KIRK KJELDSEN - TOMORROW CITY

Synopsis/blurb.......

After an armoured car robbery goes horribly wrong and leaves four people dead, young ex-con Brendan Lavin flees New York City and attempts to start over again in Shanghai. But twelve years later, after opening a bakery under an assumed name and starting a family with a local woman, his former colleagues show up and force Brendan to assist in another armed robbery, of a wealthy diamond merchant. If he doesn't cooperate, they'll expose him and kill his family. Will Brendan help them pull it off and keep his new life intact? Or will his past bring him down, destroying everything else along with it? Tomorrow City is a riveting, literary crime novel that explores the theme of reinvention in Shanghai, the city that's reinvented itself more than any other in the world over the past generation.

One of the most enjoyable facets of my reading is discovering new authors that are writing the type of fiction I enjoy reading. Admittedly sometimes you take a chance on a new book from a fresh voice and you are a bit disappointed. Not on this occasion, thankfully.

On a recent trawl of some crime fiction blogs I check in on regularly, I encountered the book on the entertaining blog – Not The Baseball Pitcher. Always a sucker for a stunning cover and a big fan of heist fiction, I shamelessly contacted the author to see if I could blag a copy.

Said copy duly arrived about maybe 6 weeks ago and my hopes were further raised when reading the back cover.

Praised by the late Leighton Gage – “I had a twofold pleasure in reading Kjeldsen’s debut. As a writer, I admired his skill at evoking sense of place and his uncommon ability to evoke sympathy for a criminal. But the real pay-off came as a reader; Tomorrow City is such a cracking good story.”

Also Lou Berney, a favourite of mine after this great book – Gutshot Straight, enthuses – “A tight, tense crime novel about a stranger in a strange land trying to outrun the ghosts of his past. Kirk Kjeldsen’s Shanghai is a terrifically fresh and evocative setting, and the action jumps off the page.”

What’s the verdict then? 

Short, sharp, fast, plenty of action, interesting settings - especially Shanghai, with a sympathetic, troubled but basically moral criminal struggling to break away from the past and provide a normal life for his partner and child. In Bernard Lavin, Kjelsden has created a likeable protagonist who I was rooting for throughout. His daily life as a Westerner, trying to run a business and a life successfully, whilst flying under the radar was illustrated superbly.  His adversaries in the book are similarly fleshed out, with the author providing them with both depth and detail, as opposed to being cardboard cut-out villains. They display a chilling lack of humanity or any empathy for others standing in the way of their goals. Shanghai, the bustling Oriental city of 23 million souls is also stunningly painted by a skilled author in his first published novel.

There is violence aplenty, which is to be expected when blaggers armed with guns and a lack of conscience go out on a job, but it was in keeping with the tale and not over-gratuitous. The novel’s conclusion is believable and had me wondering about Bernard Lavin in the days after I closed the book.

I’m looking forward to what Kirk Kjeldsen does next.

4 from 5

My thanks to the author who responded sympathetically to my request for a copy. 

                                       

JESS WALTER - BEAUTIFUL RUINS

Synopsis/blurb......

The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller

Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.

The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.

Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.

'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times

'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist

'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire

'Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year' Nick Hornby, The Believer

"Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece."

Richard Russo   

I read one of Walter’s previous novels about 3 or 4 years ago – Citizen Vince and absolutely loved it. His latest, Beautiful Ruins was bought for me by my wife back in July as a present; though in actual fact she read it before me. It would be fair to say she enjoyed it immensely.  

Having only previously read the one book by the author which was fairly well entrenched in the crime fiction genre, I’m unsure if Walter has departed from “crime” before this novel or not. To worry about labelling it I suppose is irrelevant. I’d rather read a well written novel with no criminal undertones than a poorly written, unsatisfying police procedural.    

Love, romance, celebrity, Hollywood, Cleopatra, Richard Burton, war, illness, family, death, control, substance abuse, screenwriting, hotelry, tourism, Italy, dreams, passion, responsibility, forgiveness and hope all figure throughout this charming tale.

Could a brief, unspoken, unacknowledged spark of romance in Italy in 1962, still flicker and prevail across fifty years and separate lives lived before finally igniting?

Read it yourself and find out.

Overall, Walter’s book was for me interesting, enjoyable and entertaining and at its conclusion fairly satisfying. Hand on heart, it didn’t quite reach the high spots that I had hoped for, but it could be me being picky. (Citizen Vince ticked a box or two more!) Reminded me in parts of the film Letters To Juliet, with a bit less treacle and slightly less sugar.

I have 3 or 4 more books by the author that I will hope to get to in the next year or two.

4 stars from 5  

My copy was purchased new for me from Waterstones as a present.  

W's ENJOYED, W's UNREAD

We are well into the home straight on the Crime Fiction Alphabet Journey. We've reached Week 23 and some W – authors, from the ranks of the Library shelving are offered up for consideration.

Ignoring Charlie Williams, his near-namesake Charles Williams, Jess Walter and R. D. Wingfield – the creator of Frost, the selections chosen are as follows........

Willeford, Williams, Woodrell.........3 enjoyed

Charles Willeford – Miami Blues

I would rank Willeford’s Hoke Moseley series as one of my favourites – 5 books long or 6 depending how you treat the unpublished but boot-legged manuscript for Grimhaven – which was eventually re-worked into one of the other books in the series. I think Miami Blues was also adapted for film, starring one of the multitudes of Baldwin brothers, but I've never seen it. (Can anyone tell them apart?)

Willeford in this series captured everything I love about crime fiction.....character, plot, humour and a sense of the absurd. Time for a re-read soon.

Freddy "Junior" Frenger, psycho fresh out of San Quentin, flies into Miami airport with a pocketful of stolen credit cards and disappears leaving behind the corpse of a Hare Krishna. Soon homicide detective Hoke Moseley is pursuing the chameleon like Frenger and his airhead hooker girlfriend through the smart hotels, Cuban ghettoes and seedy suburban malls of Miami in a deadly game of hide and seek.

John Williams – Into The Badlands

I ought to mention this book as reading it in the early-90’s opened my eyes to various different US crime fiction authors. Williams travelled around the US meeting writers and exploring their cities.

Quoting from an Amazon review..........” Miami >> Carl Hiassen (Lucky You, Stormy Weather), James Hall Louisiana >> James Lee Burke New Mexico >> Tony Hillerman Los Angeles >> James Ellroy, Gar Anthony Haywood San Francisco >> Joe Gores (32 Cadillacs) Missoula, MT >> James Crumley (Bordersnakes) Chicago >> Sara Partesky, Eugene Izzi Detroit >> Elmore Leonard (Be Cool, Cuba Libre, Pronto, Pagan Babies, Riding the Rap) Boston >> George V. Higgins New York >> Andrew Vachss”

If it wasn’t for Williams, my reading of the last 20 years would have been markedly different.

In the summer of ‘89 John Williams donned a baseball cap and took off for the States to search out the mythical America of the crime writers, the nation’s most astute chroniclers – to find James Ellroy’s LA, Elmore Leonard’s sleazy South Beach of Miami, Sara Paretsky’s Chicago. Meeting, among others, George V Higgins in Boston and Leonard in Detroit, partying with James Crumley in Montana and undertaking an unnerving tour of New York’s underbelly with Andrew Vachss, Williams discovers an urban America at least as disturbing and mesmeric as the popular fiction of some of his interviewees and gives us an unforgettable, often hilarious commentary on his own predicament as a penniless traveller living in a string of roachy motels.

“An acute journey, alive with the stark and the surreal”

GQ

“Part travelogue, part interviews, stuffed with anecdotes, critical asides and astute observations, 'Into the Badlands' brings personality and pleasure into the stuffy and sombre world of literary commentary … a refreshingly vital approach”

CITY LIMITS

“I learned a few things. There is vital sociological and moral comment here too”

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

“An interesting, engaging literary travelogue”

INDEPENDENT

“A vital mixture of literary criticism, personality profiles and imaginary geography”

NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY

Daniel Woodrell – The Ones You Do

Loved it, loved it, loved it! Read it at least 10 years ago and whilst it was fantastic, at its climax I found it extremely sad. Woodrell is the kind of writer who could entertain me, if I was reading his shopping list.

"It's like dyin' old men all over the world will tell you - when you get aged and rackety and think back across your entire lifespan, why it ain't the ones you do, you regret, it's the ones you don't." Lunch Pumphrey is talking about sex, but he applies his philosophy to all aspects of life - which includes dealing with anyone who has the dim wit to double cross him and the bad luck to stick around for the consequences. And that's why old John X. Shade is on the lam, his nubile young wife having run off with $47,000 of Lunch Pumphrey's ill gotten gains, leaving John X. behind with an empty safe and a wise-ass daughter, the fruit of his middle age. Given a certified sociopath like Lunch on his tail, an empty bank account and hands too shaky to hold the pool cue that once made his fame and fortune, John X. has only one way to go: Home to the first wife and three sons - now grown - he abandoned years ago, back to the steamy bayou town of St Bruno.

Wambaugh, Winslow, Westlake..........3 unread  

 Joseph Wambaugh – Hollywood Station

Wambaugh had been quiet for about 10 years or so, at least in publishing terms, with nothing to my knowledge after Floaters in 1996, until this one in 2006. He has subsequently penned about 4 other “Hollywood” novels. It has been on the shelf and gathering dust for maybe 5 years or so. I do have a load of his earlier stuff to get to as well.

They call their sergeant the Oracle. He’s a seasoned LAPD veteran who keeps a close watch over his squad from his understaffed office at Hollywood Station. They are: Budgie Polk, a 27-year-old firecracker who is begrudgingly teamed with Fausto Gamboa, the oldest, tetchiest patrol officer. Andi McCrea, a single mom who spends her days studying at the local community college. Wesley Drubb, a USC drop-out who joined the force to see some action. Flotsam and Jetsam, two aptly named surfer boys who pine after the petite but intrepid Meg Takara. And Hank Driscoll, the one who never shuts up. Together they spend their days and nights in the citys underbelly, where a string of seemingly unrelated events lures the cops of Hollywood Station to their most startling case yet: Russians, diamonds, counterfeiting, grenades a reminder that nothings too horrific or twisted for Los Angeles. Here, it’s business as usual. For the first time in 20 years, Wambaugh revisits the kind of story he tells best life in the LAPD. Not only have his fans been waiting for this comeback, but readers of the new generation of police writing will have great interest in this book.

Don Winslow –The Dawn Patrol

Winslow is one of those writers whose books I acquire but never seem to make the time to read. This came out in 2008 and was bought new. I have subsequently bought Satori, Savages and The Kings of Cool but not cracked the spine on any of them, which is fairly ridiculous. One of these years, I’ll start reading some of the back-log! I have read some of his earlier stuff, which I enjoyed.   

The author of The Winter of Frankie Machine (“another instant classic”—Lee Child) is back with a razor-sharp novel as cool and unbridled as its California surfer heroes, as heart-stopping as a wave none of them sees coming.

Boone Daniels lives to surf. Every morning he's out in the break off Pacific Beach with the other members of The Dawn Patrol: four men and one woman as single-minded about surfing as he is. Or nearly. They have “real j-o-b-s”; Boone works as a PI just enough to keep himself in fish tacos and wet suits—and in the water whenever the waves are “epic making crunchy.”

But Boone is also obsessed with the unsolved case of a young girl named Rain who was abducted back when he was on the San Diego police force. He blames himself—just as almost everyone in the department does—for not being able to save her. Now, when he can't say no to a gorgeous, bossy lawyer who wants his help investigating an insurance scam, he's unexpectedly staring at a chance to make some amends—and take some revenge—for Rain's disappearance. It might mean missing the most colossal waves he's liable to encounter (not to mention putting The Dawn Patrol in serious harm's way as he tangles with the local thuggery), but this investigation is about to give him a wilder ride than any he's ever imagined.

Harrowing and funny, righteous and outrageous, The Dawn Patrol is epic making crunchy from start to finish.

Donald Westlake – Bank Shot

I have read a fair few Westlake books in my crime fiction reading days, though mostly they were Parker books published under his Richard Stark moniker. Bank Shot has been on the shelves maybe 20 years or so, a second hand bargain that cost me about 30p. It’s the 2^nd in the Dortmunder series and as I have read the 1^st there’s no real excuse for not getting stuck in, apart from the usual complaint of too many books and not enough time!   

When John Dortmunder sets out to rob a bank, he really means it. He steals the whole thing. With the help of his usual crew, as well as a sophomoric ex-FBI man and a militant safecracker, Dortmunder puts a set of wheels under a trailer that just happens to be the temporary site of the Capitalists' & Immigrants' Trust Corp.

When the safe won't open and the cops close in, Dortmunder realizes he's got to find a place -- somewhere in suburban Long Island -- to hide a bank.

"One of the funniest conceptions you're going to come across...the ending is hilarious." (The New York Times)

 Please visit Mysteries in Paradise to check out other bloggers Alphabet selection, here.

Off now to peruse the shelves of the library for X's - I don't think I will be gone too long!

WHEN LIFE GETS IN THE WAY OF READING!

OK - this wasn't our tent and it didn't snow, but you get the gist of it!

I'm behind with my reading,

I'm behind with my write-ups,

I haven't visited many blogs of late,

I haven't responded to messages and e-mails,

All this while I was on holiday!

Now I'm trying to catch-up on 2 weeks plus of work e-mails and catch up on the mayhem that seems to exist around my job at what is our busiest time of year.

Still, I don't have much to moan about if this is as bad as it gets.

I am missing the time I spent with my family over the past couple of weeks, even if I have come to realise that camping in a tent somewhere on the North Norfolk coast on a chilly August weekend isn't really my thing!

A week and a half on and I have finally chased the cold from my bones!

V's ENJOYED, V's UNREAD

It’s week 22 on the Crime Fiction Alphabet Journey hosted by Kerrie at her Mysteries in Paradise website. The turn of the V’s to step  into the spotlight. Here’s some selections from the heaving shelves of the Criminal Library.

Valin, Vachss........2 enjoyed

Jonathan Valin – The Lime Pit

Valin wrote 10 or 11 Harry Stoner mysteries then stopped. I think I read somewhere that he went into music journalism. I’ve only read the first in the series, I don’t know how many years ago. Hand on heart I can’t exactly recall what it was about in any great detail, though I dimly recall enjoying it to the extent that I bought most of the series, but never actually read any of them subsequently. I recall a quote from a book I read recently, though the book’s name escapes me.......when we buy books, we actually think we are buying the time to read them......or something like that. I should get back to this series when I’m about 300 years old! Despite the set-up, I don’t remember it as a clichéd PI  tale.

The first Harry Stoner mystery

Harry Stoner is a private eye in the classic tradition. A loner with a history of failed relationships with women and all-too-successful relationships with bottles of scotch, he's unable to look away from the world's corruption and unable to avoid trying--futiley--to do something about it. His latest hopeless cause is Cindy Ann, a teenage hooker. Neither pretty nor engaging, she doesn't have much to offer at all, and somehow that makes her disappearance all the more disturbing for Stoner, who knows what can happen to girls nobody wants. And he's got a sick hunch that it happened to Cindy Ann, right across the Cincinnati border.

As tough as Spenser in his heyday, Stoner is as hard-boiled as they come, but he's a lot more than a standard-issue pulp P.I. The story may be ugly, but in Valin's hands it has the brutal grace of a world-class boxing match.

Andrew Vachss – Flood

This is the first in Vachss long running Burke series which I enjoyed early-90’s. Keishon, a champion crime fiction blogger and dare I say it friend, read this recently and unfortunately didn't enjoy it at all. I will re-read it at some point and some of his subsequent Burke books in the future to see if my opinion has changed....hopefully not!

Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.

Vasquez, Vine, Van de Weterin, Vargas..........4 unread

Ian Vasquez – In The Heat

This is a fairly recent addition to the library and the first in a series of 3 by the author. This will be my first Belize based mystery as and when I get to it, which knowing me won’t be any time soon.

Boxer Miles Young thinks he's got one more shot in him before it's time to hang up the gloves for good. He may be the only one who thinks so. The truth is, he enjoys the recognition his career has brought him at home, in the small Latin American country of Belize, and he's worried about how he'll support his daughter once it's over. So when his promoter comes to him with a proposition that includes one last big fight, he listens.

Isabelle Gilmore wants Miles to find her daughter, who's run off with some of her mother's money and her no-good boyfriend. Isabelle's afraid Rian's going to marry the kid, the only son of corrupt ex--police chief Marlon Tablada, and she wants Rian---and the money---found. In return, Miles gets put on a fight card with a $30,000 payday.

He's reluctant, but Isabelle thinks a hometown hero can get people to talk in ways a private investigator can't. Trouble is, before he can find Rian, he learns that there's much more to Isabelle, her daughter, and Marlon than Isabelle let on.

Clearly at home in the world of hardboiled crime writing, debut novelist Ian Vasquez is a bright new talent who infuses In the Heat with a steamy, exotic voice all his own.

JanWillem Van De Wetering – Outsider In Amsterdam

I’ve not read any Dutch based crime fiction, or at least I can’t recall any. This is the first in a 12 or 13 long series. I don’t think the short blurb does the book or series justice. Written in the mid-70’s, I’m interested in finding out how the Dutch police went about their work back then. Probably another 12 books to add to the wishlist if I enjoy this one! Apologies for the rubbish image.

Piet Verboom is found dangling from a beam in the Hindist Society he ran as a restaurant-commune in a quiet Amsterdam street. Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier of the Amsterdam police force are sent to investigate what looks like a simple suicide.

Barbara Vine – King Solomon’s Carpet

Is it cheating counting Vine as a V? Should it be R for Rendell? Either way I have not read anything by the lady who I think Ian Rankin labelled as Britain’s Greatest Living Crime Author. (I don’t think I made that up!) I think this won a Dagger Award of some description.

Jarvis lives in a crumbling house with a view of the Jubilee Line: he loves the tube with all its secrets - its hidden tunnels, its mysterious "ghost" stations, its incidents and accidents, which he records. He lives in a house which was once a school, but now he lets out rooms.

Fred Vargas – The Three Evangelists

Bought it, when my mind was set on reading some European (non-UK/Irish) crime fiction and promptly forgot about it. It must have gathered dust for a good 6 or 7 years now. One day, but probably not particularly soon, I will give Fred a try.

The Three Evangelists is an enormously entertaining departure from Vargas's Commissaire Adamsberg series. Sophia Simeonidis, a Greek opera singer, wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. As her husband doesn't give a damn, she asks her new neighbours to dig around the tree to find out if something has been buried. Her neighbours are eccentric: Vandoosler, an ex-cop fired from the police for having helped a murderer to escape, and sharing the house are three impecunious historians: Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists, as Vandoosler calls them. They accept the job because they are desperate for money and rather curious. When they find nothing and Sophia's dead body turns up weeks later, they decide to investigate.

Back next week on the 23^rd leg with some W’s.

AUGUST ADDITIONS TO THE LIBRARY....SOME OF AT LEAST

Amongst a book parcel from a friend in Florida! 

Despite having more books than I can shake a stick at, I continue to have my head turned constantly. These are some of the additions to the shelves. I will probably read Fletch first, out of this lot.....or maybe Freeling.

Swapped with a member on RISI website.

Giveaway prize from Goodreads!

His latest and a bargain charity shop find!

Scottish/Canadian author, new to me!

Heard about him, but never read him!

AUGUST, 2013 - READING LIST

August typically is a productive reading month for me, at least in terms of numbers. I say typically, but not so this year. Usually I take 2 weeks holiday in the month and crack through a few books. This year my vacation time is a week later than normal, so I have veered into September for some down-time.

That doesn't explain why I haven't reached double figures for the month though. My older 2 children were at Reading festival for about 5 days, which also coincided with my youngest disappearing to Devon for a break with one of her friends and her family. What's a man to do? Bury his head in a book, or pay some attention to his wife?

Mrs K. won hands down. So August turned more into film month than book month. I watched in no particular order.........Sexy Beast (excellent, I love Ray Winstone),  A Clockwork Orange (weird), Chinatown (fantastic), Domino (dire, didn't reach the end), Sharknado (bizarre, but fun in a so bad it's good sort of way), You're Next (better than I thought it was going to be, newly released horror/slasher movie), The Way Way Back (new release from the makers of Little Miss Sunshine - which is one of my favourite films ever. Superb family film about a lonely teenager growing up over a summer holiday. Sam Rockwell is fantastic, as is the young lad  who I didn't know).  One more film - Patten - a bio-pic, about the US general and his feats during WW2; verdict -  really good.

Back to the books though, a couple of average books read, a few excellent, one disappointment and one stand-out.

Book of the month Duane Swierczynski - The Wheelman

David Mark - Dark Winter (4)

Wayne Epperson - Chasing Bad Guys (3)

Leif G.W. Persson - Linda, As In The Linda Murder (4)

Charlie Williams - Graven Image (3)

Duane Swierczynski - The Wheelman (5)

Bill Pronzini/Collin Wilcox - Twospot (4)

Eoin Colfer - Screwed (2)

Thomas Perry - The Boyfriend (4)

Kerrie , over at Mysteries in Paradise collates other bloggers August selections here.