#45: Nemesis by Jo Nesbo

Oslo's crumpled cop Harry Hole is back in Jo Nesbo's Nemesis, in which our troubled hero tries to get out of the frame for an ex-girlfriend's murder while tracking a murderous serial bank robber.

Nesbo's first Scandinavian thriller translated into English, The Redbreast, was one of my favorite books of 2008, so I was pleased to find this one at the Morrison-Reeves Public Library. The Redbreast dealt with the emotional and political repercussions of Norway's Nazi involvement in World War II. This new one picks up a lot of themes and characters from his previous novel but, lacking the historical context, doesn't have quite the dramatic resonance of the prior outing.

That being said, Nemesis is a crackling good thriller with a great protagonist that reminds me favorably of Michael Connelly's notable series detective Harry Bosch. I like moody Scandinavian thrillers as a change of pace from American writers, but find that Nesbo has more the stylings of his U.S. counterparts with breakneck storytelling, linear action, and sardonic humor.

Recommended, with the caveat that you should read The Redbreast first. I am looking forward to Harry Hole's next adventure.

#44: River Girl by Charles Williams

A crooked deputy gets one look at a mysterious woman living in the swamp with her husband and is ready to do anything to be with her in Charles Williams' blistering noir River Girl.

It seems to me that Williams is not as well known as some of the other pulp writers of the era, but I have come across his work from time to time and have always found that he delivers the goods. Even though the reader can pretty well guess what's going to happen when our tarnished protagonist gets hooked by the "River Girl," watching the doom unfold is a wild ride and a great read. There is a great sense of time and place (a broiling small Southern town in the 50s) and an interesting (unreliable) narrator. A strong entry and one I would recommend for noir fans.

I surprisingly snagged this one for just .99 for my beloved Kindle.

#43: Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

A paroled bank robber readily slips into his old life with a fake psychic and her crime lord boyfriend even as the police have him in their sights in Elmore Leonard's easygoing crime novel Road Dogs.

I have been a longtime fan of Leonard, but in the latter part of his career he has been a bit hit and miss. This is a good novel for longtime fans, though, as it features a handful of characters from previous novels (including the George Clooney character from Out of Sight). However, for three quarters of the novel they stand around and assess each other's coolness and tell stories; only during the last bit of the novel does the story come to life with double and triple crosses and bursts of violence.

Overall an enjoyable tale, though again not at the top of Leonard's admirable bibliography. I listened to this on a good audio book version on loan from Morrison-Reeves Public Library.

#42: The Apostle by Brad Thor

The U.S. president is blackmailed into approving a covert op in Afghanistan to rescue the daughter of a major donor; meanwhile, a secret service agent who overhears the blackmail works to find out the truth in Brad Thor's military thriller The Apostle.

I had never heard of Brad Thor or his series of books when I picked this audio book up on a whim from the shelf at the Morrison-Reeves Public Library. I was quickly hooked on the fast-paced story with realistic overtones. As the plot rocketed along I found Thor leaned more and more to the right, to the point of making Tom Clancy read like Al Franken. The president, a demonized version of the worst of Clinton and Obama, who rides to the presidency on a wave of support from "the mainstream media," was my first clue.

But I enjoyed the storytelling overall and understood, via Google, that Thor did quite a bit of legwork and research on Afghanistan before writing this outing, and it shows. Politics aside, there is enough rough bromance and gun fetishism to slake the bloodthirst of any military thriller fan. I will look for more of Brad Thor's work.

#41: The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

In a post-apocalyptic world, a ragtag band of adventurers journeys to a mysterious island to secure a treasure and head off a potential enemy invasion in Samuel R. Delany's The Jewels of Aptor.

This is Delany's first published work, and bears a lot of the same motifs he explores, with more polish, in later classics like Nova and Babel-17; artists and misfits as protagonists, critical plot points featuring music and literature, psychedelic overtones. We also see the early emergence of some of his more curious obsessions, such as people wearing one shoe, rope belts, and sporting chewed fingernails.

But The Jewels of Aptor stands on its own merits, a brisk mix of high fantasy and sci-fi with some lyrical passages. A worthwhile read for fans of Delany (and I am one).

I nabbed this from www.paperbackswap.com, one half of an Ace Double with James White's Second Ending on the reverse.

#40: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

Rant Casey is a mysterious hillbilly who turns out to be Patient Zero in a virulent rabies outbreak and a leading figure in a night-time car-crash ritual; when he dies in a flaming wreck, an oral history of his brief, strange life makes up the core of Chuck Palahniuk's Rant.

Initially I was a bit afraid to take on Chuck Palahniuk's dark vision but found, with Diary and Snuff (part of last year's 50 books), that he is quite a good writer, though decidedly not for all tastes. The contents of a "sex tornado," and a time travel device that is mostly used to rape, murder, and commit incest, could conceivably bring the casual reader up short.

But Palahniuk is, as usual, full of good ideas, and is a smart, literate writer; sort of a Kurt Vonnegut with the sensibilities of Howard Stern. Rant takes on more a science fiction bent than some of his other novels, though I was quite a ways into it before I realized its near-future setting, sort of a rural cyberpunk.

I bought this with a Books A Million card my daughter gave me and enjoyed it throughout, and am now trying to decide which unsuspecting friend to give it to, to turn on to Palahniuk's work.

For discerning readers up for a challenge, Chuck Palahniuk's work is quite rewarding. Recommended, with reservations.

#39: The Laughter Trap by Judson Philips

Hard-nosed journalist Peter Styles is snowed in at a ski lodge along with a cold-blooded killer and plenty of suspects in Judson Philips' The Laughter Trap, the first in the Styles series from prolific writer Philips.

Philips offers an agreeable enough thriller, plotted a bit like an Agatha Christie whodunit with a few hard edges in a Ross Macdonald vein. One curious element is that the novel is narrated by another character observing Styles' investigation, and had I not known that Styles returns in a series of other novels I would have suspected--with his obsessive tendencies and violent outbursts--that he was the killer himself. The novel is also a bit different in that although it was written in the swingin' 60s, unlike some authors of that time period Styles definitely puts himself in the Silent Majority and looks askance at some of the beatniks and hippies around him.

I ended up with two Peter Styles novels in a big chunk of pulp I landed from ebay, and though I am not driven to read the other one I am sure will turn to it one day.

#38: Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec

An Eastern European mercenary helps a young schizophrenic woman impregnated with two mysterious babies travel from Russia to Canada, along the way brushing up against the Siberian mafia, Native American hackers, Canadian biker gangs, a self-aware Artificial Intelligence, a doomsday religious cult, and more strange characters.

Maurice Dantec's baroque cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies is a dense, maddening chunk of
sci-fi, but not without its merits for patient readers. Dantec is brimming with fresh ideas, delivered in a sardonic tone, but is prone to lengthy digressions and side treks. I would recommend this to anyone who had read a lot of the sci-fi canon and would like a challenge.

The movie Babylon A.D. is a Vin Diesel action flick theoretically based on the book, though the movie has the slenderest whisper of a connection to this sprawling, chewy work.

I listened to a very good audio book version of this on loan from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#37: To Kiss, Or Kill by Day Keene

A punch-drunk boxer from the mean streets of Chicago is fresh out of the asylum when he finds a dead blonde in his hotel in Day Keene's crackling noir To Kiss, or Kill. Soon steely cops, mouthy reporters, and bad women are all on his trail.

Dark humor and a relentless pace make this outing memorable. Keene also surprises with an upbeat ending, a rare sight to see in noir writing.

Day Keene is a current fave hardboiled writer that I only recently discovered (with Home is the Sailor being the launching point) and I am currently on the prowl for more of his work.

I snagged this one for 99 cents on my beloved Kindle.

#36: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

A handful of murders have an antisocial hacker in common, leading her to try her clear her name even as the noose tightens in Stieg Larsson's second Swedish thriller, The Girl Who Played With Fire, published posthumously.
His first novel, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, was one of my favorite reads of this year, and the follow-up is not far behind. Those who enjoyed the first one will find a richer experience with the backstories of the characters in the second, but it can also more or less stand alone.
I chew through a lot of mysteries and thrillers, as loyal readers here have observed, and enjoy changing it up with Scandinavian mystery authors now and then, an increasingly popular genre in the U.S. Their storytelling has a tendency to be less linear and more ruminative, with shifting points of view. This novel is big and chunky at more than 500 pages, but reads at a good clip and is translated in a straightforward style.
I had the great fortune to be sent a copy of this novel to give away during Knopf's "Tattoo You" contest, but naturally read it before declaring the winner.

A Slight Digression for Stieg Larsson

I am soon to be wrapping up my The Girl Who Played With Fire contest, over at my other blog, but there is still time to enter. Astoundingly, Knopf asked me to be one of 250 bloggers across this great nation to give away a copy of Stieg Larsson's latest thriller. However, they didn't mention that I couldn't read it first, so the contest ends when I get done. And I read quite a bit last night. And, by the way, it's good. More soon to be written about it here.

#35: Stop This Man by Peter Rabe

An ex-con tries to get back into the crime business by stealing a chunk of gold from a science lab, only to find out it was nuked as part of an experiment. Trailing radioactive death behind him, our protagonist finds himself hunted by the FBI, the cops, and criminals alike in Peter Rabe's rocketing noir Stop This Man.

This is another fine noir in the Hard Case Crime line, a collection of lost pulps repackaged with retro covers. Although fast-paced, I found this one to be uncommonly bleak, even by the high standards of Hard Case Crime. There is nobody to root for and plenty of downbeat moments.

Still, one of my favorites of the series (and I haven't missed many) and from one of my favorite lost noir writers. I had found A House in Naples quite by accident as a teen and always tried to grab anything else by Peter Rabe in the infrequent instances where I came across his work. A truly excellent writer who deserved more attention. Recommended.

I rarely buy Hard Case Crime novels as soon as they hit the stands, but this one I bought from Amazon as soon as I knew it was coming out and read it at a quick pace.

#34: Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

After writing several quasi-autobiographies (such as Postcards from the Edge), Carrie Fisher writes her first true tell-all, an amiable, scattershot series of anectdotes about her colorful life.

Fisher gathered a lot of material from her stage show, performed as a way of recalling memories lost through shock therapy and a lifetime of excess; thus, the audio book version is probably the best way to consume this slight volume. Wishful Drinking was an amiable listen (read by the author), but I suspect there isn't enough drilling down on a variety of interesting subjects (among them Star Wars and her movie-star parents) to make a completely satisfying read. Still, I enjoyed it and wished Fisher had provided even more.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library and consumed it rather quickly.

#33: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Suburban horror features a man who may be the last human on earth and his day-to-day struggles against his friendly-neighbors-turned-vampires in Richard Matheson's milestone horror novel I Am Legend, made into at least three movies and paid homage to countless times.

This is actually the first book I have re-read since I started trying to read fifty books a year last year. My wife and daughter were interested in it, so we listened to a good audio book version on the way up and back from Traverse City, Michigan. I had read it probably around middle school (when I discovered the Charlton Heston movie version) and was eager to see how it held up.

I enjoyed it again, though it is a bit dated, and you have to look past all of the parts that have been cribbed since and try to look at it with fresh eyes. But if you've seen any of the movies, especially the Will Smith one, there are more layers to the novel politically and philosophically that make it worth a look.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#32: Half-Injun, Half-Wildcat by John Callahan

The illegitimate son of a ranch baron is shut out of the will when his father dies, but decides to help his hard-headed half-brother save the spread during a range war anyway.

Despite the lurid pulp title, Half-Injun, Half-Wildcat is a pretty good Western (half of an Ace Double) with a lot more nuances than you might think for the time period and the Ace line.

This western came from the prolific pulp pen of Paul Chadwick, who wrote mysteries, sci-fi, and westerns under various names including Chester Hawks and the house name for Secret Agent X. It was a sturdy, quick read that I finished on a single day while on vacation in Traverse City, Michigan.

I was happy to find this Ace Double (backed with Outcast of Ute Bend by Clement Hardin) at a small used bookstore in Traverse City.

#31: Curtains for a Lover by Robert Dietrich

Another pulp adventure from the swingin' sixties, with plenty of hungry women and barking pistols for hero Steve Bentley; though, curiously, it turns out our protagonist is not a private eye or an undercover spy, but a Washington accountant.

Curtains for a Lover is a further curiosity as one of the many paperback outings written under a pseudonym by Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt. When I was younger, I read and enjoyed several of his David St. John spy novels without having a clue who he was, only later learning about his strange role in U.S. history.

I did not know this was one of his other writing non-de-plumes when I picked it up in a little used bookstore in Traverse City Michigan on vacation, but some late-night googling brought me back in touch with an old favorite.

Our numbers-cruncher actually appeared in several of "Robert Dietrich's" novels, although the bankbook-balancing generally takes a back seat to boozing and bed-hopping. Here the whole story is set off by a high-maintenance stage actress who thinks someone is forging big checks with her signature. In quick order the bodies are stacking up and the suspect list gets longer.

I found this to be a highly enjoyable read with some good prose passages. I knocked this one out in about a day while on vacation and would be happy if I stumbled across more of Bentley's adventures.

#30: The Murderer Vine by Shepard Rifkin

Slightly shady private eye is convinced to avenge the murder of several civil-rights workers in the deep South in Shepard Rifkin's sobering noir The Murderer Vine.

A long shadow is cast over the first few pages, leading relentlessly to a stark closing chapter that turns detective fiction on its cauliflower ear. Rifkin's private eye, fresh from the big city with his secretary in tow, finds the rural South and its supposed bumpkins a little harder to fathom than he thought. A lot of interesting political and social thought lifts the storytelling.

Rifkin has offered a fine, downbeat work, originally written in the 1970s and reprinted for the excellent Hard Case Crime line, a mix of pulp paperbacks featuring lost noirs and contemporary crime. This would probably be one of my favorites in the entire series, and I haven't missed many.

I read this one on my lovely Kindle and was one of the first three books I bought for this device. Recommended.

#29: Two-Way Split by Allan Guthrie

A mentally unbalanced trio of thieves inadvertently cross paths with an ex-con trying to go straight(ish) and a crooked(ish) private eye in Allan Guthrie's crisp caper novel Two-Way Split.

Guthrie name-checks old-school noir but adds his own touches of blunt humor and quirky characters. The Edinburgh setting adds interest and is also the location of another crackling crime drama from Guthrie that I read last year, Kiss Her Goodbye, which features some of the same characters.

I would easily point any Guy Ritchie movie fans towards Guthrie, or any reader who likes tough noir in a different setting. There is no doubt there is a lot of good mystery writing coming out of Europe today, at times eclipsing our homegrown scribes.

Two-Way Split has the distinction of being the first novel I read on my beloved new Kindle, and I purchased the download at the humble price of around a dollar. I consumed it over a day or so on the beach in Traverse City, Michigan, the perfect spot for reading a good pulpy outing.

I am on the prowl for more of Guthrie's fine, reverent noir writing.

#28: The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany

Trippy sci-fi has student tasked with tracing a poem that originated during a star-journey in which spaceship society devolved over a generations-long flight. The student makes a space-jaunt to the fleet of supposedly junked ships and finds that they aren't quite as abandoned as he thought.

I became a big fan of Samuel R. Delany last year and keep an eye out for his work. This one was the first one I nabbed from the book-swapping site www.paperbackswap.com (an improvement over BookCrossing, I think, which I used to call "Book Throwing Away Club"). I swallowed this in a single gulp on a long afternoon on the beach in Traverse City, Michigan.

The Ballad of Beta-2 is an early work and, although interesting, not as fully ripened with the wild imagination of some of his later novels such as Nova and Babel-17. In fact, its brief page count means big chunks of exposition are dealt with rather briskly.

However, a lot of Delany's trademarks are here, and there are bouts of neat ideas, making it worth reading for Delany completists like myself.

#27: Go Green, Live Rich by David Bach

Interesting collection of insights about how to green your life and perhaps save/make some money at the same time. Go Green, Live Rich is a rather slender, breezy volume written with the cheery agressiveness of a lot of business books of this type.

This seems like a curious selection based on previous blog entries, and it is. I had to select a "green" book to complete the summer reading program at the Morrison-Reeves Library. I picked this one because of having some interest in green living and green applications at work and home. This very quick read had some decent takeaways; however, I wasn't convinced that if I took all my savings from going green and invested it I would become rich.

Go Green, Live Rich will provide some food for thought as a primer for green thinking, especially if the reader hasn't been exposed to the concepts before.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond Indiana and read it in a short span of lunch breaks.

#26: The Paper Pistol Contract by Philip Atlee

Nullifier Joe Gall is given the tricky assignment of spoiling a French nuclear test and pinning it on the Chinese in The Paper Pistol Contract by Philip Atlee.

Naturally, this being written in the swinging 60s, Joe leaves a little time for the ladies and to kill a Godless Communist or two. But in the end I was a bit surprised how philosophical Gall is and more surprised at a somewhat downbeat ending; in fact Gall's "contract" more or less ends in ruins, with the bodies of friends and foes alike around him.

Atlee also displays a fine, full sense of place and character that makes his writing a cut above the usual pulp fare of that era. I was genuinely pleased with the last Joe Gall adventure I read (scroll down) and will keep looking for more of Atlee's work (even as, it seems, more and more of the Gold Medal paperbacks of my youth are in landfills, or somewhere).

I bought this one in a big heaping helping of Atlee and Edward S. Aarons paperbacks from ebay and looking forward to more.

#25: Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

A Thai cop with his own curious code of ethics (on display in Burdett's last novel with this character, Bangkok 8) intervenes when a prostitute--who works in his mother's brothel--kills an American spy. Soon our somewhat tarnished protagonist stages a coverup that draws the attention of the U.S. government, potential terrorists, and corrupt cops and soldiers.

John Burdett's writing features steel-hearted storytelling spiked with dark humor and shocking bursts of sex and violence. Plenty of Bangkok red-light adventures makes this one cautious treading for the unwary reader, but I really liked our protagonist's circuitous philosophical musings. I will be looking for the third in this series, I believe freshly released.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana and read it rather quickly.

#24: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Billy Beane continues to spin straw into gold with the Oakland A's, a traditionally underfunded baseball team with ongoing successes. How he does so is at the center of Michael Lewis' Moneyball, an entertaining piece of reporting heavy with arcane baseball logic but leavened with interesting human interest stories.

Whether you are a hardcore baseball person or a more fair-weather dabbler like myself, Moneyball is engaging storytelling. A reader can tell that Lewis enjoyed the subject and he writes in a bright, clear style. It is interesting to see what has happened to some of the characters--I mean, actual baseball players--since the writing of the book and how the A's have fared overall.

I picked this up for a quarter at a library book sale and passed it on to another baseball fan when I was finished.

#23: Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs, a private investigator and amateur psychologist in 1930s London, takes on the case of a missing heiress that eventually leads back to multiple murders driven by a shameful act during World War I.

This is the second of the series featuring Maisie Dobbs, and like the first has a mildly engaging mystery. But Dobbs has a great backstory; she was a poor girl who came up "in service" as a maid to a quirky mistress who later sent her to college, then later still serves as a nurse at the front in World War I, becoming wounded and then coming under the toutelage of a Poirot-like investigator and eventually taking over his practice.

Consequently, I picked up the second novel mostly to see what happened to Maisie Dobbs next, and again found the storylines from the past more compelling than the present mystery presented. I think the writing is a little more clear-eyed than what you might find in the typical English "cozy" mystery, and Winspear writes with a nuanced ear for details. This, more than any plotting, would encourage me to get the next in the series.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#22: The Silken Baroness Contract by Philip Atlee

Secret agent Joe Gall, "The Nullifier," goes deep undercover to sort out various intrigues in the Canary Islands and elsewhere in Philip Atlee's enjoyable spy outing The Silken Baroness Contract.

As I wrote recently, I have a renewed interest (along with a fair chunk of fandom) in finding some pulpy Gold Medal books of the 50s-70s, and getting acquainted (or re-acquainting myself) with this body of work.

I had not read Atlee before and found myself pleasantly surprised. His protagonist, Joe Gall, never found a doll he didn't want to bed or a commie he didn't want to kill, but Atlee has a great sense of detail and place and passages of fine writing, as well as finely-tuned action scenes and bolts of (non-PC) humor. Gall was a more well-rounded character than I thought I would find, once you get past all of the saber-rattling (including one eyebrow-raising scene where Gall, in a steambath, kneads the stump of a Korean War vet who lost his leg).

I thought I would briefly dip into Atlee before resuming another Edward S. Aarons book, but find myself inclined to try Atlee again sooner.

I bought this book in a happily large lot of Gold Medal paperbacks from ebay.