Tsk, only a dozen or so posts from the last time I wrote about what I read over the summer. The skinny hasn’t changed much – it’s still almost all crime novels and thrillers, with the occasional pop science thrown in.
Before I tell you titles, I want to help promote a new blog from a friend, Britpulp. It’s a great collection of reviews of crime writing as well as some broader writing about the state of publishing within this genre.
This year in reading I have been continuing my trawl through all the works of P D James and Sara Paretsky, and recently have completed both Cordelia Gray novels. There’s a very graphic depiction of suicide by wrist slitting in one of them that has been preying very heavily on my mind ever since. In the Adam Dalgliesh world, I’m now more than half way through the series with Death of an Expert Witness read in a tent in North Wales over the May bank holiday and enjoyed; A Taste for Death which followed me around a couple of holidays and Devices and Desires in which unfortunate Dalgliesh ends up holidaying amidst a serial killer investigation with a nuclear power plant thrown in. (Again, fascinatingly, it’s the James’s depiction of bureaucracy in the 1970s and 80s that gets me. Nuclear power plants have committee meetings. Of course, when you think about it, they must have, but until reading this I never had thought about it.)
It’s been a while since I’ve dipped into V I Warshawski’s world, but most recently I have read Tunnel Vision with extended scenes set in abandoned storm tunnels under Chicago in a time of flooding. She gets thrown around, bruised and bloodied again and I often wonder if anyone has taken the trouble of writing a list of the injuries she has sustained across the series? It’s a wonder she can still walk after a career of being hit, shot, stabbed and beaten so often.
New this year has been the John Milton series by Mark Dawson. Not least for the opportunity to say, when quizzed on what you are reading, Oh yah, I’m reading John Milton? It’s not the highbrow fifteenth century poet, it’s a very readable thriller series set in the world of a British assassin, turned on by his own government and pursued across the globe. Whilst on the run, he also manages to atone for his past alcoholism with random acts of kindness supporting the oppressed, from council estate gang victims in London in the first book, to the women abused by drugs gangs in Mexico, to stumbling across a southern USA armed conspiracy. John Milton as a character is a mess of clichés – strong but vulnerable; unbeatable in a fight almost all of the time; super fit and talented with every sort of martial art and firearms skill. Mark Dawson deploys some reasonably obvious attempts to get us to like his characters and to build tension, but ends up with highly readable and enjoyable plots. And if you run out of Milton novels there’s a parallel series with an overlapping cast headed up by Beatrix Rose too.
I’ve been reading Mark Dawson on Kindle, and it seems well worth doing that. There are extra novellas not available in print which act as an introduction to his character, and an explanation of his new approach to writing – also here on his website. He’d been published in print before, only to see his novels sink without much critical or public appeal. He changed tacks to self publishing through the Kindle platform, which enabled him to engage more closely with his readers, and never looked back. Eventually, enough sales of his ebooks seemed to have pushed Amazon themselves to put his novels into paperback. Which seems a rum old way to get into print.
This afternoon I have finished reading For Reasons Unknown. Its author Michael Wood is a friend of friends on Facebook and promos for this keep popping up. It has a super female DCI as its lead character and unveils trauma in her life at the same time as working through a terribly twisty plot with a cold case and a recent death, all set in a snowy Sheffield. I had read somewhere that its author Michael Wood was a proof-reader and so a certain few horrors leaped out at me. Run-on sentences, and at least two occasions which looked like cursor slips where sentences had been jumbled into each other. Tsk, tsk.
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