LATER by Stephen King

LATER Stephen King (stephenking.com) Hard Case Crime (hardcasecrime.com) £8.99 Looking back on it, I sometimes think my life was like a Dickens novel, only with swearing. From a young age Jamie Conklin has been able to see dead people. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell, because they don’t look like anyone’s conventional idea of a ghost, […]

SNATCH by Gregory McDonald

SNATCH Gregory McDonald (www.gregorymcdonald.com) Hard Case Crime (www.hardcasecrime.com) £7.99 Two eight-year-old boys from very different backgrounds. Two sets of less-than-competent kidnappers. In the hands of Gregory McDonald, almost anything could happen. Like many people of my generation, my first exposure to the work of Gregory McDonald was the wonderful 1985 film Fletch, in which Chevy […]

The 2013 Round-Up

And so, once more, to the end of the year and the requisite retrospective of my reading habits over the past twelve months here at Reader Dad. Regular visitors and Twitter followers will know that 2013 has been a year full of ups and downs (more downs, unfortunately, than ups) for me, what with five […]

JOYLAND by Stephen King

JOYLAND Stephen King (www.stephenking.com) Titan Books / Hard Case Crime (titanbooks.com / http://www.hardcasecrime.com) £7.99 The safety bars came down with a clank, and a few girls tuned up with preparatory screams. Clearing their vocal chords for dark-ride arias to come, you might say. There was a jerk, and we rode into Horror House. Summer, 1973. […]

Hospital Reading Round-up, or: A Letter of Apology

Dear Reader, I hope you will forgive this break from the usual straightforward literary(?) criticism for this personal note to explain the relative quiet at Reader Dad of late, and to apologise to authors, publishers, publicists and potential readers for the lack of reviews written and published on the site since mid-February. Anyone who follows […]

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS James M. Cain Hard Case Crime (hardcasecrime.com) £16.99 Back in September 2004, Hard Case Crime – then an imprint of American publisher Dorchester – launched with Lawrence Block’s Grifter’s Game. The idea behind the line, as evidenced by the lurid, pulpy (yet beautiful) covers, was to reproduce the feel of those early […]