Tuesday 31 May 2016

2 BY RYAN SAYLES

A couple this week from an author I know next to nothing about - Ryan Sayles.

I do like the look of his books though, which is just as well as I have a few of them on my Kindle!

He has a website/blog over here - Vitriol and Barbies.


Other titles available from Sayles....

That Escalated Quickly! (2013) (Got it!)

Two Bullets Solve Everything (2014) (Got it!)

An omnibus release of a couple of novellas from Chris Rhatigan and Ryan. Disco Rumble Fish - Ryan, A Pack of Lies - Chris.)

I'm Not Happy 'til You're Not Happy (2016)

A collection of stories by Ryan Sayles





















The Subtle Art of Brutality (2012)

The girl has gone missing. Again. But this time people are trying to kill her. Trying to burn down everything she has touched or left behind. The girl's surrogate father feels responsible and to assuage his guilt, he hires Richard Dean Buckner, former Saint Ansgar homicide detective turned private eye to ferret her out. Buckner was doing fine as a bare-knuckles detective for the PD until he was rendered "unserviceable" by a hit attempt. Early retirement doesn't sit well with that type of man, half predator and half savior. He takes the case, and from two ex-boyfriends who ruined their lives for the girl, her rapist dad, drug dealers she burned for thousands, an uncomfortable meeting at the local Incest Survivors group to whoever is setting fire to her life, Buckner is going to need all his guts, instinct and .44 Magnum to finish the job. Because in Saint Ansgar, what doesn't kill you only makes you wish it did. 

Praise for The Subtle Art of Brutality

 "Richard Dean Buckner is just the hero for our modern world: a righteous killer who can step outside convention and right the wrongs; and Sayles is just the writer to drive his story. This is how I like my fiction: unrelenting prose and kick-ass justice."
-Joe Clifford, author of Lamentation

"The brutality is in the prose. Course and violent, Sayles writes like he is seeking vengeance against the world. It's 21st century noir. Mickey Spillane on meth."
-Tom Pitts, author of Knuckleball

"As subtle as brass knuckles to the face. Buckner is a classic and Sayles is one to watch."
-Eric Beetner, author of Rumrunners and The Year I Died Seven Times .

"Richard Dean Buckner left me wanting more. He is a breath of fresh air in an antiques shop. A biker in a museum. A chaotic, reckless anomaly. You know I'm enjoying something when I deliberately slow down my reading pace to enjoy the novel longer. The Subtle Art of Brutality is a ridiculously strong first novel, starting the new darling of the P.I novels legacy."
-Benoit Lelievre

Warpath (2015)

The real estate mogul is lying about something, but his wife really was raped twenty-years ago in an unsolved assault. Now she's long dead by her own hand, the case has gone cold, and the mogul starts dropping cash into former Saint Ansgar homicide detective turned private eye Richard Dean Buckner's wallet to find some answers.

Just hours later Buckner's old homicide partner calls up. His grandmother was just killed in a drive-by that hit the wrong address. People that stupid need to be taught harsh lessons, and vengeance just so happens to be one of Buckner's finer skills.

Everything circles the drain as Buckner finds himself at war with the worst gang the city has to offer as well as the slithering rapist who has resurfaced just to tie the loose ends from the twenty year-old crime. Buckner doesn't back down, and if that means getting himself carjacked so he can interrogate the gang bangers, pose as the mogul's secret lover and chase the rapist into a women's shower room so he can beat him mercilessly, so be it. Just another day.

***Praise for Warpath***

"When so many PI novels are all about pretty form, damned few writers get the gritty function of real PI novels. Chandler, Hammett, Crais, Crumley. Those guys are the shit. So is Sayles. Warpath immerses you in his world, shows you what you'd rather not see, makes you hear his music his way. When Bruckner bleeds, we do, too. But it's not just pretty red, it means something, we learn from it. Read him...period. Incidentally, Sayles tells us that music sounds like a drillbit up someone's ass. Come on...how can you not read that?"
- Trey R. Barker, author of Death is Forever and Slow Bleed

"Buckner's back. More bloody, more bawdy, more biting ...and more brutal. Sayles' wise-cracking, sardonic detective takes you along in the front seat for a ride on noir's wild side. Funny, dark and twisted. Warpath chafes against the cookie-cutter mysteries of yesteryear and serves up crime like no other. Not since Philip K. Dick has a writer created a narcotic so insidious as the Big Fry."
- Tom Pitts, author of Knuckball and Hustle

"William James first defined the literary technique of stream-of-consciousness and then William Faulkner and James Jones employed it for powerful and uber-original effects, becoming the best-known practitioners of the technique until Gordon Lish came along and edged it further along in its evolution. Now, Ryan Sayles has taken hold of it and pushed it along even further on its evolutionary journey with one of the wildest noir rides I've ever been privileged to read, his raw and elemental Warpath. Buckner isn't nuts or a psychopath; he's just tired of all the bullshit that goes on in the game between criminals and cops and intelligently, he simply takes the most logical course of action in eradicating the animals who dare to breathe in his world. That he's the baddest bad ass in the neighborhood doesn't hurt. This is a ground-breaking book in just about every sense of the word. Sayles is a mighty talent and we're lucky to have him."
- Les Edgerton, author of The Bitch, The Rapist, The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping and others

"Richard Dean Buckner is a tough ex-police detective turned tougher private eye with at least .44 reasons not to call him Dick. Ryan Sayles pulls out all the stops as he races his protagonist along a frantic and treacherous Warpath."

- J.L. Abramo, award-winning author of Gravesend

Monday 30 May 2016

LOGGING THE LIBRARY - PART SEVENTY-THREE

After a couple of months off from the task at hand, back again......
Iain Levison x 2, John D. MacDonald, Tess Gerritsen x 2, 

One from the long Travis series!

Non-fiction!
 A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember


Margaret Millar, Joel Dicker, Iain Levison, Chris Holbrook, Ellery Queen two-fer!

Not tried any Millar yet!

Courtesy of blog friend Moira @ CiB

Short story collection,

Dan Fante, Jennifer Kincheloe, Bill Hillmann, Jeff Klima,

The title has me thinking of Anne Frank and her diary somehow!

Irvine Welsh liked it!

Fante memoir by the son - the recently passed Dan Fante.

Nice job - cleaning up crime scenes! 

Mark Pryor, Ruth Dugdall, Terry Shames, Gordon McAlpine, Eric Matheny,

Already read - photos taken 6 months ago!

Intriguing title! Intriguing book!
 "Woman with a Blue Pencil is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novel--something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of 'mystery' fiction--one that Kafka, Borges, and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated."

--JOYCE CAROL OATES


What becomes of a character cut from a writer's working manuscript? 

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American academic, has been thrust into the role of amateur P.I., investigating his wife's murder, which has been largely ignored by the LAPD.  Grief stricken by her loss, disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come, Sam discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence (including even the murder he's investigating) have been erased. Unaware that he is a discarded, fictional creation, he resumes his investigation in a world now characterized not only by his own sense of isolation but by wartime fear. 

Meantime, Sam's story is interspersed with chapters from a pulp spy novel that features an L.A.-based Korean P.I. with jingoistic and anti-Japanese, post December 7th attitudes - the revised, politically and commercially viable character for whom Sumida has been excised. 

Behind it all is the ambitious, 20-year-old Nisei author who has made the changes, despite the relocation of himself and his family to a Japanese internment camp.  And, looming above, is his book editor in New York, who serves as both muse and manipulator to the young author--the woman with the blue pencil, a new kind of femme fatale.   
New-to-me author - Eric Matheny

Ruth Dugdall!

Nicholas Searle, Robert Palmer, Allen Eskens, Mick Herron, Kerry Hadley-Pryce,

Anyone familiar with the "black country" an area in the West Midlands, England?
 Maddie and Harry: she’s an estate agent, he’s a teacher. They’ll say they live in the Black Country. They’ll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they’d killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they’ll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we’ll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it’s darker than it should be.


Mick Herron and his gang of Slow Horses from Slough House!

Read a few months back - very good!

Sheila Quigley, Peter Swanson. C. B. McKenzie, Susan Froetschel, Leo Perutz,

Vintage crime given a new lease of life by Pushkin!

Susan Froetschel 

Debut novel!
 Winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize, winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, and a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, a debut mystery set in the Southwest starring a former rodeo cowboy turned private investigator, told in a transfixingly original style.


John D. MacDonald, Linwood Barclay, Tony Parsons, Sam Millar, J. Frank James,

Karl Kane - PI novel from an author with a somewhat interesting past!
An ex-resident of Long Kesh and part of the blanket protest, to a conviction for armed robbery. His memoir ON THE BRINKS was pretty damn good!
J. Frank James - new-to-me author!

Tony Parsons - seen mixed reviews for this one - my wife sort of enjoyed it!

Travis again!

John Grant, L. A. Morse x 2, Anya Lipska, Stephanie Gayle,

Mr Noirish himself - John Grant - fact or fiction? 

Polish crime in London?

Stephanie Gayle!

Christina James, Kris Nelscott, Matthew Pritchard, J. Frank James, Frank Westworth,

Short series opener.

Murder and corruption in Spain!

Male, black PI novel from a white, female author!  

Frank Westworth Chastity book!

Roy A. Teel Jr., Mark Stubbs, David Shafer, L. T. Graham, Chelsea Cain,

New-to-me author - Roy A. Teel Jr.

David Shafer - something I meant to read a year ago!

Mark Stubbs - 12 Rounds!

Chelsea Cain - standalone book possibly!

Mis-filed - read over a year ago!

Tub 73!


HIGHLIGHTS..... Looking forward to in particular - Bill Hillmann, Jeff Klima, Mick Herron, L. A. Morse, Iain Levison, 
LOWLIGHTS..... nothing I'm totally dreading, Tess Gerritsen more my wife's cup of tea than mine!


FULL LIST OF 50 AS FOLLOWS:

To be back-filled at some point....