Book Review | Finders Keepers by Stephen King

"Wake up, genius."

So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, a Salinger-like icon who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades. 

Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he's released from prison after thirty-five years.

Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever.

***

I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but let me let you in on a little secret to some: though books are a big deal to people like you and me, we're outnumbered and undoubtedly outgunned by those folks who wind their way through life without ever really reading. To them, the way we've committed to literature is... quite simply inexplicable.

What they don't know—and what we, the enlightened, indubitably do—is that great writing can change lives. Great writing like the work of one John Rothstein, creator of Jimmy Gold, the real American hero at the heart of The Runner trilogy. On the basis of those books, a legion of readers "judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth." (p.85)

Morris Bellamy, a twisted little twentysomething whose mom doesn't love him enough in the late 70s of Finders Keepers' first chapters, is one of said series' dyed-in-the-wool devotees—right up until he slaughters its author.

Book Review | Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

A riveting cat-and-mouse suspense thriller about a retired cop and a couple of unlikely allies who race against time to stop a lone killer intent on blowing up thousands.

Retired homicide detective Bill Hodges is haunted by the few cases he left open, and by one in particular: in the pre-dawn hours, hundreds of desperate unemployed people were lined up for a spot at a job fair in the distressed Midwestern city where he worked. Without warning, a lone driver ploughed through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes. Eight people were killed, fifteen wounded. The killer escaped.

Months later, on the other side of city, Bill Hodges gets a taunting letter in the mail, from a man claiming to be the perpetrator. Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent hunting him down.

Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. And he is preparing to kill again.

Hodges, with a couple of misfit friends, must apprehend the killer in a high-stakes race against time. Because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim hundreds, even thousands.

***

On the back of a forgettable follow-up to one of the finest fantastical fictions he's written, Stephen King delivers a straight serial killer story with a difference of no small significance: in Mr Mercedes, one of our two main characters is the murderer. The other? His next victim, naturally.

The killing starts in the darkness of a day in April, several years before the events documented in the rest of the text. A job fair is to take place at the local auditorium, and the most motivated folks have been waiting at the gates for ages. They say the early bird catches the worm—some of these birds won't last much longer without one—so when a big gray Mercedes rolls up around sunrise, they think it must be the Mayor, come to commend them for their dedication.

It isn't. It's the last thing a lot of the jobseekers will see.

The car accelerated directly at the place where the crowd of jobseekers was most tightly packed, and hemmed in by the DO NOT CROSS tapes. Some of them tried to run, but only the ones at the rear of the crowed were able to break free. Those closer to the doors—the true Early Birds—had no chance. They struck the posts and knocked them over, they got tangled in the tapes, they rebounded off each other. The crowd swayed back and forth in a series of agitated waves. Those who were older and smaller fell down and were trampled underfoot. (pp.10-11)

The driver of the twelve-cylinder sedan kills eight and injures any number of others, and as if that weren't awful enough, he gets away with it as well.

This unsolved homicide has haunted Detective Bill Hodges ever since—even into his retirement, which he hasn't handled well in any event. He's wasting daylight on drink and terrible television, and seriously considering suicide, when he's sent a poison-pen letter, postmarked with a smiley face. Hodges has seen such a sticker before, on the steering wheel of the vehicle of evil, and his hunch is on the money: the note is from none other than Mr Mercedes, taunting him to pull the trigger of the Smith & Wesson he keeps on the occasional table by his chair.

The letter sets off a spark in Hodges' heart; a spark that catches fire; a fire that spreads until it's fully-fledged.

Book Review | Reviver by Seth Patrick

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Jonah Miller is a Reviver, able to temporarily revive the dead so they can say goodbye to their loved ones — or tell the police who killed them.

Jonah works in a department of forensics created specifically for Revivers, and he’s one of the best in the business. For every high-profile corpse pushing daisies, it’s Jonah’s job to find justice for them. But while reviving the victim of a brutal murder, he encounters a terrifying presence. Something is on the other side watching. Waiting. His superiors tell him it's only in his mind, a product of stress. Jonah isn't so certain.

Then Daniel Harker, the first journalist to bring revival to public attention, is murdered. Jonah finds himself getting dragged into the hunt for answers. Working with Harker's daughter Annabel, he becomes determined to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Soon they uncover long-hidden truths that call into doubt everything Jonah stands for, and reveal a sinister force that threatens us all.

***

If, for a time, we could talk to the dead, what would we say to said?

Jonah Miller, duty reviver for the Forensic Revival Service, asks the dearly departed how they died, in an effort to find out why, and by whose hands. Understand that his subjects have all met a hellish end, mostly through means cruel and unusual, and their posthumous testimony, however hard to extract, could make all the difference if and when their killers are caught.

Though Jonah and his co-workers are out for justice, in the better-paid private sector, other revivers act as mediums between the living and the lost... albeit for the right price. Mercenary as this practice often is, at the end of the day, what wouldn't we give for the opportunity to whisper sweet nothings or simply say goodbye to our much-missed loved ones?

On the other hand, what would we be taking away?

The truth is, even now, no-one knows. Though people have come to accept the practice of this dark art—largely thanks to the sensitive way the journalist Jonathan Harker dealt with its initial discovery—much about the process remains mysterious. And with no easy answers forthcoming in the years since the landmark first revival, funding for further study has all but dried up. Yet there are a few still looking into the possible consequences, such as Dr. Stephanie Graves, who specialises in remnants.

From the get-go we know that "hearing the dead bear witness to their own demise was never pleasant." (p.1) Headaches and nausea are to be expected, but poor overworked Jonah soon starts suffering from more serious side-effects. In short order he's hearing voices that are not there, seeing things that simply cannot be, and experiencing the leftover memories of people he has revived.

But being a reviver is all that Jonah has—in fact it's all he has had since the horrendous death of his mother—so he plays down the various complications. He makes a token trip to see an in-house shrink, then gets back to work as if nothing untoward had happened. However, he can't keep up the act after he's called in to revive the bloated, blackened corpse of the aforementioned Jonathan Harker, who in his last days had been investigating a group of particularly militant Afterlifers.

As you can imagine, there has been some resistance to the idea of ghost whispering, and the Afterlifers represent this perspective:

"What hostility remained gradually coalesced into a protest group called the Afterlifers, well-funded from an easy collaboration of disparate religious interests who saw revival as desecration, an unacceptable disturbance of the dead. But loud as they were, they found their calls for moratorium ignored. Direct action from more extreme members brought public disapproval. Their message of outright objection to revival took a back seat, replaced by more successful calls for greater control, rights for the dead, and a system insuring revivers were licensed." (p.15)

Still, there are those who disapprove of the process. Those who are prepared to use violence on revivers, never mind all the good they indubitably do. Jonathan Harker's killing is just the first suggestion of their elaborate plans, and given his involvement—not to mention the remnants of the murdered journalist with him still—Jonah is quickly drawn into this conspiracy. Soon, he and Harker's daughter Annabel find themselves racing against time to expose a chilling plot before the Afterlifers are able to realise the rest of their threats.

In the main, Reviver is a legitimately gripping conspiracy thriller, but the author—a Northern Ireland man who develops video games for Sega in his day job—also incorporates elements of horror into his first novel, as well as a healthy helping of crime fiction. Individually, neither of these aspects are especially impressive—though both have their moments near the beginning of the book—but presented together, like slight yet satisfying starters before a main meal, they complement the core story cannily, helping to make Seth Patrick's debut distinct.

Just as well, I warrant, because parts of Reviver would be by-the-numbers otherwise. Its elevator pitch is interesting, but not dissimilar to a number of others made in recent memory, and though Patrick's execution of his premise is perfectly acceptable, it is too pedestrian to pull one through the occasional doldrums. The narrative unfolds much as you might expect, with scant few surprises that have not been telegraphed earlier.

Additionally, there's quite a bit about Reviver which seems... not clumsy, but indecently convenient. Various relationships simply don't feel real, particularly as regards the one-dimensional women who pretty much flit in and out of existence relative to Jonah's indiscriminate interests. The only character to really come off is our anxious protagonist's pal Never Geary, who plays a charmingly maternal role and offers light relief in the interim.

Last but not least—before this becomes a laundry list of drawbacks, which Reviver definitely doesn’t deserve—expect a whole lot of explaining, including one mad scientist who elaborates, at alarming length, on his dastardly masterplan. On the whole, Patrick tells substantially more than he shows over the course of the story... but I’d argue that this is equally suggestive of his debut's strengths.

You see, it really is very direct; refreshingly so if you're in the right frame of mind for a few evenings of fast-paced fun. Reviver is a no-nonsense novel which values thrills over chills and holds banter in higher regard than character, but credit where it's due: the reading experience is resolutely thrilling, and the chatter, especially where Never’s concerned, is certainly snappy.

The high and mighty might be inclined to describe this as a dearth of depth—and it is, there's no getting away from that—but what Reviver lacks in terms of texture and density the author makes up for with an excellent sense of immediacy and quantities of unbridled excitement. In sum, though Seth Patrick has next to no use for poetry in his prose—an issue emblematic of many of his debut’s minor missteps—Reviver is a timely reminder that stories need not be beautiful to be good. This first novel has small problems aplenty, then, but these don’t detract from the fact that I really enjoyed reading it... and there's value in that, I think.

***

Reviver
by Seth Patrick

UK Publication: June 2013, Tor
US Publication: June 2013, Thomas Dunne

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Book Review | Joyland by Stephen King

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College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life — and what comes after — that would change his world forever.

A riveting story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old — and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time — Joyland is Stephen King at the peak of his storytelling powers. With all the emotional impact of King masterpieces such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, Joyland is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved.

***

After a lamentably uneventful 2012, Stephen King kicks off what looks to be an unusually huge year for fans of the master of modern pop horror with a small but perfectly formed mystery novel. Joyland is the second story King has written for Hard Case Crime, and like The Colorado Kid — which SyFy has since adapted into a reasonably successful TV series that deals with the weird and the wonderful on a weekly basis — it comes complete with throwback cover art by Hard Case mainstay Glen Orbik and a fantastic, nostalgic narrative.

Joyland takes the form of a tale told by an old man looking back on the last year of his youth:

1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones's lost year. I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart. 

Sweet, huh? (pp.12-13)

Devin — or Dev to his friends, who flit in and out of the fiction like memories lost and found again — Dev, then, is in the process of the processing the loss of his first love, a heartbreaker called Wendy Keegan who leaves our young man hanging when she sashays on down to a job in Boston. At first, Dev doesn't know what to do without her, so when the prospect of employment at a nearby amusement park quite literally lands on his lap, he takes the opportunity by the horns, looking to lose himself in something all-consuming.

Joyland is absolutely that. But Dev's star turn as a Happy Hound will eat up much more than all the time and energy he suddenly has on his hands: to tell the truth, it will consume his youth.

King's many admirers will be pleased to hear Joyland showcases the author of The Shining and this year's never-mind-how-needful sequel, Doctor Sleep, at the top of his game. It's rather more reminiscent of Duma Key and Different Seasons than the aforementioned classic, and more interested, in the main, in natural characters than supernatural factors, but be that as it may, Joyland bears its fair share of thrills and chills.

So sit back. Relax. Make yourself a plate of something, perhaps.

"And I'll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it." 

"Is it really a ghost story?" 

"I've never been in that damn funhouse, so I don't know for sure. But it's a murder story. That much I am sure of." (p.35)

Dev hasn't been at Joyland for long when he first hears tell of this spectre. Supposedly, she's the ghost of a girl who was murdered by her as-yet-unidentified boyfriend halfway through the Horror House.

That this homicide happened years back is a tragic fact; that something remains of poor Linda Gray to this day is probably just local legend. Dev becomes taken with the tale in any case. He begins by looking into the circumstances of the slaying — one of a number done by a serial killer with an apparent fondness for fairs. Then, when a friend of Dev's says he sees her, and another makes a dangerous breakthrough, his investigation steps up a gear.

This aspect of the narrative unfolds slowly — in fact, it's only towards the end that said thread takes front and centre — but there's more than enough going on in the interim to retain the reader's interest. Early on, Dev meets Annie and Mike, a single mother and her sickly son, who suffers from Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy, and I dare say this pair play a more meaningful role in Joyland's story than the so-called ghost of Linda Gray. In what is far and away the novel's most emotional moment, Dev takes it upon himself to show Mike the time of his life. And when he finally rises into the sky, "up where the air is rare," (p.229) I had myself a bit of a cry.

A murderer is unmasked come the climax, and there is, admittedly, a slight speculative edge to the entire affair, but Joyland is no horror novel, nor is the "hard-boiled crime fiction" this imprint traffics in a particularly fitting description. What we have here is a coming of age tale, primarily; a beautiful book, warm and honest, about a boy becoming a man, and his tempered transformation really does pack a punch.

In the exceedingly unlikely event that Stephen King is only remembered for one thing, I warrant it will be his talent for crafting characters, which I'd assert is especially evident in this text. In Mike and Annie, not to mention Tom and Erin, Lane and Fred and Eddie — and it wouldn't do to forget dear Dev himself — King conjures living, breathing people out of thin air, often in the space of a few paltry pages.

Here, however, his sense of setting is also on top form. Joyland is a magnificent place to spend a weekend immersed in, and the surrounding area is nearly as well realised. Here's how the old-timer who owns the amusement park puts its purpose:

"This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don't already know that will come to know it. Give such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here." (p.59)

Know that King's business, at least in this instance, is not dissimilar.

In short, Joyland is a joy. A gem whatever its genre. And I would be remiss not to note that it bodes very well indeed for Doctor Sleep, which must be the most significant novel the stalwart wordsmith has written since the finale of The Dark Tower saga. If the further adventures of Danny Torrance measure up against the high standard set by this more modest effort, King's constant readers can look forward to another real treat this year.

***

Joyland
by Stephen King

UK & US Publication: July 2013, Hard Case Crime

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Book Review | London Falling by Paul Cornell

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The dark is rising...

Detective Inspector James Quill is about to complete the drugs bust of his career. Then his prize suspect Rob Toshack is murdered in custody. Furious, Quill pursues the investigation, co-opting intelligence analyst Lisa Ross and undercover cops Costain and Sefton. But nothing about Toshack’s murder is normal.

Toshack had struck a bargain with a vindictive entity, whose occult powers kept Toshack one step ahead of the law – until his luck ran out. Now, the team must find a 'suspect' who can bend space and time and alter memory itself. And they will kill again. As the group starts to see London’s sinister magic for themselves, they have two choices: panic or use their new abilities. Then they must hunt a terrifying supernatural force the only way they know how: using police methods, equipment and tactics. But they must all learn the rules of this new game - and quickly. More than their lives will depend on it.

***

Time is running out for undercover coppers Tony Costain and Kevin Sefton. For years they've been working on exposing Rob Toshack for the kingpin of crime he undoubtedly is, but now that they've infiltrated the upper echelons of his organisation, the powers that be declare an imminent deadline: come hell or high water, they're to take him at midnight tonight. But to date, their target's been smart. The Met, for all their efforts, still don't have anything solid to hold him on.

What a stroke of luck, then, that Toshack appears to be as desperate as our listless lot. As the witching hour approaches, he goes from door to door, robbing and ransacking with nary a care; searching, seemingly, for some way out of a situation that he shouldn't know word one about. When he comes up with nothing, he's nicked — alongside most of his enforcers.

Detective Inspector James Quill knows that the charges probably won't stick, but he has at Toshack in the interview room in any event, giving it his exhausted all. Shortly, to the shock and horror of all involved, their prime suspect is in the middle of confessing to everything... when he goes and explodes!

"[Quill] fell with the force of it, hit the desk and then fell. Great gouts of blood, far too much, flew around him, covering the furniture, the tape recorder, the room, as if a bucket of it had been thrown over him. Quill managed to heave himself upright, and found blood still showering like rain. He was covered in it. So was the brief, who was yelling hysterically. Toshack [...] was just a mass of blood which had come from that mouth, that had burst from him, from his lolling dead head." (pp.37-8)

In the aftermath of this horrific incident, a small but perfectly formed unit of coppers is formed from the embers of Operation Longfellow. Quill, Costain and Sefton are all enlisted, whatever their differences, as is Lisa Ross, an outside intelligence analyst with inside ties to the Toshack family. With the clock ticking, their continuing mission: to investigate the impossible, explain the inexplicable - beginning with the spontaneous eruption of public enemy number one - and arrest the offending entities, be they beholden to Her Majesty's laws of conduct or not.

Given that this is an urban fantasy novel, albeit in crime fiction's clothing, I warrant they won't be.

Having worked steadily in a spread of literary industries since winning a young writer's competition in 1990, Paul Cornell is the sort of author whose name you don't know that you do know. If that's the case, be warned you will after this. Currently, he scripts Demon Knights for DC's New 52, Saucer Country for Vertigo, and his new Wolverine series is forthcoming from Marvel as part of the NOW! initiative. In the intervening years, Cornell has had a baker's dozen of Doctor Who novels published, two non tie-ins entitled British Summertime and Something More, meanwhile he's composed countless teleplays for UK mainstays such as Casualty, Coronation Street, and of course the Time Lord's own show.

For all that, though, London Falling - and the sequels sure to succeed it in time - may be where Cornell makes his most lasting mark. He's described it himself as 'The Bill do Buffy,' and this is a remarkably apt reference point, though it may take a little explaining. Gone but not forgotten, The Bill was a British soap opera come police procedural, as interested in the highs and lows of the lives of its characters as the crimes they quashed each episode; not dissimilar to Cornell's new novel. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meanwhile, was all charm and banter, by way of weekly monsters and overarching big bads. Excepting the inimitable Whedonesque wit, London Falling can count all of the above amongst its eventual strengths.

Pity, then, that it begins so nondescriptly, with the lastmost morsels of another novel's plot - or so it seems - and a cast of coppers so caught up in the crush to catch Toshack that they come across as caricatures: there's the possibly corrupt undercover, the know-it-all new blood, and the no-nonsense boss who's lost faith in the former. Only Lisa Ross, the obsessive analyst with a tragic past, reads as real from the first. The others take too long to develop beyond simple sketches, and though in the fullness of time their credibility increases, London Falling is something of a slog in the interim, particularly considering the author's jocular verbosity.

A couple of hours in, however, in the home of the wickedest witch there ever was in West Ham, everything changes. Our foursome become cursed with a sort of second sight which allows them to glimpse stark darkness gathering in a world under even London's underworld. As Ross reports:

"She had felt joys among the fears, even, but it had been mostly fear. There had been motion between the trees of Hyde Park, and strange lights manifesting, in colours she wasn't able to put a name to. Things moved between the trees faster than was possible. There had been unexpected structures in silhouette. Shadows lurking under shadows." (p.85)

From here on out, London Falling is suddenly alive with excitement. Once our officers have come to terms with their hellish new perspectives, they see Mora Losley for what she is - as do we - and their pursuit of her, under the umbrella of Operation Toto, is singularly gripping. Hereafter the sense of tension that had previously peppered the procedure spreads like an infection. There are some truly gruesome moments in the offing, and when Cornell hits home with a harrowing twist involving Quill, the stakes finally feel meaningful.

To wit, this manic middle section gives way to such a darkly fantastic last act that giving London Falling's overburdened opening a free pass seems a small price to pay. I only wish I could talk more about it, but to do so would be to give the entire affair away. Rather rest assured that at the end of the day, it's a beautiful game, as they say, and alongside the fans of crime and urban fantasy fiction London Falling stands to attract - for all the right reasons, for once - soccer supporters will also be in their element.

Especially for the latter lot, then: though Paul Cornell fumbles his first touch of the football, in a terrific turn of events, he finds his feet... he shoots... he scores!

And the crowd goes wild.

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

London Falling
by Paul Cornell

UK Publication: December 2012, Tor
US Publication: April 2013, Tor

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Book Review | A Single Shot by Matthew F. Jones

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Anyone's life can change in an instant. In Matthew F. Jones's acclaimed novel, one man's world is overturned with a single shot.

Trespassing on what was once his family's land, John Moon hears a rustle in the brush and fires. But instead of the deer he was expecting, he finds the body of a young woman, killed by his stray bullet. A terrible dilemma is made worse when he stumbles upon her campground - and the piles of drugs and money concealed there.

Moon makes his choice: he hides the corpse, and takes the cash. His decision will have consequences he can neither predict or control.

***

"The buck should have died in the pines from a single shot," (p.11) opines former farmer John Moon, hunting illegally on the estate that would have been his had not his father squandered it away in his last days. But no such luck. John has only managed to wing the deer, and when it runs, fearful of what might happen if it's found, bled out, he gives chase, tracking the buck to an abandoned quarry, where a sudden noise and a flash of colour startles him into firing a second slug.

Only later does John understand what he's done. For the moment, he

...picks up his shotgun from the grass-and-weed-covered gravel, starts to cock it, then, changing his mind, wraps both hands around the barrel, hoists the butt like a post-hole digger above the deer's head, and brings it forcefully down. The deer's skull collapses like a rotten vegetable. The buck groans once, for several seconds twitches again, then lies still. Placing the gun on the ground, John thinks it shouldn't have come to this. (p.11)

Finally he turns to survey the unintended consequences of his second shot, laying splayed on the forest floor: the terrible wreckage of what was only moments ago a runaway taking refuge in the quarry. "She is maybe sixteen, with crystal-blue eyes, blossom-shaped clumps of freckles on both cheeks, a small space between her upper incisors where a piece of gum or chewable candy is lodged. The clump of blond hair is a ponytail. John looks up at the sky. It looks just as it did five minutes before. He can't figure out how that can be." (p.13)

Knowing full well that this is an accident he will not be able to explain to anyone's satisfaction - not even his own - John, ever the practical man, hides the girl's body. In so doing, he finds a sackful of cash; ill-gotten gains, he reasons. Money from a robbery or a drug deal. Why else would the girl have hidden out here in the sticks?

With nothing left to lose, John takes the money and runs. He will find, however, that he has a great deal left to lose. His health... his estranged wife and child... perhaps even his life. Because the girl may not have been alone in the forest after all.

So begins A Single Shot, a short, sharp shock of a country noir novel come at long last to the UK, fully fifteen years since its much ballyhooed-about publication in America. If anyone can explain to me why in the Sam hell it took so long for this harrowing yet elegant specimen to touch down, I'd be much obliged.

In any event, the shattering impact of A Single Shot - we might as well call it blunt force trauma - seems to me not at all diminished by the decade and a half it's spent in transit. A story very much in the mode of Deliverance, and reminiscent of the work of Daniel Woodrell (who wrote Winter's Bone, and not coincidentally introduces this text), A Single Shot is narrated entirely by its protagonist, the flustered, blustery murderer John Moon. Moreover, his is a tale told in the present tense from first to last, which bestows upon events such excruciating immediacy as to make the reader feel as anxious, as endangered, as this drunken hunter, now hunted.

At a level deeper than conscious comprehension, John is thinking that the apparent palpability of words, acts, the whole process of human interchange, is a sham. He is mindful, though, only of his physical distress. His trembling extremities. His palpitating heart. (p.171)

Matthew F. Jones' belated third novel is an unbearably tense affair, at times, and all piss and vinegar and pornography - to wit: be warned that there's a whole lot of sex herein - when on rare occasion lives (innocent or otherwise) are not knowingly at stake. A Single Shot is not in truth a very likeable book, but from the first of its seven chapters - each of which corresponds to a single day of a single week in the life of poor, put-upon Moon - one becomes so swept up in the heady momentum of things, which go from bad to worse to oh-God-made-it-stop in short order, that there is nary a moment to stop and consider the withered lilies: the disgust and deep discomfort that are A Single Shot's stock in trade.

Black as pitch but beautiful in its terrible, wondrous way, A Single Shot is a distressing but unputdownable evening's reading sure to stay with one long after the lights have gone out. The movie is of course due sometime in 2012, and I expect it'll be tremendous. Thanks be that we have this chance to see what all the fuss has been about before then.

***

A Single Shot

by Matthew F. Jones

UK and US Publication: September 2011, Mulholland Books

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Book Review | Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski

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Charlie Hardie, an ex-cop still reeling from the revenge killing of his former partner's entire family, fears one thing above all else: that he'll suffer the same fate.

Languishing in self-imposed exile, Hardie has become a glorified house sitter. His latest gig comes replete with an illegally squatting B-movie actress who rants about hit men who specialize in making deaths look like accidents. Unfortunately, it's the real deal. Hardie finds himself squared off against a small army of the most lethal men in the world: The Accident People.

It's nothing personal-the girl just happens to be the next name on their list. For Hardie, though, it's intensely personal. He's not about to let more innocent people die. Not on his watch.

***

Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski is only the second novel to come from the garage-full of talent driving Mulholland Books, but already the imprint - sprung fully-formed from the Hodder & Stoughton stables - has established for itself, and consumers too, a identity all its own: of quality, high-octane crime thrillers from American writers. Only last month, Marcia Clark set the bar sky-high with Guilt by Association, a pulse-pounding legal procedural, but with a leap, a bound, and a lizard man called Charlie Hardie, Fun and Games raises the standard still higher.


Hardie is an accidental hero in every sense of the phrase. A policeman until some unspeakable crisis stole away his family, and his faith in the institution of law and order, he's taken to serial house-sitting in the three years since: watching over luxury condos while they're otherwise unoccupied for bourbon money and not much more. When he's not mainlining old movies one after the other after the other, he whiles away the time before, during, and after assignments drinking and navel-gazing - but however out of shape Hardie may be, he's still got some of the old officer in his DNA. To wit:

"Like most Philly cops, Charlie had taser training. And if you have Taser training, you have to ride the lightning at least one. It's a rule. Just so you know firsthand what you're dishing out.

"Hardie's first time became a kind of legend in law enforcement circles. Because just a few seconds after the training officer put the contact pads on Hardie's back and gave him a fifty-thousand-volt kiss and started to explain the effects of the shock, Hardie coughed and began to stand up." (pp.101-102)

Charlie Hardie has been through the ringer in his time, but whether through luck or resilience or sheer, unadulterated stubbornness, he just keeps on keeping on. "Unkillable Chuck," (p.118) as a local reporter dubs him, had "tried his best and lost - just like Rocky. That didn't mean he didn't give it his all. And that was something to be commended." (ibid) And something that comes in hella handy when our misbegotten drifter stumbles into the scene of a crime... in progress. For in the abode of his latest client, away from it all on the hard-to-find Alta Brea Drive, Hardie finds fallen starlet Lane Madden.

Shellshocked and strung out on a speedball, Lane has taken refuge in this seemingly secure apartment after narrowly escaping a car crash contrived by The Accident Men, a company of assassins who treat each kill as if it were a Hollywood production, tailor-making from their subtle slayings narratives fit for the tabloids. Lane was supposed to have taken a nose-dive into the treacherous Decker Canyon, but by the skin of her teeth she managed to get away to the house on Alta Brea Drive, where she and Hardie will have to survive the home invasion from hell.

And for once, the marketing is on the money, because Fun and Games is exactly that: fun and games. Short at less than 300 pages and sweet, if by sweet we agree to mean action-packed, thrilling - damn near addictive, even - this first escapade in Charlie Hardie's winningly witless company makes for an exciting and singularly satisfying evening's reading.

So much so that I begin to think all authors should do a run on Deadpool or Punisher before they publish books, because Swierczynski, with a wealth of such experience behind him, brings certain essential lessons of sequential art to the table in Fun and Games. Namely a sense of what is strictly necessary, and the brutal kill-your-children willingness to strip away all else; and a notion of pace and flow, of high beats and low, that has this first of three Charlie Hardie novels pumped up from the word go, and never less than high-octane thereafter.

Of course, with comic book highs come comic book lows, and alas, there is in Fun and Games something of a dearth of characterisation - a common problem in the medium aforementioned, though assuredly not an inherent one. In any event, Swierczynski spends too long dishing out precious tidbits about who Charlie Hardie is and what terrible thing happened three years ago to make him this hopeless semblance of man; piecemeal reveals where an actual character arc could and should be. The only other issues I would raise with regards to Fun and Games are a couple of awkward narrative contrivances, such as the inability of Chuck and Lane to call for help, whether by hook (no landline and a power cut which puts paid to the internet) or by crook (terrible cell reception means mobile phones also so happen to be out of the question).

But contrivances along those lines are par for the course; let's not be pedantic about them. Anyway, the pace of Swierczynski's first novel for Mullholland Books is such that there's not often the opportunity to stop and wonder about such nominal things. And lest we forget, this is only the first of three misadventures starring house-sitter come accidental hero Charlie Hardie, the second of which - Hell and Gone, due out in October - is sure to answer many of the questions Fun and Games leaves one with. Fun and Games is in every other respect a mile-a-minute crime thriller - fearless, funny and utterly accessible - fit to leave you breathless by its last, explosive moments.

***

Fun and Games

by Duane Swierczynski

UK and US Publication: June 2010, Mulholland Books


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The Best Things In Life Are Free | L.A. Noire

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've been playing L.A. Noire.

You might be wondering how that could possibly be, given that I was also playing L.A. Noire... what? Three weeks ago? Four? Well, the other half took an interest in an early case, and never one to rebuff the prospect of gaming together - a prospect much belittled of late, with couch co-op all but abandoned to make way for online mutiplayer - I've been playing it in fits and starts since; whenever we've both got a few hours to spend and an appetite for detection.

Anyway, we're on the last desk as of now: we were demoted to Arson, I'm afraid, for certain... infidelities. And I'm rearing to polish off those last few investigations and get started on a review for you all. But in the meantime, I've been following closely news of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, an anthology of eight short stories related in some way to the game, from a who's-who of contemporary crime and thriller authors including Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates and Duane Swierczynski.

And yesterday, almost lost in the E3 shuffle, there was news. The best news you or I could imagined, at that, because L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories is not only now available for your e-reading device of choice - it's available to download for absolutely nothing.

That's right.

For your free Kindle download, if you're in the UK, this link will get you where you need to be. If you're based in the States, try this one, instead.

Or for directions on how to get a compatible file for your Nook or your iPad or whatever else it is you use to read these thingummies, hit up the links on Rockstar's blog.

Pretty sweet of Mulholland Books to offer this treat up gratis, no?

But be aware: the e-book will not be free forever. As of June 12th, L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories will run you some pocket change... so go on and get it now, while the getting's good!

Book Review | Faithful Place by Tana French

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The course of Frank Mackey's life was set by one defining moment when he was nineteen: the moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Frank never heard from her again.


Twenty years on, Frank is still in Dublin, working as an undercover cop. He's cut all ties with his dysfunctional family. Until his sister calls to say that Rosie's suitcase has been found. Frank embarks on a journey into his past that demands he re-evaluate everything he believes to be true.

***

Tana French has been a cut above from the word go. Her haunting debut In the Woods left no doubt in my mind that a distinctive new voice in crime fiction had spoken up, demanding a fair hearing, and though French's next novel had its issues - perhaps The Likeness was a touch too Murder She Wrote in the belief-beggaring mystery of coincidence at its core - nevertheless its was a gripping read, so taut and thrilling and refreshingly character-driven most longtime crime writers would have stood to learn a thing or two from it.


Well you ain't seen nothin' yet.


Faithful Place in French's best yet, and by a country mile. With a brilliantly conflicted new protagonist to come to grips with, and a grim new neighbourhood with its very own closet full of skeletons to explore, the Irish import of the hour ably breaks away from the pack, delivering an unabashedly heartfelt portrait of a people, a place, and a time.


Twenty years ago, Frank Mackey planned to escape Faithful Place with his gorgeous girlfriend, Rosie Daly. The son and the daughter of two tight-knit families at war with one another over a long-forgotten grudge, these star-cross'd lovers had hoped to run away from the estate, to take off towards the bright city lights of London and never return. In secret the pair packed their bags, arranged with great care a rendezvous point from which they would stage their daring flight, and bided their sweet time.


But come the appointed hour, there was no sign of Rosie. Frank waited for her the whole night through... but nothing. And with the dawning of the next day came the dawning realisation that the love of his life had stood him up. Rather than coming crawling back to the Mackeys, with his tail between his legs, Frank resolved instead to forge on with the plan, such as it was.


The one that got away has been the bane of his existence ever since, so when Frank - an undercover detective now, working for the Dublin police force - when Frank gets wind of the discovery of a suitcase filled with Rosie's things stuffed up the chimney flue of Number 16, Faithful Place, and returns home to hear tell of a rank smell as of rotting rats in the same abandoned building shortly after he and the Daly girl were presumed to have run away together, he must face the very real possibility that twenty years ago, Rosie met a markedly more awful fate than the life he has imagined her living ever since: murder.


As dark as anything Tana French has written, as fraught with cruelty, loss, and the corruption of quiet hope, Faithful Place is yet an indelibly endearing novel. Charming in a thuggish sort of sense, say like Jason Statham coming home for a cup of tea, and funny in the way a Glasgow kiss might be, if it went badly wrong - as so often such things do - Faithful Place will surely grab you from the get-go, disarming you with its warmth and its humanity, disturbing you with its brutal honesty, and insight.


It's somewhat off-kilter as far as crime fiction goes - but then this author has made that style of narrative her stock in trade - and perhaps French can be a little over-verbose when directness is all such-and-such a moment demands, but these are niggles... nothings, really, next to the fabulously alarming way your heart will pound when inevitably, Frank confronts a killer.


Faithful Place is crime fiction at its very finest. A tragic tale, brilliantly told... loving but bittersweet... and told with such prescient truth that you'll be a mess well before the end: the latest from Tana French? Fecking superb. 

***

Faithful Place

by Tana French

UK Publication: March 2011, Hodder & Stoughton (PB)
US Publication: July 2010, Viking Adult (HC)


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Book Review | The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris

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Glasgow, 1946.


The last time Douglas Brodie came home he was a proud young man in a paratrooper's uniform. Now, the war is over but victory’s wine has soured and Brodie’s back to try and save his childhood friend Shug Donovan from the gallows.


Everyone thought Donovan was dead, shot down in his bomber in the flames of Dresden. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he had been. He returned from the war burned, mutilated and unrecognisable. He haunts the gloomy streets of Glasgow scoring heroin to deaden the pain. When a local boy is found raped and murdered, the local monster is the only suspect.

A mountain of evidence says he's guilty but something doesn't sit right with ex-policeman Brodie , and if Shug is innocent, the real killer is still out there. Working with advocate Samantha Campbell, he trawls the mean streets of the Gorbals and the vast hills of western Scotland, confronting corrupt coppers, troublesome priests and Glasgow's deadliest razor gang in a race against time for Shug's life.


As Brodie delves deeper, the murder tally of innocents starts to climb, so when Sam disappears amongst the danger Brodie reverts to his wartime role as a trained killer. Now it's them or him...

***

For a Scotsman - had you guessed already? - I have, in truth, some pretty conflicted feelings about my wee country. Some days I'll defend it to the hilt, and few things get me up in arms like the offhand assertion, more common than you might think, that Scotland is somehow in England. But then, I live here, and though the vistas have a certain rugged beauty to them, and there are communities yet I'd feel proud to be a part of, and the whiskey is really rather fine, day by day I'm faced with the unvarnished truth of the Highlands and Islands I call home -- and it isn't pretty.


Nor indeed is the Scotland of The Hanging Shed, the first book of a mooted series of noirish crime thrillers starring disillusioned ex-policeman Douglas Brodie. In fact not a great deal seems to have changed in the sixty-some years between the then of author Gordon Ferris' Godforsaken post-war setting and now, for The Hanging Shed hinges on a violent knife crime against a child - the rape and murder of one Rory Hutchinson - and takes in along the road to ruin religious bigotry, principled abuse and institutional poverty.


Same old, same old, then.


Brodie too takes it all in his stride. Though he's been away without leave for a few years - what with World War II and all - he grew up amongst such, and coming back to Glasgow he finds the city fits like an old glove; it's where he belongs if he belongs anywhere. But Brodie's belated homecoming is not for his own sake, or his mother's: his childhood friend and nemesis in adulthood Shug Donovan has been convicted of the rape and murder of one Rory Hutchinson, sentenced so forth to be hung by the neck until dead.


Brodie doesn't have much sympathy for Shug's plight - hasn't had since he stole away with Brodie's long-lamented first love - but Shug insists he's innocent. "I'm no' that kind of guy. You ken me," (p.32) he pleads, and though the evidence - such as it is - points to him and him alone, a junkie now, self-medicating away the pain of the terrible burns he came away from the war with, the pieces simply don't fit. Everything is too neat, too tidy... and Glasgow, I assure you, is many things, but tidy it is not. Not even now.


The Hanging Shed is an unrelentingly grim novel, without humour or much in the way of relief beyond the blank pages between chapters - and perhaps a little lightness would have helped to leaven its downward spiral of a narrative. But Brodie, a dour-faced down-and-out "making [just] enough money to afford food, fags and Scotch, not necessarily in that order" (p.3) - a man after my own heart! - Brodie isn't the sort to laugh easily. Few folks are hereabouts, and as such he sits well against the city. Frankly, much as I might have appreciated a belly laugh here or there, I was very impressed by Ferris' unflinchingly authentic portrayal of place and a time and a people I'm sure the impulse must be to pretty up some. The Hanging Shed is Scottish crime fiction from a displaced Scottish author and by the heathen Gods, it shows.


Ferris writes at times with an abruptness which put me in mind of Jeff VanderMeer's crisp prose in Finch, another blessed Corvus book. Particularly in the early-going he has such a decisive voice it can come across as thuggish - suitably so - and though the finely honed blade he wields becomes rather more blunt as The Hanging Shed goes on, by then the gripping plot has kicked in in earnest, lickety-split like, and if a few of the characters seem only half-formed as yet, bear in mind we're talking about the first book of a series here: very likely Ferris is holding back so that's there somewhere for Brodie and Co. to go come The Hanging Shed's successor.


And come it may, because though The Hanging Shed is bitter enough to burn, and so insistently miserable as to give this one Scotsman the warm-and-fuzzies, thinking of home, at its best it's quite, quite terrific. God's honest truth.

***

The Hanging Shed

by Gordon Ferris

UK Publication: March 2011, Corvus / Atlantic


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