels in love with him, and an even stranger relationship with his local priest, a man who provides him with the silver urns he requires to “store” his marks. He has a long and troubled history with the Blacklight, a history that cost one man his life, and almost cost Buck his own, but for Buck it’s the only way he is ever likely to discover who he is, and where he came from.
The story starts slowly, introducing the characters, and their various abilities, and the concept of the high-speed train that runs between the Lost Angels Plaza in Los Angeles and the Dreamworld resort in Las Vegas. As we see these things spring into life around us, I couldn’t help but be struck by similarities to the third volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower epic, The Waste Lands: the Lost Angels Plaza as the Cradle of Lud; the Jaeger Laser as Blaine the Mono; the Blacklight Triangle as the waste lands themselves. Like Roland’s story, there’s an overarching sense of doom as the main players move into position, and the train readies for departure.
From that point on, around about the middle of the book, the narrative grabs the reader by the throat, throttles up a few notches, and drags us along for a ride that moves as fast as the train itself. There is no let-up in the action, and I would certainly recommend trying to read this portion of the book in a single sitting for maximum effect. The authors have a fine grasp of how to move a story along at breakneck pace, and how to keep the reader interested. The story is extremely visual, cinematic in its approach and scope. The book cover adds to this illusion, a movie poster that is eye-catching and intriguing. There are times when it seems we’re reading a film script – or a Matthew Reilly novel – but thankfully they’re few and far between. There is no mistaking that these are very talented writers who have done an excellent job of translating their skills of writing for the screen to writing an engaging and extremely entertaining novel.
Dark, gory and brilliantly-plotted, Black Light combines the elements of a good horror novel, with the stylistic tics of a mystery story, and the pace and tone of the best thrillers on the market. Melton, Dunstan and Romano have created, in Buck Carlsbad, a likeable, if somewhat damaged, character that the reader can identify with and root for. They’ve also created a mythology and backstory that is solid and original. The combination make this one to watch, and a dead cert for a series of novels and films charting Buck’s journey. If you’re a fan of Felix Castor or John Constantine, or are looking for a horror story that’s a bit different from the norm, then Black Light is the book for you.
SNAPSHOT by Craig Robertson
 |
SNAPSHOT
Craig Robertson Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.co.uk) £12.99 |
Glasgow, present day, and someone – a man with a high-powered rifle and a scope to match – is taking out the rulers of the city’s underbelly: drug dealers, murderers, extortionists. As the body count grows and war breaks out amongst the various underground factions, the Strathclyde Police find themselves in the unenviable position of trying to solve a crime, and stop a murderer that the rest of the world is lauding as a hero.
Snapshot, Robertson’s second novel, centres on the characters of Tony Winter and Rachel Narey. Winter is a police photographer, a gifted man who enjoys his work a little bit too much. He’s a leftover from an earlier time, fighting to stay in employment in a time when crime scene photography is increasingly becoming the domain of the crime scene investigators, Jacks-of-all-trades in an environment where saving money is key. Tony has a problem, a need to photograph the dead that borders on obsession, an itch to capture people on the borderline between life and death. Detective Sergeant Narey, who appeared in Robertson’s first novel, Random, returns here to investigate another high-profile case, despite the office politics that remove her from the investigation for a short time.
Snapshot is one of those novels for which the clichés breakneck and gripping, amongst others, were seemingly invented. Opening on a crime scene which introduces us to the key players in as economical a way as possible, the book maintains a frenetic pace for its 400-page duration. We are immediately immersed in the sights and sounds of modern Glasgow, and Robertson has no problem littering both narrative and dialogue with words and phrases that, to an outsider, can sometimes be difficult to understand. Don’t worry, though, you’re unlikely to miss anything important – an insult or jibe between friends. It feels natural and is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, which offsets the grim central plot, a gruesome collection of dead bodies as seen through the lens of Tony Winter’s camera.
Winter is a strange character to put in the central role. He’s not a particularly likeable man, with his slightly creepy hobby and his whiny attitude: Winter is a civilian employed by the police force. As a result, he is outside the main body of the investigation and not privy to the information they are gathering, or the theories upon which they are working. As a result, he is prone to frequent strops when his friends, Narey and Addison, both key players on the team, withhold information from him. I for one wanted to throttle the man and tell him to get on with his work and stop his moaning on more than one occasion. But for all that, the book works, and you care enough for this man to want him to make it out the other side.
The only problem I have with the book is the cover – this sort of stock photography makes a lot of these British thrillers look the same and can, for me, be very off-putting. But it’s a minor quibble, given what lies behind that cover. Dark and darkly-humorous, thrilling and highly addictive, Snapshot is an excellent novel from a self-assured and talented author who has found his stride early in the game.
THE CUT by George Pelecanos
 |
THE CUT
George Pelecanos (www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/georgepelecanos) Orion Books (www.orionbooks.co.uk) £12.99 Released:25th August 2011 |
Another week, another shameful secret here at Reader Dad: The Cut – the first book in a new series featuring private investigator Spero Lucas – is the first George Pelecanos book I’ve read. With that out of the way, let’s get on with the review.
Spero Lucas is an ex-Marine, a veteran of Gulf War II who spent most of his tour fighting insurgents in Fallujah, and currently works as an unlicensed investigator in Washington, D.C. Most of the work he does is commissioned by Tom Peterson, a high-powered lawyer who will use any loophole he can find to help his clients beat a guilty verdict. One such job brings him into contact with Anwan Hawkins, a high-profile marijuana dealer currently in prison. Hawkins hires Lucas to find and return a number of packages that have been stolen from his dealers, or retrieve any proceeds made from their sale. What starts out as a simple piece of work soon turns sour, and Lucas finds himself embroiled in murder, kidnapping, crooked cops and psychopathic assassins.
Spero Lucas is an interesting character: he’s part of a large Greek family, most of whom – himself included – were adopted and renamed by their new parents. His father has recently died, and Spero seems not to be coping too well: ‘You go to the graveyard more often than you go to see Mom’ his brother tells him. Despite that, he’s a loving brother and son, and a devout and practicing member of the Greek Orthodox Church. But there’s another side to Lucas: Spero Lucas at work. Here we see a darker soul, a troubled man who has seen more than his share of killing, and who has issues getting it off his chest, even with the men with whom he served. He’s an unlicensed investigator who operates on the fine line between legal and not. There are scenes in The Cut which will make you question whether or not you like this man.
The Cut is a lean (just over two-hundred pages), fast-paced thriller told in language that is almost lyrical. Pelecanos has an encyclopaedic knowledge of DC and the people who live there, how they speak and how they act. This is a city filled with racial tension in which Lucas – a white man with a black brother – seems to be the only colour-blind person. It is at once an edge-of-the-seat crime novel and an examination of a man who has served his country in a foreign war, and is now trying to adjust to life back in his home town, the relationships he forges, and those he fails to forge, and how he can exist as, effectively, two separate people. With a supporting cast of characters who could each carry a novel of two of their own, The Cut is a fun ride with a very dark undertone.
Spero Lucas will return, and we can only hope that Pelecanos sticks to what proves to be a successful formula: short and sharp, dark, exciting and beautifully written. If you’re a fan of The Wire – for which Pelecanos wrote – or a fan of old-fashioned crime fiction – I’m thinking Chandler, Hammett, Stark – then The Cut is definitely one for you.
Incoming- THREE STRONG WOMEN bTHREE STRONG WOMEN by Marie N'Diaye (from MacLehose Press)
- THE FRIENDS OF EDDIETHE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V Higgins (bought)
- SKAGBOYS by Irvine WSKAGBOYS by Irvine Welsh (bought)
- A COLD SEASON [signeA COLD SEASON [signed, limited edition from PS Publishing] (bought from publisher)
- THE BLACK PATH by Ås
- Goodis [Library of AGoodis [Library of America] edited by Robert Polito (bought)
- ALIF THE UNSEEN by GALIF THE UNSEEN by G Willow Wilson (from Atlantic Books)
- A GAME OF THRONES GrA GAME OF THRONES Graphic Novel by George R. R. Martin et al (from Harper Voyager)
- TORN by Casey Hill (TORN by Casey Hill (from the author)
- BLOODMAN by Robert PBLOODMAN by Robert Pobi (from Arrow)
- THREE STRONG WOMEN b
