LOGGING THE LIBRARY - PART EIGHTY-TWO

Another 50 from the library in the loft!

Tub 82

Peter Robinson, Peter Straub, John R. Maxim, James Swain, Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson,

Tony Valentine series book from James Swain

Tony Valentine is an expert at spotting cheats. He's tossed them out of gambling casinos from Atlantic City to Las Vegas and Monaco. But though Tony has never met a scam he couldn't crack, his son and partner, Gerry, has just walked into one with a body count.

What started with a conman's deathbed confession turns into a deadly Las Vegas grudge match during the world's biggest poker tournament. While Gerry and his shady friends tangle with the Vegas mob, Tony enlists the aid of an aging grifter who's fleecing suckers with a dazzling array of improbable betting stunts. Tony's been hired to save the tournament (and stop a blind player who's out to heist it), while Gerry's just trying to stay alive - now that murder is in the cards.

Featuring insider tips for catching poker cheats, as well as a glossary of card hustler terms!

George MacDonald Fraser, John Hart, Robert Harris, Gerald Seymour, Joe Gores,

Top thriller writer Gerald Seymour

Sean McNally has sworn his oath to the IRA. But then he'd turned his back on the violence and the hatred, and gone south to the Republic. Life was good, until they came for him to do one last job. But in its aftermath, McNally is captured and is facing a lifetime's imprisonment. Unless he dares think the unthinkable... and becomes a tout.

Lieutenant David Ferris hadn't wanted to join the army, but found himself in it anyway. In a cruel twist of fate, his path crosses that of Sean McNally's and he quickly becomes a pawn on the frontline of a brutally tense war of nerves. As McNally prepares to gives evidence, Ferris must confront his own destiny. Not only is his life at stake, but also that of the future of the entire command structure of the IRA...

Walter Wangerin Jr., Peter Robinson, Sara Gran, Robert Wright Campbell, Elmore Leonard, 

Early Elmore Leonard novella - turned into a film with Randolph Scott

The Tall T is a 1957 American Western Technicolor film directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, Richard Boone, and Maureen O'Sullivan. Adapted by Burt Kennedy from the short story "The Captives" by Elmore Leonard, the film is about an independent former ranch foreman who is kidnapped along with an heiress, who is being held for ransom by three ruthless outlaws. In 2000, The Tall T was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Thom Jones, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Simon Conway, Mark SaFranko x 2, 

Thom Jones short stories

Thom Jones may be one of the few authors whose acknowledgments thank not only his dog, wife, and agent, but also Wyeth/Ayerst Laboratories and Stuart Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Effexor and Elavil--"drugs so good they feel illegal." Likewise, Cold Snap, Jones's second volume of short fiction, is so good these stories feel (but thankfully are not) illegal. In typically manic style they draw tragicomic portraits of boxers, Marines, and other assorted tough-guy types--even, in "Rocketfire Red," a part-Aborigine surfer girl turned drag racer and international model. Pitchman extraordinaire Ad Magic from The Pugilist at Rest returns, writing fraudulent but devastatingly effective direct-mail appeals for Global Aid even as he loses his mind on the combined effects of Dexedrine, paregoric, malaria, and a thumb smashed by Rwandan soldiers. In "Way Down Deep in the Jungle," another Africa story, cynical Dr. Koestler's baboon absconds with an entire bottle of whiskey, then entertains the natives with shockingly accurate imitations of the American smoking, masturbating, and moving his bowels. A plastic surgeon boxes his way through a fatal heart attack in "Ooh Baby Baby"; a diabetic with an amputated foot feeds a black widow spider in "Pickpocket"; the young Marine of "Pot Shack" compounds his foolishness in joining up ("Why did you join? Why did you join? Etc. Why did you fucking join?") by volunteering for recon, "where they take awful to a new level." It's the kind of fictional universe in which a manic doctor plays Russian roulette to cheer himself up, and the result is somehow, improbably, funny. But these stories go well beyond whistling in the dark. They are in fact a way to hold our 20th-century demons at bay, as the epigraph from 1 Samuel suggests: "Seek out a man who is skillful in playing the lyre: and when the evil spirit from God is upon you, he will play it, and you will be well." May we all be well, and may Thom Jones play on. --Mary Park

Mickey Spillane x 3, Neville Thompson, John Dale,

Hammer-time!

Otto Penzler (ed.), Marcus Sedgwick, Stella Rimington, Simon Mawer, David Gillham,

As good as Le Carre......apparently

Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause. Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France, her official mission to act as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must seek out family friend Clement Pelletier, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon, he is of urgent significance to her superiors. As she struggles through the strange, lethal landscape of the Occupation towards this reunion, what completes her training is the understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love.

Derek Raymond, Malcolm Mackay, D. B. Shan, James Patterson,

Malcolm Mackay - my favourite Scottish author!

From the award-winning author of The Glasgow Trilogy, comes Every Night I Dream of Hell, a dark and thrilling Glaswegian crime drama.

Nate Colgan: a violent man; 'smart muscle' for the Jamieson organization. Someone to be afraid of.
But now, with its most powerful individuals either dead or behind bars, things within the Jamieson organization are beginning to shift. When Nate, long working on the fringes of the business, is reluctantly appointed its new 'security consultant', he can little imagine how things are about to unravel . . .

It begins with an execution, a message; and soon the various factions within the organization are sent into chaos. But out of the confusion comes one clear fact: a new group has arrived in Glasgow, and in their quest for power they are prepared to ignite a war. But who is behind the group? And why has the calculating Zara Cope - the mother of Nate's child - suddenly appeared back in town?

Meanwhile DI Fisher, buoyed by his recent successes in finally jailing some of the city's most notorious criminals, is prowling on the edges of these latest battles, looking for his chance to strike before all hell breaks loose . . .

A dark and thrilling Glasgow crime drama from the award-winning author, in Every Night I Dream of Hell Malcolm Mackay takes us deep into a world of violence, fear and double-crossing that grips until the final page has been turned.

Mark Poirier, Richard Wright, Marcus Sedgwick, Minerva Koenig, Ry Cooder,

Minerva Koenig debut novel

She's short, round, and pushing forty, but Julia Kalas is a damned good criminal. For 17 years she renovated historic California buildings as a laundry front for her husband's illegal arms business. Then the Aryan Brotherhood made her a widow, and witness protection shipped her off to the tiny town of Azula, Texas. Also known as the Middle of Nowhere.

The Lone Star sticks are lousy with vintage architecture begging to be rehabbed. Julia figures she'll pick up where she left off, but she's got a federal watchdog now: police chief Teresa Hallstedt, who is none too happy to have another felon in her jurisdiction. Teresa wants Julia where she can keep an eye on her, which turns out to be behind the bar at the local watering hole. The bar's owner, Hector Guerra, catches Julia's eye, so she takes the job. But before she can get to know him as well as she'd like, they find a dead body on the bar's roof.

The county sheriff begins trying to pin the murder on Hector for reasons that Julia discovers are both personal and nefarious. Unfortunately, the evidence cooperates, but Julia's finely-honed personal radar tells her Hector isn't a killer. She risks reconnecting with the outlaw underground to prove it and learns the hard way that she's not nearly as tough--or as right--as she thinks she is.

Nine Days, Koenig's debut, is atmospheric, gutsy and fun, and Julia Kalas is an intriguing new heroine in crime fiction.

Stephen Schottenfeld, Ryan David Jahn, Mike Thomas, Paula Hawkins, John Florio/Ouisie Shapiro,

William Shaw, Robert Crais, Roger Hobbs, Chris Ewan, Leonard Chang, 

Leonard Chang - Allen Choice series book!

"That I am a nobody doesn't bother me as it might some people. I prefer anonymity, unobstructed movement through a crowd with neither a first nor a second glance in my direction." Anonymity is both existential goal and survival skill for Allen Choice, who may call himself a Korean-American but who isn't particularly comfortable with the label. A Silicon Valley security specialist (don't call him a bodyguard), Choice drifts through life the way he drifts through crowds: detached, isolated, neither particularly fulfilled nor particularly unhappy. He notes wryly, "I used to think I was in inertial rest, a body at rest remaining so. Once an outside force applied itself to me, I would be in motion. I liked this idea. It freed me, relieving me of the responsibility. I just had to wait for an outside force. But I soon realized this was an illusion... I decided to call it the inertial deception. I can't succumb to it."

But in Over the Shoulder, Leonard Chang's brooding neo-noir novel, circumstances conspire to administer an outside force of momentous proportions when Paul Baumgartner, Choice's partner, is killed in front of him. Paul's family, his employers, and the police all assume the hit was directed at the executive the pair were protecting. But Linda Maldonado, a reporter looking for a hot story to catapult her from the thigh cream comparisons and doggy-daycare features of the Lifestyles pages, hectors Choice into investigating Paul's death.

His investigation is quickly fractured by treachery and deception, as he uncovers strange links between Paul's death and that of his own father, an immigrant who died in a warehouse accident when Choice was 8. Elegantly captured in Chang's restrained prose, secrets and memories rise slowly to the surface, forcing Choice to confront both the long-hidden scars of familial bitterness and the poignancy of his father's quest to preserve his dreams of a medical career, even as he succumbed to the exhausting drudgery of physical labor.

Chang's first two novels, The Fruit 'N Food and Dispatches from the Cold, garnered praise for their starkly realistic portrayal of racial tension and quotidian ennui. Over the Shoulder, though leavened with a touch of dry humor, doesn't pull any punches either, as Chang lays bare his protagonist's frailties and fantasies. --Kelly Flynn

Tub 82 sorted!

HIGHLIGHTS.... Minerva Koenig, Mark Safranko, Malcolm Mackay, Roger Hobbs, Joe Gores,

LOWLIGHTS...... a few here from my son's books - Paul of Dune - not my kind of thing, D. B. Shan, James Patterson and the Simon Mawer book doesn't look as appealing as it once did.

FULL LIST OF 50 AS FOLLOWS:

AUTHOR		TITLE	YEAR	SERIES
CAMPBELL	ROBERT WRIGHT	THE SPY WHO SAT AND WAITED	1975
CHANG	LEONARD	OVER THE SHOULDER	2001	AC1
CONWAY	SIMON	DAMAGED	1998
COODER	RY	LOS ANGELES STORIES	2011
CRAIS	ROBERT	THE WATCHMAN	2007	EC11/JP1
DALE	JOHN	DARK ANGEL	1995
EWAN	CHRIS	LONG TIME LOST	2016
FLORIO/SHAPIRO	JOHN/OUISIE	ONE PUNCH FROM THE PROMISED LAND	2013
GILLHAM	DAVID	CITY OF WOMEN	2012
GORES	JOE	MENACED ASSASSIN	1994
GRAN	SARA	DOPE	2006
HARRIS	ROBERT	FATHERLAND	1992
HART	JOHN	THE KING OF LIES	2006
HAWKINS	PAULA	THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN	2015
HERBERT/ANDERSON	BRIAN/KEVIN J.	PAUL OF DUNE	2008	HOD1
HOBBS	ROGER	GHOSTMAN	2013	JW1
JAHN	RYAN DAVID	LOW LIFE	2010
JONES	THOM	COLD SNAP	1995
KOENIG	MINERVA	NINE DAYS	2014
LEONARD	ELMORE	THE TALL T	1955
MACDONALD FRASER	GEORGE	QUARTERED SAFE OUT HERE	1992
MACKAY	MALCOLM	EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL	2015
MANCHETTE	JEAN-PATRICK	THE PRONE GUNMAN	2002
MAWER	SIMON	THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY	2012
MAXIM	JOHN R.	THE BANNERMAN SOLUTION	1989	B1
PATTERSON	JAMES	DOUBLE CROSS	2007	AC13
PENZLER	OTTO	AGENTS OF TREACHERY (ed.)	2010
POIRIER	MARK	MODERN RANCH LIVING	2004
RAYMOND	DEREK	A STATE OF DENMARK	1964
RIMINGTON	STELLA	PRESENT DANGER	2009	LC5
ROBINSON	PETER	DEAD RIGHT	1997	IB9
ROBINSON	PETER	PLAYING WITH FIRE	2004	IB14
SAFRANKO	MARK	THE ARTISTIC LIFE	2016
SAFRANKO	MARK	SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON'T WANT TO KNOW	2016
SCHOTTENFELD	STEPHEN	BLUFF CITY PAWN	2014
SEDGWICK	MARCUS	THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS	2003	BODD1
SEDGWICK	MARCUS	THE DARK FLIGHT DOWN	2004	BODD2
SEDGWICK	MARCUS	THE KISS OF DEATH	2008
SEYMOUR	GERALD	FIELD OF BLOOD	1985
SHAN	D. B.	PROCESSION OF THE DEAD	2008	CT1
SHAW	WILLIAM	THE BIRDWATCHER	2016
SPILLANE	MICKEY	ONE LONELY NIGHT	1951	MH4
SPILLANE	MICKEY	THE BIG KILL	1951	MH5
SPILLANE	MICKEY	KISS ME, DEADLY	1952	MH6
STRAUB	PETER	THE THROAT	1993	BR3
SWAIN	JAMES	DEADMAN'S POKER	2006	TV6
THOMAS	MIKE	UGLY BUS	2014
THOMPSON	NEVILLE	MAMA'S BOYS	2006
WANGERIN JR.	WALTER	THE BOOK OF THE DUN COW	1978	DC1
WRIGHT	RICHARD	EIGHT MEN	1961