June 2011....11
books this month
Cormac
McCarthy – The Orchard Keeper
Craig
McDonald – Toros And Torsos
John Harvey –
Bluer Than This
Jeremy Duns –
Free Agent
Michael
Zadoorian – Second Hand
Brady Udall –
Setting Loose The Hounds
Charlie
Williams - One Dead Hen
Dave Zeltserman
– Killer
Lynn Kostoff
– The Long Fall
Robert
Campbell – The Junkyard Dog
Benjamin Whitmer
– Pike
A more
enjoyable month’s reading overall.
McCarthy and
Harvey (poetry – what was I thinking of when I bought this?)....were the two
low points.
McDonald,
Williams and Zeltserman I’ve read previously. I would read again if the mood
took me. Williams’ book was the I think the fourth and last in his Mangel
series with Royston Blake, having read the previous three it ended on a high.
Campbell’s
book was a re-read from someone I used to read a lot of about 20 years
ago.............the old mysterious press paperbacks that used to grab me. Plenty more of them in the attic!
Three books
competing for pick of the month – Duns and Free Agent.
Blurb........ In July 1945 MI6 agent Paul Dark took part in a top
secret mission to hunt down and execute Nazi war criminals. He will discover
that everything he understood about that mission, about its consequences, and
about the woman he once loved, has been built on false foundations. Now it's
1969 and a KGB colonel called Slavin has walked into the High Commission
inLagos, Nigeria,and announced that he wants to defect. His credentials as a
defector are good - he has highly suggestive information which indicates that there
is yet another double agent within MI6, which would be a devastating blow for a
Service still coming to terms with its betrayal by Kim Philby and the rest of
the Cambridge Five. Paul Dark has been largely above suspicion during MI6's
years of self-recrimination. But this time he can see his number coming up. For
some it would be fight or flight time. But when you discover that everything
you've taken for granted and trusted for twenty four years turns out to be
untrue, and when your arrest may only be moments away, then perhaps the only
option is both fight and flight. Free Agent is a twisting, intense thriller set
between London and Nigeria during the height of the Cold War. It's a novel of
innumerable cliffhangers, all set within a constantly evolving moral universe,
and the surprises keep coming until the very last page.
Zadoorian and Second Hand
Blurb....... Richard sees treasure
everywhere. In that old eight-track quadraphonic stereo, that pink granite
bowling ball, or a Niagara Falls napkin holder. While most people scramble for
the newest and the best, Richard searches for the odd and obsolete -- and sells
it at his second-hand shop on the edge of Detroit.
Why does he do it? For Richard, junk is a way of life, a calling, and a
passion. Until his comfortable second-hand life gets a first-hand jolt.
Richard's mother has died, and left behind a valuable house full of packed-away
junk -- including some old photos that will change everything Richard thought
about his parents. And then there's the hip, thrift-attired woman who comes
into his store with more than junk on her mind.... Suddenly some very
unexpected things are entering Richard's life, including some surprising
revelations about love and loss -- and what's really important in life.
With an unerring blend of the comic and the poignant, Michael Zadoorian has
written an unforgettable novel about knick-knacks, garage sales, romance, and
the bonds we form with people and things -- the perfect story for anyone who
has ever loved something second hand.
On the basis that it didn’t quite
reach the heights attained by The Leisure Seekers, pick of the month is
Lynn Kostoff – The Long Fall
Blurb...... At once authentic and
flip, by turns wildly funny and deadly serious, as riveting as it is inventive,
The Long Fall twists sibling rivalry inside out and sets the conventional crime
novel on its head. In sunbaked Phoenix, Arizona, this never-predictable tale
tosses into its antic mix a dead father, his two sons—one a small-time ex-con
with a consistent genius for sabotaging his own best interests, the other a
straight, uptight solid citizen with a moneymaking chain of dry-cleaning stores
and a restive ex-stewardess of a wife named Evelyn—and a sicko cop with a
twisted worldview. Recently released from prison—twenty-four months for
possession of a truckload of black-market saguaro cacti—and in deep debt to an
unforgiving crank dealer, Jimmy Coates returns home only to discover that his
brother has cut him out of his inheritance. A not-unjustifiable desire to settle
old scores and new sends Jimmy on a robbery spree that wipes out four of his
brother’s dry-cleaning establishments. But when he finds himself tumbling for a
mutinously sexy Evelyn, the impulse to vengeance reverses itself. Unwittingly,
however, Jimmy has already set in motion a series of dangerous
consequences—adultery, blackmail, love, betrayal—that culminate in a blueprint
for murder. And it could be Jimmy himself who is taking the long fall.
Recommended.
