LOGGING THE LIBRARY - PART SEVENTY-NINE

Tub 79 and another 50 from the tubs in the attic!

Tub 79

Lisa Gardner, Jack O'Connell, James O. Born, Nick Gaitano, Christopher Brookmyre, 

James O. Born - Bill Tasker series book.

Florida lawman James Born follows one of the most highly praised crime debuts of the year with a literally explosive novel of hunter and hunted.

FDLE agent Bill Tasker, still smarting from a run-in with the FBI that almost got him killed, reluctantly teams up with the bureau again on a case involving a stolen Stinger missile. The op goes smoothly enough (though the feds take all the credit-what else is new?), but something about the whole setup just doesn't feel right to him. Tasker pokes around a bit-and stirs up more trouble than a nest of rattlesnakes: with his boss, with the FBI, with the ATF, and, worst of all, with a certain gentleman who loves to see things blow up . . . bigger and bigger things,as it turns out. The bomber hasn't killed anybody yet, but if this FDLE agent keeps interfering-well, there's always a first time, isn't there?

Robert Daley, James Frey, Lauren Henderson, Peter Straub, Lee Martin,

Robert Daley from the 80s.

This latest novel by the author of Prince of the City may end by focusing on the controversy over a green Deputy Commissioner who commits accidental homicide, but it is really about the fascinating distribution and realignment of power at the top of the nation's largest police force. Foreign correspondent Phil Keefe has been selected right-hand man to New York Police Commissioner Timothy J. Egan, a small, strong-minded former police academy instructor bent on reform of the department. Keefe is coached by a sergeant who has seen awful cruelties on the streets of New York. He is suspected by top brass who fear their power slipping into his hands. And he is resented by his girlfriend, an actress whom he leaves each night to visit the city's cops at work. He is in over his head, though, when police officials saddle him with a difficult hostage negotiation that results in the death of a distraught black trucker. Daley himself is on slightly unfamiliar ground when he brings to task an ambitious senator and assistant DA. And he sometimes pushes too far his recurring theme of the cop as society's martyr. But when Daley describes working cops, he makes clear the aggravation and ugliness of their jobs. And when he examines the methods by which major police officials quietly protect their careers and extend their grasp, he writes like a dazzling pre-glasnost Kremlinologist scrutinizing small changes in photos of Soviet leaders for revealing clues.

James Frey - I like him even if Oprah doesn't.

One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel - a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines - some never to be seen again - but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.

Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

Gar Anthony Haywood, Jim Frederick, George MacDonald Fraser, Barry Maitland, John McCabe,

Barry Maitland - Brock & Kolla 5!

 One cold December day a shop assistant at Silvermeadow recognises a customer as Gregory 'Upper' North, a vicious bank robber who's been on the run for years. When DCI Brock and DS Kathy Kolla follow up the sighting, they discover that another major investigation is underway at the mall, into the disappearance of a teenage girl who worked as a waitress in the food court there. They agree to work with the Essex police on both cases, and the body of the missing girl is discovered, having apparently been crushed in one of the rubbish compactors in Silvermeadow's vast basement. Kathy and Brock explore the strange hermetic world of the mall, a place of perfect temperature and constant sunshine, in sharp contrast to the bleak winter landscape of the surrounding Essex countryside. They meet the different groups of people who inhabit the place: somewhere among them is not only a gang planning a violent robbery, but also a serial killer, stalking young women in the mall - a shark in warm, teeming waters. Like the mall they are drawn to, the people we meet are not what they appear. Illusion and fantasy mask the hard realities of need and dependence, and others have to die before Kathy and Brock finally trace those realities to their unexpected source. This dark and brilliantly plotted crime thriller bears comparison with Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin.

Alan Furst, John Grisham, Tim O'Brien, Georges Simenon, Jon A. Jackson,

Mulheisen series book from Jon A. Jackson

Hit-man Joe Service is on the run from would-be assassins and suffering from partial memory loss. He enlists the help of his love-struck nurse, Cate Yoder, as he searches for his long-time lover Helen Sedlacek and the millions of dollars they heisted from the mob in the prequel "Deadman".

Vietnam stories - Tim O'Brien

 "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber

Bill Bryson, David Baldacci, Stuart Neville, John Burdett, Charles Williams,

Charles Williams - 1950s

 Two Chicago hoodlums and a beautiful nightclub singer on the run decide to hide out in the bayou country of the deep South, land of moonshine whisky and easy loving. Then Miss Choo-Choo Caroline disappears wearing nothing but a very tiny G-string encrusted with diamonds, and the neighbourhood erupts into a fevered search of the woods. Only one thing is certain, and that is that Sagamore Noonan aims to- make himself some big money from the whole scandalous business.

Stephen Greenleaf, Jonathan Valin, Norman Mailer, James Slant, Alex Garland, 

A crystal meth memoir!

Leaving Dirty Jersey is the compellingly crafted tale of James Salant's descent into crystal meth addiction. Written at the age of only twenty-two, this memoir chronicles his year-long addiction with complete honesty and heartbreaking candour. 

Brought up in a stable, middle-class family, the second son of two therapists, he was introduced to heroin at seventeen by his brother Joe. This resulted in a spell in rehab where he met a bunch of ex-convicts, and he soon fell into the thuggish, drifting lifestyle of meth addiction. It was to take a near-psychotic event to finally get him to clean up.

With graphic descriptions of life on crystal meth - the insatiable sex drive, the paranoia, the desperate need for more drugs to sustain the high - James' writing mimics the emotional detachment of the drug and the wired yet aimless life it induces. His voice is so open and authentic, it is hard to believe he is still so young. 

Given the nickname Dirty Jersey, while living as a tough guy-junkie in California, James had it tattooed on the inside of his left arm. There it remains as a graphic and permanent reminder of his past life as a junkie.

Frank Lean, Walter Mosley, Graham Greene, Luke Rhinehart, Richard Aleas, 

Walter Mosley, Fearless Jones book

Paris Minton doesn't want any trouble. He minds his used bookstore and his own business. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble finds him, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. When the nephew of the wealthiest woman in L.A. is missing and wanted for murder, she has to get involved--no matter if she can't stand him. What will her church think? She hires Jefferson T. Hill, a former sheriff of Dawson, Texas, and a tough customer, to track him down and prove his innocence. When Hill goes missing too, she tricks his friend Fearless Jones and Paris Minton into picking up the case. Paris steps inside the world of the black bourgeoisie, and it turns out to be filled with deceit and corruption. It takes everything he has just to stay alive through a case filled with twists and turns and dead ends like he never imagined. Written with the voice and vision that have made Walter Mosley one of the most entertaining writers in America, FEAR ITSELF marks the return of a master at the top of his form.

I read this years ago and saved it for another turn - The Dice Man.

 LET THE DICE DECIDE


This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart - and in some ways changes the world as well.

Because once you hand your life over to the dice, anything can happen.

Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

Martin Booth, Charles Williams, John B. Spencer, Joseph Finder, Martin Cruz Smith, 

1st Arkady Renko - this'll be a re-read!

 A thriller featuring Chief Investigator Arkady Renko who is investigating the discovery of three corpses in a Moscow park. But why have the trio been mutilated, and why have they been buried in Gorky Park? From the author of HAVANA BAY and RED SQUARE.

Dick Francis, Joseph Koenig, John Baker, David Simon, Lee Child, 

Joseph Koenig - I loved his book Floater.

 This crime thriller from the author of "Floater" takes the reader on an entertaining tour of New York City's sleazier side. It centres around Russian-born Kate Piro, who has no difficulty attracting men, but soon finds that they are about to lead her into some complicated trouble.

Jake Needham x 2, Kris Nelscott, Laura McBride, Francis Gilbert, 

Debut novel from Laura McBride,

An accessible, beautifully crafted and heartbreakingly topical novel about PTSI and the unseen effects of global conflict on ordinary lives.

Beyond the bright lights and casinos lies the real Las Vegas, a forces town. In the predawn hours, a woman's marriage crumbles with a single confession. Across the city, Bashkim, the young son of an immigrant family, observes how they are struggling to get by in the land of opportunity. Three thousand miles away on the other side of the United States, a soldier, recently returned from active service in Iraq, wakes up in hospital with the feeling he's done something awful. 

In Laura McBride's heartbreaking and authentic novel, these disparate lives are brought together by one split-second choice; this is a story about families, the ones we are born to and the ones we choose to make. Faced with seemingly insurmountable loss, each person must decide whether to give in to despair, or to find the courage and resilience to rise. 

'A powerful story of the way in which war detonates far from battlefields, exploding lives in a single irrevocable moment. We Are Called to Rise reverberated long after I'd put it down. I can't stop thinking about it' Sarah Blake, The Postmistress 

Tub 79 - put to bed!

HIGHLIGHTS..... Charles Williams, James Salant, Jake Needham, Barry Maitland, Richard Aleas, John Baker, Jon A. Jackson and others. Looking forward to enjoying a bit of non-fiction from this tub.

LOWLIGHTS...... hmm, not too much to be scared of, maybe Baldacci and Brookmyre aren't especially singing out to me.

FULL LIST OF 50 AS FOLLOWS: 

AUTHOR		TITLE	YEAR	SERIES
ALEAS	RICHARD	LITTLE GIRL LOST	2004	JB1
BAKER	JOHN	KING OF THE STREETS	1998	ST3
BALDACCI	DAVID	TRUE BLUE	2009
BOOTH	MARTIN	HIROSHIMA JOE	1985
BORN	JAMES O.	SHOCK WAVE	2005	BT2
BROOKMYRE	CHRISTOPHER	A TALE ETCHED IN BLOOD AND HARD BLACK PENCIL	2006
BRYSON	BILL	NEITHER HERE NOR THERE	1991
BURDETT	JOHN	BANGKOK TATTOO	2005	SJ2
CHILD	LEE	THE HARD WAY	2006	JR10
CRUZ SMITH	MARTIN	GORKY PARK	1981	AR1
DALEY	ROBERT	MAN WITH A GUN	1988
FINDER	JOSEPH	POWER PLAY	2007
FRANCIS	DICK	IN THE FRAME	1976
FREDERICK	JIM	BLACK HEARTS	2010
FREY	JAMES	BRIGHT SHINY MORNING	2008
FURST	ALAN	THE WORLD AT NIGHT	1996	NS4
GAITANO	NICK	JADED	1996	JP2
GARDNER	LISA	GONE	2006	Q+R5
GARLAND	ALEX	THE BEACH	1996
GILBERT	FRANCIS	I'M A TEACHER, GET ME OUT OF HERE	2004
GREENE	GRAHAM	A GUN FOR SALE	1936
GREENLEAF	STEPHEN	DEATH BED	1980	JMT2
GRISHAM	JOHN	THEODORE BOONE	2010	TB1
HAYWOOD	GAR ANTHONY	BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST	1995	J+DL2
HENDERSON	LAUREN	CHAINED!	2000	SJ6
JACKSON	JON A.	DEAD FOLKS	1996	DSM6
KOENIG	JOSEPH	LITTLE ODESSA	1988
LEAN	FRANK	THE RELUCTANT INVESTIGATOR	1997	DC3
MACDONALD FRASER	GEORGE	FLASHMAN AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD	1994	FP10
MAILER	NORMAN	WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?	1967
MAITLAND	BARRY	SILVERMEADOW	2000	B+K5
MARTIN	LEE	GANGSTER'S WIVES	2004
McBRIDE	LAURA	WE ARE CALLED TO RISE	2014
McCABE	JOHN	STICKLEBACK	1998
MOSLEY	WALTER	FEAR ITSELF	2003	FJ2
NEEDHAM	JAKE	THE BIG MANGO	2011
NEEDHAM	JAKE	LAUNDRY MAN	2002	JS1
NELSCOTT	KRIS	STONE CRIBS	2004	SD4
NEVILLE	STUART	THE TWELVE	2009	JLI1
O'BRIEN	TIM	THE THINGS THEY CARRIED	1990
O'CONNELL	JACK	BOX NINE	1992	Q1
RHINEHART	LUKE	THE DICE MAN	1971	DM1
SALANT	JAMES	LEAVING DIRTY JERSEY	2007
SIMENON	GEORGES	MY FRIEND MAIGRET	1957	M?
SIMON	DAVID	HOMICIDE: A YEAR IN THE STREETS	1991
SPENCER	JOHN B.	A CASE FOR CHARLEY	1984	C1
STRAUB	PETER	MYSTERY	1989	BR2
VALIN	JONATHAN	THE MUSIC LOVERS	1993	HS10
WILLIAMS	CHARLES	THE DIAMOND BIKINI	1956
WILLIAMS	CHARLES	AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA	1971