Category Archives: review

Review: Fierce Bitches by Jedidiah Ayres

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Anybody who read my recent review of Ayres’ collection A F*ckload of Shorts will know I thought highly of it. And rumblings on the crime fiction grapevine suggested that his latest, Fierce Bitches, was a cracker. Reviews were exceptional right across the board. So I made sure to grab a paperback copy the moment it became available.

Fierce Bitches involves a small town, or more a collection of buildings really, called Politoburg, in the middle of nowhere in Mexico that belongs to Harlan Polito, a crime boss. The population of this town consists of Mexican whores (the Marias), gringos who work for Polito (sent out of the way, to be called on when the boss needs them), and Ramon who runs the place by keeping gringos in line – making sure they don’t hurt the girls, keeping them supplied with booze, drugs etc, and breaking heads when needs be. Everything runs smoothly, or as smoothly as a town that consists of criminals can, until a robbery of a delivery occurs, leaving people dead and Ramon severely injured. In the aftermath of the robbery one of the Marias escapes with a nameless gringo and suddenly everything goes to hell…

It’s hard to know how to classify Fierce Bitches. It’s not strictly crime fiction, although crimes obviously occur during it (lots of them, in fact), I suppose you could call it noir, it’s certainly bleak enough, but even that doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It has many elements in the mix, but the best way to describe it would be as a cross between the hellish El Rey finale of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway and the biblical fury of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. One thing is for certain, it has an ambition that most modern noir novels will probably never come to emulating. For a start, the use of language is certainly superior to many writers currently working in this field. Second-person narration is notoriously difficult to get right but Ayres absolutely nails it here. Also, the fractured timeline mode of storytelling is another skill that’s not easy to nail, but again Ayres manages it with aplomb. It’s an exceptional bit of writing that, despite only being novella length, feels much weightier than its page count and has certainly marked Ayres as someone who will probably rise to the top of the current crop of crime/noir writers sooner rather than later. I can see this being in my top ten or top five or whatever the fuck it ends up being at the end of the year.

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Review: The Storm Without by Tony Black

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According to the blurbs, Tony Black is apparently Irvine Welsh’s favourite crime writer. This is no small thing to have on your resume, that one of the most influential writers of the last thirty years thinks you’re the mutt’s nuts when it comes to writing crime fiction.

Black has made his name writing the Gus Drury series of books, all of which come with lots of critical acclaim, so he has a pedigree with this stuff. This Blasted Heath release isn’t one of those, this one is about Doug Michie, a former RUC officer with a past, who has returned to his old home town of Ayr. He’s barely back in town five minutes when he meets an old friend, and once more than that, Lyn, whose son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. She doesn’t believe he did it. Doug takes it on trust and starts investigating. What he finds out leads him to old enemies, smuggling and council corruption. On top of which he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and ex-colleagues who aren’t exactly happy to have him back.

The Storm Without is a brisk read with plenty of style and a compelling narrator in Doug Michie. Tony Black’s excellent prose brings the rainswept streets of Ayr alive with nice little nuggets of description and he keeps the narrative moving along nicely. So far so good. But there is one flaw, one that takes a 5-star performance and turns it into a 4-star scrape. That flaw is the ending. Without giving away spoilers there is a rescue for a certain character, but the thing is we never find out how this happens or by whom or how the character gets found. Aside from a paragraph of a newspaper article explaining that it has happened there’s no further description to explain how it happened. Okay, I know they say show don’t tell, but if you can’t show something at least tell me how something occurred – I’d rather be told something than just be forced to accept that something has happened – without an explanation it becomes a deus ex machina and feels a bit rushed. This is a pity, really, because Black can really turn a sentence and he knows his way around a narrative and in Michie he has created a genuinely complex and likeable character. Despite the flawed ending, in my humble opinion, at least, this is still a fine read, but it could have been more than that. Still, Michie is a great character and I look forward to reading more from him and Tony Black.

Review: Death on a Hot Afternoon by Paul D Brazill

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As regular readers will know I recently reviewed, and really enjoyed, Paul’s 13 Shot of Noir, which if you haven’t already bought it you should do so immediately. So another day another Brazill ebook. Does Death On A Hot Afternoon live up to the high standards set by 13 Shots? Well, see below and find out…

Luke Case is a middle-aged hack working for a Madrid magazine run by local who fancies himself as a patron of the city’s art scene. One afternoon, he is chatting with another hack, Nathan, who starts telling him in a roundabout way about a murder he committed many years before – one he’s been on the run from ever since. The whole afternoon gets boozier and when Case ends up drinking with Lena K, a young Torch singer who seems to have appeared from nowhere on the Madrid scene, he finds he might have the chance of enjoying a very nice evening with her and a friend! But the evening takes a turn for the worse and leaves Case wondering just who this Torch singer is and what it is that she wants.

As witnessed in 13 Shots, Brazill has an excellent writing style and a lovely turn of phrase and you can witness it here in spades:

People fired sharp looks at me like bullets from a machine gun.

Along with some clever dialogue:

“Well, a cliche to me is like a red rag to a bull. I avoid them like the plague.”

Case, for all his seediness, makes a great narrator and protagonist even if he seems to be attracted to trouble the way iron filings are attracted to magnets. The build-up is beautifully done and then – slam – the pay-off comes quickly and the rug has been pulled from beneath Case and the reader. It’s a lovely and controlled bit of storytelling. I’ve heard some folks complain that it’s not long enough. I can understand what they mean (great characters, not wanting it to end etc), but I thought it was the perfect length – in and out and no messing about.

Highly recommended.

Review: A F*ckload of Shorts by Jedidiah Ayres

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Jedidiah Ayres is unknown to me, which is one of the reasons I picked this collection. 2013 is going to be a year where everything I read on Kindle will be new crime stuff (new to me, at least). And all my paperbacks will be literary fiction I’ve not read before. But I digress. This isn’t about me, it’s about Jedediah Ayres and A F*ckload of Shorts.

I’ve seen Ayres mentioned on Twitter a few times and also on a few blogs I read, and all the mentions have been positive. That and the fact that it was published by the excellent Snubnose Press was enough to make me pick up this collection of shorts. And I’m glad I did because for the most part I really enjoyed it.

Ayres’ stories tend towards the grim and mostly reside in crime fiction territory, although there are a few exceptions to this. The humour is sick and twisted, which is a good thing, and his imagination throws up some very dark shit. At its best (the linked stories Mahogany & Monogamy and Fuckload of Scotch Tape; Hoosier Daddy, The Whole Buffalo and Viscosity) it works incredibly well, mixing extreme black comedy with noir tropes to create something fresh and new – not something that’s easy on the well-trodden noir path. Overall it’s a really strong collection, but I have to add that The Adversary, despite being well written, felt too long and I found myself skipping and speed reading through it, but that’s just me – you might love it.

This collection comes highly recommended.

Review: We Are The Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay

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When the perpetually depressed DCI Jericho is asked to get involved with ailing reality show Britain’s Got Justice he is less than happy but he goes along with it because he’s given no choice. While this is going on he is being sent Tarot cards featuring various images of a hanged man. The show goes as disastrously as expected, with Jericho being made to look as incompetent as possible by the show’s makers, particularly as one of the show’s contestants has been kidnapped by a killer who rather enjoys performing torture experiments on people (just to see how much of it they can take). As more Tarot cards arrive Jericho realises that they have a link to some mysterious deaths that, in turn, are linked to him by blood. As the show progresses things get worse for Jericho and when a colleague that he is having an affair with disappears, leaving him as a suspect, he goes on the run in a desperate attempt to prove his innocence and work out who and why he is being targeted, setting up a final confrontation with the murderer.

This is the first Douglas Lindsay I have read and it won’t be the last, because I like his prose style and his facility with storytelling, both of which are excellent, but it will be the last DCI Jericho story I read. As much as I tried to warm to Jericho I simply couldn’t. His depression makes him surly and rude, and he spends much of the first half of the book just staring at people he doesn’t like (more or less everyone), which would be fine if he had other elements to his character that made him compelling – a way with words, a sense of duty, a brilliance of detection, or even a certain amount of self-deprecation – but he has none of these. Alas, he is a charisma vacuum throughout the entire novel.

Being a noir person, I can deal with detestable protagonists as long as there’s something about them, however minor, that I can warm to. I just couldn’t warm Jericho at all. Normally this would be the kiss of death to me finishing the story, but I have to say that Lindsay’s narrative was beautifully paced and his writing style is as smooth as warm butter, and these were enough to keep me flipping the pages. The last quarter of the book is a lesson in how to keep a story driving forward at an ever greater pace, at which point the last of my objections to Jericho became null and void and I just enjoyed the story.

I can’t highly recommend WETHM because of my issues with the character of DCI Jericho, but I can recommend it because Lindsay’s narrative and smooth prose style are excellent and he does know how to tell a story well.

Review: Wee Rockets by Gerrard Brennan

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Joe the leader of a gang of Belfast yobs called the Wee Rockets has decided it’s time to leave the gang. Not because he feels in any way bad about what he does, but because he’s growing faster than the other gang members, and he’s worried that this will make him easier to recognise. At the same time, concerned local citizen and vigilante wannabe, Stephen McVeigh is desperate to do something about the Wee Rockets gang and stop them from attacking innocent pensioners in the area. He starts investigating, which brings him into contact with Joe and Joe’s mother, with whom he starts a relationship. Joe eventually passes the Rockets leadership over to Liam, a fat loser who desperately wants to be respected. The moment Liam takes control of the gang he ups the ante and, instead of playing safe like Joe, he gets them to move into robbing stores and younger people, because the takings are bigger. And when Joe’s criminal father also appears on the scene after many years away, the scene is set for mayhem that ultimately leads to fatalities.

Wee Rockets is the first Brennan that I have read and I must say that I was impressed by the confidence and fluidity of his writing. He is very good at fast scene-setting and renders his characters nicely in only a few sentences. The dialogue is also spot-on, with a nice grasp of how people really speak. The plotting is well handled, though I did have a few minor issues with the ending, which leaves one particular character still walking the streets when he should really be behind bars after all the mayhem he has caused. But, like I said, it’s a minor issue rather than a big deal, and is more than offset by Brennan’s confident storytelling abilities and his excellent characters. I like the fact that Joe, despite his occasional sentimental moment, remains a scumbag throughout. I also like the way that Liam’s transition from fat loser to remorseless gang-leader is realistically handled in terms of motivation. Like so many of Blasted Heath’s other publications this is an excellent crime thriller and marks them out as one of the most exciting new publishers around. Highly recommended.

Review: Hogdoggin’ by Anthony Neil Smith

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The sequel to Yellow Medicine finds Billy Lafitte, former police officer, suspected traitor, and full-time bad guy, riding with a biker gang led by the brutal and savvy giant Steel God. Lafitte has worked his way up to second in command and has God’s respect. But when a call comes in about his ex-wife, Lafitte decides to turn his back on the gang and go and find out exactly why he’s been called back.

Meanwhile, his nemesis, Agent Rome, an FBI agent with a serious grudge against Lafitte, is still trying to pursue his man despite being warned off the case by his employers and his wife. But Rome doesn’t listen and decides to use Lafitte’s emotionally fragile ex-wife as bait to lure him in.

After an ill-fated trip back to Yellow Medicine, Lafitte decides to get back to his family by any means possible, but things go increasingly wrong. Leading to his capture and torture by some idiotic rednecks.

When he decides to call on Steel God for help everything gets really bloody, leading to a showdown, and serious carnage, at a hotel surrounded by the police, with Agent Rome in tow.

Smith’s sequel improves on Yellow Medicine in a number of ways. Firstly, in dispensing with Lafitte’s first person narration it broadens the scope of the story. Rome is no longer the one dimensional FBI guy he appeared to be in the first novel – his run-in with Lafitte at the end of the YM has affected him both professionally and personally and his reasons for pursuing the man seem more believable this time around. Other characters get the opportunity to breathe and Smith does a good job of bringing them to life. Also, the use of multiple character perspectives propels the tale at a faster clip than the first novel managed, especially during the final chapters, which are superbly paced, and Smith’s muscular, clipped prose helps bring it all together in fine style. Fans of noir and hardboiled fiction will find plenty to enjoy here, but it’s written in such a way that fans of more ‘mainstream’ thrillers will get a kick out of it, too. Recommended.

Review: Killing Cupid by Mark Edwards & Louise Voss

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Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are excellent examples of authors who have done very well out of the self-publishing boom. Their novel Catch Your Death was one of 2011′s best-selling Kindle novels and Killing Cupid also did very well in the charts.

In fact, they were offered a book deal due to their online success and this is how I came to be reading the print edition of Killing Cupid rather than the ebook. Apparently both this novel and Catch Your Death have been amended from the ebook editions, though I obviously couldn’t say how much this changes the finished article.

The novel begins with a woman’s death, by a fall from the stairwell of her building. Alex describes fleeing the scene of the crime whilst giving the reader an indication that he’s prepared to kill for the woman he loves. The object of his affection is the teacher of a creative writing class that he attends, Siobhan.

Alex falls in love with Siobhan at first sight and becomes obsessed with her. Stalking her first on Facebook and then in the real world. Hanging around where she lives and then finally getting into her home. He becomes jealous of his teacher’s friendship with one of the other students, a female and this is where death comes into the equation. Siobhan, who is dealing with a relationship break-up, doesn’t initially realise she’s being stalked, but once Alex steals her credit card details in order to send her gifts she finally cottons on.

She kicks him off her course and threatens him with the police if he doesn’t pay her back for every penny he stole. From here the story changes tack. Alex starts a relationship with a friend of his flatmate and Siobhan begins to become obsessed with Alex, initially through interest in writing a novel but eventually through rage, and starts to take revenge on Alex and his new girlfriend. Meanwhile Alex is having to deal with the fact that a friend of the girl who fell from her stairwell is probing into her death and doesn’t believe the police’s version of events that it was accidental. As things wind to a close, Alex gets a few surprises he didn’t expect…

Edwards and Voss do a good job of making Alex come across as sympathetic, even though you know he’s a seriously screwed-up individual. They also do a good job of making Siobhan seem sympathetic in the earlier part of the novel but make her transition to angry stalker later in the story unfold realistically. The technique of narration via the character’s journals gives the story some nice turns and delivers a satisfying twist or two at the end. Killing Cupid is a good solid novel with a few narrative surprises and will give readers a lot of enjoyment. Recommended.

Review: Capture by Roger Smith

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Last year I was lucky enough to discover the writing of Roger Smith when I bought Dust Devils, which was one of my favourite novels of 2011. It was dark, fast-paced, superbly written and featured, in the character of Inja Mazibuko, one of the most despicable villains ever to grace the pages of a crime thriller.

Then I read Ishmael Toffee, his excellent novella about a reformed gang killer who is forced to go back to his old ways when he discovers that the daughter of a man he works for is being sexually abused. Like Dust Devils it was dark stuff, but treated the thorny subject of child abuse with a lot of sensitivity.

In short, he’s become one of my favourite authors in the space of two books. I have Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead in my collection, but I just need to get around to having the time to read them.

However, I have just recently finished Capture, his latest and, in my humble opinion, greatest work. The story begins with a former policeman now rent-a-cop, Vernon Saul, watching a young child wander into the sea where she drowns. He has the chance to save her but chooses not to because he sees no benefit in it. The parents, Nick and Caroline Exley, are being too selfish to notice and when they do notice it is too late. Despite this, Vernon Saul puts on a show of trying to save their daughter’s life, because this is where he sees a benefit, due to the fact that it makes him look like a hero. He uses the child’s death to inveigle his way into Nick’s affections and convince the wealthy motion capture system designer to let him help in various ways. Too consumed by grief, Nick let’s Vernon help in the belief that he is a good man. Of course, Saul is nothing of the sort. He is the kind of man who loves to be in control of people. He is damaged by events in his childhood (sexual abuse and mutilation by his father) and can only really get enjoyment by making people dance to his tune,  especially when they suffer. Slowly but surely, and with great glee, Vernon turns life Exley’s life into a nightmare, leading him down a dark path that includes murder. As Nick realises that his life is spiraling out of control he tries to cut Vernon out but that just makes things worse…

Capture is the best thriller I’ve read this year, thus far. It has a complex character driven plot that interweaves numerous lives and deaths into its tapestry. Smith’s lean, muscular prose paints plenty of unforgettable images with an economy that is a joy to behold. It has lots of incident for those who like a body count. Also, it isn’t afraid to give the characters flaws and make them seem selfish or petty or even nasty despite the fact that they are fundamentally decent. However, its trump card is the character of Vernon Saul, a villain so Machiavellian that one is surprised that he doesn’t twist himself inside-out. He’s a murderer, a manipulator, a parasite, and also very human – a monster created by tragedy rather than a two-dimensional uber-criminal. Personally, I think the key to Roger Smith’s success is that he writes villains better than anybody else out there, and Vernon Saul is arguably his finest, even better than Inja Mazibuko, which takes some doing.

If you’ve not read any Roger Smith before you’ll be in for a real treat once you’ve loaded this into your Kindle . Capture is an excellent read by an excellent writer at the top of his form. Like all great thrillers, it grips from the first page and cranks the tension up until it reaches breaking point, particularly the finale, which left my nails pretty well shredded from biting them too much.

In all honesty, if I read better crime thriller this year then it will seriously have to be really bloody amazing.

It’s that good.

Review: What it Was by George Pelecanos

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I’m a big fan of the work of George Pelecanos. The DC Quartet is up there with James Ellroy’s LA Quartet and David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet in my very humble opinion. He writes action as well as just about anybody in the business and his sense of plot is also top-tier. So when I had the chance to grab What It Was I didn’t hesitate.

Derek Strange, a regular Pelecanos player, recounts the story of Red Jones to another of his major players, Nick Stefanos. Jones is a bad-ass hard man who decides to light up the DC streets one hot summer in 1972 when he goes on a crime spree. The carnage begins when he shoots a wretched heroin-tester by the name of Bobby Odum and takes what little money he has along with a fancy-looking ring and some Roberta Flack tickets, both of which he gives to his girlfriend, a stunning, Amazonian madam called Coco Watkins.

Strange is dragged into it when he is hired by a maths tutor, with a serious set of curves and a story that doesn’t quite add up, to find the missing ring. At the same time a Detective Frank Vaughan, a former police partner of Strange, is investigating the murder of Odum. Both men end up chasing Jones and his equally ferocious partner, Alfonzo, as they cut a swathe through DC’s criminal element.

One thing I’ve always loved about Pelecanos is his attention to period detail – the clothes, the cars, the hair, and especially the music – without ever sacrificing the pace of the story. Which is why What It Was is something of a disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad novel, in fact, I’m not sure Pelecanos is capable of writing a bad novel, but it’s not in the class of The Big Blowdown or King Suckerman, either. The problem here is that the period detail, once such a great servant of Pelecanos’ peerless plots, in places overwhelms the story. At one point, towards the end of the story, two major opposing characters end up at the Roberta Flack concert. This should have been the source of some serious tension, but Pelecanos instead drowns the setpiece in unnecessary detail about Robert Flack’s gig, and music, and loses momentum. In fact, it knocked me out of the story for several pages.

Another hefty paragraph earlier in the novel has Strange pondering the fact that he’s in the middle of a ‘cultural revolution that was happening’. Is anybody that self-aware about the time they’re living in? Possibly they are, but whilst the character is rather loaded with beers? That I’m not so sure about. It almost felt like the addition of detail for detail’s sake.

There are some other moments when the details feel too over-worked; like a master painter, and Pelecanos is a master, have no doubt, who obsesses over the details to the detriment of the overall canvas.

If this sounds like I’m slating the novel, I’m not; but Pelecanos is a writer who’s set such sky-high standards over the years that anything that doesn’t scale these heights will seem like a come-down. And, for me at least, What It Was is a real comedown from the heights of the DC Quartet or Drama City.

If you’re a new reader of Pelecanos then no doubt you’ll enjoy it, but if, like me, you’ve read some of his masterworks then you might feel, as I do, that this isn’t a great writer at the top of his form.