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The Fear Index – A Mystery Novel About Conscious Machines by Robert Harris

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:27:05 +0000

At the nexus of high finance and sophisticated computer programming, a terrifying future may be unfolding even now.

Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s name is carefully guarded from the general public, but within the secretive inner circles of the ultrarich he is a legend. He has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that predicts movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions. But one morning before dawn, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of his lakeside mansion, and so begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.

Fiendishly smart and suspenseful, The Fear Index gives us a searing glimpse into an all-too-recognizable world of greed and panic. It is a novel that forces us to confront the question of what it means to be human—and it is Robert Harris’s most spellbinding and audacious novel to date.

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About Robert Harris

Robert Harris’s previous books include Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, Conspirata, and The Ghost Writer (originally published as The Ghost). His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been a television correspondent for the BBC, political editor of The Observer, and a columnist for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He lives in a village near Hungerford in Berkshire, England.

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Editorial Reviews

“Ingenious . . . There aren’t many writers who can produce genuine page-turners these days but Harris is one and The Fear Index had me gripped from the start . . . The characters are superb . . . Harris is stunningly good at explaining complex financial instruments in layman’s terms.”
—Sunday Express

“Harris’s great skill is to inhabit fully and convincingly the worlds he writes about, showing off his vast research yet never allowing the white-knuckle narrative to lose momentum.” —New Statesman

“As gripping a tale as anything Harris has written . . . It crackles with energy and invention, and the author’s obviously extensive research into the arcane world of state-of-the-art computing technology, algorithms, trading and hedge funds is dished up lightly and intelligibly.” —Irish Independent

Robert Harris, In ‘Fear’ of a Financial Frankenstein

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

When British thriller writer Robert Harris set out to write his new novel, The Fear Index, he had 1984 and Frankensteinon his mind. He wanted to explore how humans fall victim to the domineering forces of their time, and he set his sights on global finance.

Then on May 6, 2010, something known as a “flash crash” happened on Wall Street. The Dow plummeted — the result, in part, of lightning-fast, computer-generated trades.

Harris tells Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep that he had found the catalyst for The Fear Index, the story of a hedge fund, a scientist and his computer run amok.

Harris’ protagonist is the brilliant physicist Alex Hoffman, who has made billions through his algorithm that tracks incidences of fear-related words on the Internet and uses them to decide when to buy or sell stocks. All goes swimmingly (and lucratively) for Hoffman — until the computer program begins misbehaving.

“I thought I was making it up,” says Harris. “But when I finished the novel, I discovered this is happening [and] quite common, actually. [Topics] trending on Facebook, Twitter and so on [are] read by algorithms and factored into calculations as to what shares to buy.” [Read the full article...]

What It Was – A Hard-Boiled Noir Style Mystery Novel by George Pelecanos

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:03:53 +0000

Washington, D.C., 1972. Derek Strange has left the police department and set up shop as a private investigator. His former partner, Frank “Hound Dog” Vaughn, is still on the force. When a young woman comes to Strange asking for his help recovering a cheap ring she claims has sentimental value, the case leads him onto Vaughn’s turf, where a local drug addict’s been murdered, shot point-blank in his apartment. Soon both men are on the trail of a ruthless killer: Red Fury, so called for his looks and the car his girlfriend drives, but a name that fits his personality all too well. Red Fury doesn’t have a retirement plan, as Vaughn points out – he doesn’t care who he has to cross, or kill, to get what he wants. As the violence escalates and the stakes get higher, Strange and Vaughn know the only way to catch their man is to do it their own way.

Rich with details of place and time – the cars, the music, the clothes – and fueled by non-stop action, this is Pelecanos writing in the hard-boiled noir style that won him his earliest fans and placed him firmly in the ranks of the top crime writers in America.

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About George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is the author of several bestselling novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, and a producer and Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO hit series The Wire. He currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme. www.george-pelecanos.com.

Reader Review

I’ve long been a fan of Pelecanos’ work, my initiation starting with his novel RIGHT AS RAIN, and continuing along after that joyride to include his other works. I was struck from the beginning by the authenticity of his characters, the rhythm of his writing, and his powerful handling of violence. His work has a verisimilitude often absent in genre fiction. He isn’t a crime novelist, he’s a NOVELIST, period. I’m of the opinion that Pelecanos never makes a wrong note. I’ve read SHOEDOG, one of his lesser known novels, more than a handful of times. Now, to his latest work. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new Pelecanos shortly on the heels of THE CUT, his hardcover released late last year (another gem, by the way). The surprise was then elevated upon learning that this newest novel would return to the world of Derek Strange, a character I’ve grown to love. But then, I love all of the characters in Pelecanos’ world, from Nick Stefanos, to Terry Quinn, to…well, you get the point. This newest novel gripped me from page one and never let up steam. Written in scenes both cinematic and rhythmic (vignettes)told from the points of view of several characters, WHAT IT WAS is a study in how a crime novel should be written. Violent but emotionally satisfying, poignant in its rendering of the human condition (here you have the criminal perspective, the police perspective, the private investigator perspective, the girlfriends riding shotgun with their criminal boyfriends perspective–all handled with aplomb). To say that Pelecanos is a master is an understatement. I’d read a new book every month from him. Kudos.

Phillip Thomas Duck
author of Triage: A Thriller (Shell Series)

Book review: ‘What It Was,’ by George Pelecanos

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

I’ve read most of George Pelecanos’s 17 previous novels, always with admiration, but four can be singled out as his finest work: “Right as Rain” (2001), “Hell to Pay” (2002), “Soul Circus” (2003) and “Hard Revolution” (2004). All feature a decent and thoughtful — but far from perfect — African American named Derek Strange and are set in Washington. The first three show Strange as a middle-aged private detective. “Hard Revolution” goes back to 1968, when he was a young D.C. policeman; it climaxes with a powerful portrayal of the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Having completed this great quartet, Pelecanos moved on to other characters, but now, in “What It Was,” he returns to Strange, in 1972, as a 26-year-old private detective. The idea for the novel came to him when he was researching a possible Watergate book. He chanced upon a story in this newspaper titled “Cadillac Smith’s Legend of Violence,” about Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, a notorious criminal of that era. The fictional central figure in this novel, Robert Lee “Red” Jones, is loosely based on Smith’s career. [Read the full article...]

Defending Jacob: A Courtroom Thriller by William Landay

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:26:22 +0000

Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

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About William Landay

William Landay is the author of The Strangler, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Crime Book of the Year, and Mission Flats, winner of the Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel and a Barry Award nominee. A former district attorney who holds degrees from Yale and Boston College Law School, Landay lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.

Editorial Reviews

“William Landay makes bold use of his genuine storytelling gift, his amazing ability to craft believable dialogue, and, above all, his extraordinary understanding of what it means to be a husband and father to present us with an unforgettable tale of an ordinary marriage and family in crisis. On the surface this novel reads like a first-rate thriller, but at its heart it’s a love story. It’s the story of a man who adores his wife and child, but more than that, it’s a novel that describes the fine edge between love and madness, and the lies we sometimes tell ourselves. Landay has proven himself to be an extraordinary writer, and Defending Jacob is an amazing novel. Do yourself a favor and read it. It’s that good.”—Nicholas Sparks

“More than a terrific legal thrill ride, Defending Jacob is an unflinching appraisal of the darkest, most poignant consequences of the love that binds, and blinds, families. It’s one of those rare books that call for contemplation and insight along with every breathtaking surprise.”—Stephen White

“A novel like this comes along maybe once a decade . . . a tour de force, a full-blooded legal thriller about a murder trial and the way it shatters a family. With its relentless suspense, its mesmerizing prose, and a shocking twist at the end, it’s every bit as good as Scott Turow’s great Presumed Innocent. But it’s also something more: an indelible domestic drama that calls to mind Ordinary People and We Need to Talk About Kevin. A spellbinding and unforgettable literary crime novel.”—Joseph Finder

Book review: ‘Defending Jacob,’ by William Landay

The Washington Post Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

In the publicity material for William Landay’s “Defending Jacob,” its publisher and several advance readers liken the novel to Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” arguably the finest of American legal thrillers. The hype is justified. I don’t think Landay’s novel has quite the elegance or gravitas of Turow’s, but it’s an exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing story that deserves and should achieve a large audience.

The similarities start with the fact that Turow and Landay are lawyers who began as prosecutors, and each novel is narrated by a prosecutor who finds himself in grave legal trouble. Each book delves deep into the character of its protagonist and his family, and both offer caustic but informed indictments of our legal system. Finally, both provide a stunning ending. If you remember the surprise at the end of “Presumed Innocent,” be warned that the outcome of “Defending Jacob” is even more unexpected.

The two novels differ in one important regard. Turow’s Rusty Sabich was charged with murdering his lover. Landay’s Andy Barber, a prosecutor in Newton, Mass., has his world upended when his 14-year-old son is accused of murder. Before that calamity, Andy and his wife, Laurie, had shared a comfortable, happy suburban lifestyle with Jacob, their only child. The boy was often withdrawn and monosyllabic, but no more so than many other teenagers. [Read the full article...]

Mistaken – A Novel About The Entwined Lives Of two Dubliners by Neil Jordan

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:34:24 +0000

“I had been mistaken for him so many times that when I heard he had died it was as if part of myself had died too.” So begins Mistaken, the new bestselling novel from the master of gothic fiction, Neil Jordan.

Kevin and Gerald were two boys growing up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Though they had never met, they shared a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. Yet Kevin was doubly haunted, living next door to the one-time residence of Bram Stoker, and the shadow of both a vampire and Gerald stretch far across his early years. For a time, the boys’ doppelganger paths would cross innocently enough—one stealing the other’s unwitting girlfriend, or being called out to in the street–until a family tragedy sends them both down a much darker path.

About Neil Jordan

Born in 1950 in Sligo, Ireland, Neil Jordan’s early career began as a writer. After setting up The Irish Writers’ Cooperative in 1974, he went on to win The Guardian Fiction Prize for his book of short stories NIGHT IN TUNISIA (1976). Since then he has gone on to publish three novels, THE PAST (1979), THE DREAM OF A BEAST (1983) and most recently SUNRISE WITH SEA MONSTER (1994). Jordan’s published fiction has been translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese.

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Editorial Review

They’re the same age. They look almost the same. Yet their backgrounds are strikingly different. Kevin Thunder, the narrator, lives on Dublin’s impoverished northside, while Gerry Spain is from the well-heeled southside; the class antagonisms are raw. Kevin’s father is a bookie; Jerry’s is a lawyer, later a judge. Kevin’s rough-and-tumble schooling is far inferior to Jerry’s fancy private school. Their lives, however, will overlap for some 40 years, from their adolescence in the 1960s to Jerry’s death in his mid 50s (his funeral opens and closes the novel). Kevin finds himself being mistaken for Gerry: ejected from a store for shoplifting, approached invitingly by a girlfriend. Amid the confusion he has one dependable ally: his beloved mother, the caretaker of their building’s apartments. His father is often away, and Kevin is happy to replace him (there are Oedipal overtones). Mother and son go swimming together until one day, alone, she drowns. Jordan is at his best depicting their tender solicitude and Kevin’s coming-of-age encounters with Gerry’s girls. His touch is less sure with Kevin/Gerry. They eventually meet in a series of edgy encounters. By now Gerry is an undergraduate at well-manicured Trinity, while Kevin’s at a trade school; Gerry, shy and insecure, uses Kevin’s name for his published stories. The ladies still get them confused. “Were we…the light and shade of the same person?” It’s the classic dilemma posed by the genre. Jordan plays with it, offsetting Kevin’s weak light against the increasingly dark, addicted, adulterous Jerry, but years pass before he ratchets up the tension. The climax, flashy and camera-ready, involves impersonation and murder in Manhattan, but it seems less ordained than arbitrary. – Kirkus Reviews

Double Take - Film Director Neil Jordan’s Novel ‘Mistaken’

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan’s films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic fifth novel. “I grew up . . . under the shadow of a vampire,” says the narrator, a man whose childhood home in Dublin was next door to a house where Bram Stoker, the author of “Dracula,” once lived. Although Jordan’s screen monsters are visible — he directed “Interview With the Vampire” and is now shooting “Byzantium,” about mother-daughter vampires — in this novel vampirism becomes the perfect metaphor for the story of two look-alike men who feed off each other’s souls all their crisscrossed lives.

“Mistaken” begins with the narrator, Kevin Thunder, at the funeral of Gerald Spain, a troubled, once famous writer dead in his mid-50s. (Surely Jordan knows these names have a Dickensian distance from reality; his literary references here include Poe and Joyce, one the icon of the haunted, the other of emotionally tortured men traipsing around Dublin.) At the cemetery, Kevin meets Gerald’s grown daughter, Emily, and some mysteries take shape as others begin to unravel. Emily befriends Kevin — she says some animal scent on his body reminds her of her father — and we begin to wonder. Will Kevin become Emily’s lover? Will he be more like a father? Could he actually be her father? [Read the full article...]

Stay Awake: Haunting And Suspenseful Stories by Dan Chaon

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:14:18 +0000

Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.

Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

About Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications; and Await Your Reply, which was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen “Best of the Year” lists. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Editorial Review

“With this arresting collection, Chaon again demonstrates his mastery of the short story. . . . Chaon brings readers fantastically close, slowly drawing them into the anxiety or loneliness or remorse of his characters, and building great anticipation for the twists to come.”—Publishers Weekly

Fumbling in the Dark - ‘Stay Awake,’ Stories by Dan Chaon

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In his somber, beautifully constructed 2009 novel, “Await Your Reply,” Dan Chaon presented three interlocking narratives, each involving a form of identity theft. Midway through, in a strangely haunting scene, a man and a woman are wandering the ruins of a drowned town: Nebraska’s own Atlantis, the man calls it. A reservoir that once flooded the place has dried up. Old buildings, now exposed, are washed out and ghostly, standing derelict amid silt and scrub grass. In both that novel and this new collection of stories, much of the world has that same quality of erosion and insubstantiality. Even the people seem hollowed out, teetering on the verge of collapse.

A curious aspect of the stories in “Stay Awake” is the recurring use Chaon makes of a few distinctive motifs. A man loses a finger in a fall from a ladder. Someone glimpses through a window a figure not of this world. A parent commits suicide. Children are deformed, abducted, sent away to foster families, even murdered. Yet the echoes within these narrative elements aren’t evidence of creative limitation. The sense, rather, is of a narrow cluster of related ideas being urgently worked out. These stories feel as though they had been written fast, one after another, expressing with some urgency a closely related set of variations on a given theme. [Read the full article...]

‘Stay Awake’: Stories On Grief And Everything After

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Grieving is a series of a million heartbreaks. Every morning, you wake, temporarily freed of the memory of what you’ve lost, only to have the memory rush in and crush you all over again. Mourning meddles with sleep and thought; it makes an hour feel like a month, and a year seem like a lifetime. Most people survive it, but not without a sense of lost time — and that they have lost something of themselves along the way.

It’s that uneasy feeling, that sometimes blurry line between the dreaming and waking lives, that is the theme of Dan Chaon’s darkly beautiful short story collection Stay Awake. It almost reads like a novel in fragments. Although each story contains different characters, there’s an unsettling thematic commonality among them. People are lost — to car accidents, suicides or diseases — and their loved ones do their best to get by. Often unsuccessfully.

In “Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well,” an alcoholic widower with heart problems goes on a bender in downtown Portland years after the death of his wife. The descent feels like a slow, excruciating suicide. [Read the full article...]

Raylan: The New U.S. Marshal Givens Novel by Elmore Leonard

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:10:38 +0000

The revered New York Times bestselling author, recognized as “America’s greatest crime writer” (Newsweek), brings back U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the mesmerizing hero of Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the hit FX series Justified.

With the closing of the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mines, marijuana has become the biggest cash crop in the state. A hundred pounds of it can gross $300,000, but that’s chump change compared to the quarter million a human body can get you—especially when it’s sold off piece by piece.

So when Dickie and Coover Crowe, dope-dealing brothers known for sampling their own supply, decide to branch out into the body business, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to stop them. But Raylan isn’t your average marshal; he’s the laconic, Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing lawman who juggles dozens of cases at a time and always shoots to kill. But by the time Raylan finds out who’s making the cuts, he’s lying naked in a bathtub, with Layla, the cool transplant nurse, about to go for his kidneys.

The bad guys are mostly gals this time around: Layla, the nurse who collects kidneys and sells them for ten grand a piece; Carol Conlan, a hard-charging coal-mine executive not above ordering a cohort to shoot point-blank a man who’s standing in her way; and Jackie Nevada, a beautiful sometime college student who can outplay anyone at the poker table and who suddenly finds herself being tracked by a handsome U.S. marshal.

Dark and droll, Raylan is pure Elmore Leonard—a page-turner filled with the sparkling dialogue and sly suspense that are the hallmarks of this modern master.

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About Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has written more than 40 books during his highly successful writing career, including the bestsellers Road Dogs, Up in Honey’s Room, The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, When the Women Come Out to Dance. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Be Cool. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.

Editorial Review

The first and most successful of the stories complicates Raylan’s apprehension of marijuana trader Angel Arenas with the discovery that the dealers with whom Angel was meeting left with his money, his grass and his kidneys, which they propose to sell back to him for $100,000 (the price they demand for either one or both). Raylan’s questioning of Pervis Crowe, eastern Kentucky’s top marijuana grower, soon leads him to a transplant nurse known, for excellent reasons, as Layla the Dragon Lady. Their encounter ends with a sizable body count and Pervis’s oath of vengeance. Raylan’s second adventure pits him against Carol Conlan, a law-school–trained vice president of M-T Mining, whose skills in dealing with the problems that beset her employer extend far beyond the courtroom. After their conflict ends in a standoff, Leonard introduces still another strong woman, poker-playing Butler College student Jackie Nevada, who’s staked by aging horseman Harry Burgoyne, who’d appeared more briefly in the first tale. The villain of this third piece, Delroy Lewis, forces three of his female acquaintances to rob banks and then gets mighty annoyed when one of them ends up with an exploding dye packet. The fadeout finds Leonard acting as if he’s wrapped everything up, but you have to wonder.

A master’s valedictory canter around a familiar track—an unimpressive job of carpentry that’s still treasurable for Leonard’s patented dialogue and some truly loopy situations handled with deadpan brio. – Kirkus Reviews

Back on the Case

The New York Times Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught. However, there’s more to it, which I didn’t pass on: “Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery.

While relatively new to Leonard’s novels, I’m not new to the subject matter here. The titular character, Raylan Givens, is also the protagonist of an excellent FX television series, “Justified,” which is based on Leonard’s novella “Fire in the Hole,” originally published as an e-book in 2000. Givens appeared in two earlier books — “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap” — but the success of “Justified” has prompted Leonard to put him back on the job. [Read the full article...]

The Silent Oligarch – A Spy Story From The Bowels Of The Russian Government by Christopher Morgan Jones

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:26:41 +0000

Racing between London and Moscow, Kazakstan and the Caymans, The Silent Oligarch reveals a sinister unexplored world where the wealthy buy the justice they want—and the silence they need. Here private spy agencies duel for dominance, governments eagerly defer to the highest bidder, and colossal wealth is amassed through shadowy networks of companies. But where the money actually flows—and who benefits from such corruption—is something necessarily hidden, sometimes in plain sight.

Behind the imposing splendor of the Kremlin rises a run-down office building, home to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. A nondescript bureaucrat in a drab government agency, Konstanin Malin secretly controls a vast business that dominates the nation’s oil industry, making him one of the most feared and wealthy men in Russia. Over the years Malin has siphoned billions from the state and poured them into his private empire, hiding what he owns offshore.

The man who has done the hiding is Richard Lock, a diffident English lawyer whose life in Moscow is falling apart: criss-crossing the world administering his master’s affairs, he has seen his relationships with his estranged family and highly practical mistress slowly deteriorating. Lock is bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, greed, and most of all by a complex lie that neither can escape. But slowly, Lock is beginning to realize that the lie will not always hold.

Once an idealistic young journalist, Benjamin Webster now works as an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm, a mercenary spy for the rich and powerful. Webster’s cynicism and anger were born when he witnessed a colleague murdered in Russia for asking too many tough questions; now, ten years later, he may finally be able to avenge her unsolved murder. Hired by a client to ruin Malin, he discovers that this shadowy figure may have arranged his friend’s gruesome death—to hide a terrible secret buried at the heart of his criminal empire.

Soon Webster realizes that Lock is Malin’s great weakness; and when he starts to apply pressure, Lock’s fragile world begins to crack. His colleagues begin dying mysteriously, his relationship with Malin turns ominously ice-cold. The police begin asking questions, the newspapers smell blood in the water, and Webster’s investigators close in on the truth. Suddenly Lock is running for his life—though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn’t say.

A heart-pounding hunt around the world, through opulent boardrooms and anonymous hotels, The Silent Oligarch is a chilling and unforgettable novel of our time.

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About Christopher Morgan Jones

For eleven years CHRIS MORGAN JONES worked at the world’s largest business intelligence agency. He has advised Middle Eastern governments, Russian oligarchs, New York banks, London hedge funds, and African mining companies. The Silent Oligarch is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

“This is a happy partner to the work of Deighton, Archer, and le Carré… Mysterious men, cryptic of speech and beautifully tailored, move through glittery settings-seacoasts, grand hotels, swank neighborhoods-carried on craftily understated prose that approaches cold poetry. Rows of massive buildings “bullied all the leaves off the bare limes and left the trees cowering in the middle of the road.” Ben Webster is a snoop employed by a London corporate espionage firm. His boss” client has hired the company to bring down a Kremlin functionary, the toadlike Malin, whose manipulation of Russia”s oil industry is making him a trillionaire. Webster attempts to get at the toad through his dithering money launderer, Richard Lock. Reader identification is complete. We”d like to be Webster-tough, smart-but we know we”re really more like Lock, not as bright and strong as we wish. Men are betrayed. Drugged. Kidnapped. Tossed off buildings. Downed by snipers. If the good guys win, it”s at such a cost they”re left wondering if they accomplished anything. They did. They were part of a first-class novel.” - Booklist

“Fans of thrillers, especially those set in present-day Russia, will welcome the supernova that has burst onto the spy and suspense scene . . With a mysterious, complex plot and terrific local color, this novel resonates to the pounding heartbeats of the boldly drawn main characters. John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith, and Brent Ghelfi will be inching over in the book display so readers in search of erudite, elegant international intrigue can spot the newcomer.” – Library Journal

“Jones sketches of all that is good and bad about London, Moscow, Berlin seem dead-on, right down to his marvelous detailing of the decadent lifestyle of the new Russian oligarchy, a group where school children receive Ferraris as birthday presents. His bad guy, Malin, “impermeable” eyes “dark brown and heavy, neither curious nor passive,” is thoroughly sinister. The author also is adept at constructing and explaining the complicated post-Soviet Russia ambiance. Told in the third person, his narrative moves forward with an aura of malevolence to a conclusion too close to reality to be anything but believable. Minimal gun-flourishing, minimal violence, maximum moral quandary.” – Kirkus

“The Silent Oligarch,” by Chris Morgan Jones

The Washington Post Book Review – January 29, 2012 (Excerpt)

If a 21st-century version of Monopoly or Risk were invented, players wouldn’t acquire and trade Park Place and Marvin Gardens, or even corporations like Microsoft and Deutsche Bank. The real money is in faceless corporations with bland and non-revealing names: organizations with purposes purposely unclear, registered in secretive countries such as Russia and Liechtenstein, with boards of directors and shareholders who may or may not have anything to do with the company — indeed, who may not even exist. They’re billion-dollar corporate webs constructed not of strings of silk but of something much stronger and stickier: strings of legalese.

A massive tangle of such corporations is the nucleus of “The Silent Oligarch,” Chris Morgan Jones’s debut novel, a story of quiet suspense and international espionage. Overseeing this particular corporate tangle is Richard Lock, a divorced Brit who manages the holdings of Konstantin Malin, a Russian “silent oligarch” engaged in an elaborate money-laundering operation: Money goes out of Russia, money comes back, and a percentage of it ends up in Malin’s pockets, untraceable and untouchable. With the corporate machine in place and his own name rather than Malin’s on many of the papers, Lock has become a wealthy man. He has little to do except sun himself in Monaco — “avoiding responsibility and tax in the paradises of the world” with his girlfriend of the moment — while thinking wistfully about the ex-wife and daughter he left behind in London. [Read the full article...]

Agent 6 – A Novel Filled With Intrigue From Behind The Old Iron Curtain by Tom Rob Smith

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:58:18 +0000

THREE DECADES.
TWO MURDERS.
ONE CONSPIRACY.

WHO IS AGENT 6?

Tom Rob Smith’s debut, Child 44, was an immediate publishing sensation and marked the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. Named one of top 100 thrillers of all time by NPR, it hit bestseller lists around the world, won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and the ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

In this spellbinding new novel, Tom Rob Smith probes the tenuous border between love and obsession as Leo Demidov struggles to untangle the threads of a devastating conspiracy that shatters everything he holds dear. Deftly capturing the claustrophobic intensity of the Cold War-era Soviet Union, it’s at once a heart-pounding thriller and a richly atmospheric novel of extraordinary depth….

AGENT 6

Leo Demidov is no longer a member of Moscow’s secret police. But when his wife, Raisa, and daughters Zoya and Elena are invited on a “Peace Tour” to New York City, he is immediately suspicious.

Forbidden to travel with his family and trapped on the other side of the world, Leo watches helplessly as events in New York unfold and those closest to his heart are pulled into a web of political conspiracy and betrayal-one that will end in tragedy.

In the horrible aftermath, Leo demands only one thing: to investigate the killer who destroyed his family. His request is summarily denied. Crippled by grief and haunted by the need to find out exactly what happened on that night in New York, Leo takes matters into his own hands. It is a quest that will span decades, and take Leo around the world–from Moscow, to the mountains of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, to the backstreets of New York–in pursuit of the one man who knows the truth: Agent 6.

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About Tom Rob Smith

Tom Rob Smith graduated from Cambridge University in 2001 and lives in London. His first novel, Child 44, was a New York Times bestseller and an international publishing sensation. Among its many honors, Child 44 won the ITW 2009 Thriller Award for Best First Novel, The Strand Magazine 2008 Critics Award for Best First Novel, the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Tom invites you to visit his website www.TomRobSmith.com and follow @tomrobsmith on Twitter.

Editorial Reviews

“When a trilogy is as unpredictable and riveting as Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 series, set as it is both in the harsh Russian landscape and the dense thicket of the human soul, expectations quickly evaporate in a page-turning frenzy….Smith, a young British screenwriter turned best-selling novelist, has created in Leo Demidov a Kafkaesque modern hero for our times, a good man trapped in a corrupt, manipulative system, forced to choose between loyalties to family, country and conscience. With a cinematographer’s eye for settings and historical detail, Smith uses Leo’s journey to examine larger issues, especially the political, social and religious systems that both unite and divide us.”
(BookPage )

“Fortified by formidable details of Soviet history, Smith’s closing volume of the Leo Demidov trilogy (Child 44; The Secret Speech) knits together iconic characters and elements…Fans of Smith’s first two books will avidly seek out the final chapter, though this one stands on its own as well. The Afghan interlude is a searing echo of today’s headlines, while the buildup of suspense over several decades is the armchair equivalent of a jaw-jarringly extreme ride at an amusement park.” (Library Journal )

“Agent 6 has all the elements that made the first two books in the series hits: relentless action, a flawed but fascinating protagonist and a clear-eyed view of the absolute brutality of an authoritarian government.” (Dallas Morning News )

Book review: ‘Agent 6′ by Tom Rob Smith

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – January 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

Four years ago, “Child 44,” Tom Rob Smith’s debut thriller set in Stalinist Russia, was a literary sensation.

An edgy, intense portrait of Russia’s secret police and the lengths they would go to to protect their country’s image as a crime-free society, “Child 44″ managed to straddle a fine line between well-researched, absorbing historical fiction and propulsive thriller that would earn the book universal praise, sales of more than 1.5 million copies worldwide and a place on the Man Booker Prize’s longlist (unusual recognition for a work of genre fiction).

“Child 44″ introduced 30-year-old Leo Demidov, a fanatically loyal agent with the MGB, the Soviet secret agency that was a precursor to the KGB, and his wife, Raisa, a beautiful schoolteacher. One pleasure of reading that book and the follow-up, “The Secret Speech” — set amid the turmoil after Stalin’s death — was witnessing Leo’s transformation from tool of the state into a man who fiercely loves and values his wife and family.

Now comes “Agent 6,” the final installment in what Smith had reportedly always planned as a trilogy. Stepping outside the Soviet bloc for the first time, “Agent 6″ is Smith’s most ambitious book, covering some 30 years and the USSR’s engagement with “The Main Adversary” during the Cold War and its disastrous misadventures in Afghanistan with rebel fighters. [Read the full article...]

The Fear Index – A Novel About Machines Becoming Conscious by Robert Harris

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:09:57 +0000

At the nexus of high finance and sophisticated computer programming, a terrifying future may be unfolding even now.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Robert Harris

Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.

Editorial Reviews

“Unputdownable . . . Harris has achieved the impossible, or at least the improbable: an explanation of the extravagantly esoteric nature of hedge funds, which normal people can understand . . . I gorged myself, devouring his dystopian vision of free markets enslaved by a sinister artificial intelligence in one breakneck sitting.” —The Daily Telegraph

“Reminiscent of everyone from Michael Crichton to Ian Fleming, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock.” —Financial Times

“A virtuoso specimen . . . Inventively exploiting current anxieties about algorithmic trading to update the Frankenstein story, The Fear Index is both cutting edge and keenly conscious of its literary predecessors . . . A tour de force.” —The Sunday Times

Trust the Computer at Your Own Risk

The New York Times Book Review – January 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

The title of Robert Harris’s new thriller, “The Fear Index,” comes from the volatility index, or VIX — also known as the “fear index” — which measures expectations of violent swings in the market, as Wall Street watchers know from the harrowing meltdown of 2008. This fleet-footed, if sometimes hokey, novel takes place in the rarefied world of hedge funds, featuring one that has achieved huge returns by short-selling and using trading algorithms that “thrive on panic.”

It’s an energetically researched tale based on one of the back stories to the crash of 2008: bankers’ hiring of physicists to devise hugely complex trading programs that few really understand, and those new strategies running dangerously amok. It’s also a familiar story of hubris and its fallout.

In fact, “The Fear Index” — like such recent novels as Kevin Guilfoile’s “Cast of Shadows” (2005) and Laurence Gonzales’s “Lucy” (2010) — is a variation on that ever-popular template, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Once again, we’re introduced to a scientist who dares to play God by creating a new form of life (in this case, a computer program named VIXAL that evolves into a form of artificial intelligence). Once again, that new being leaves a spiral of havoc in its wake. [Read the full article...]

Blueprints of the Afterlife – The End Of The World As We Know It by Ryan Boudinot

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:13:51 +0000

From the “wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and “darkly funny” (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.

It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.

Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot is the author of BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2012); MISCONCEPTION (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2009), a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award; and THE LITTLEST HITLER (Counterpoint, 2006), a Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com Best Book of 2006. His work has appeared in MCSWEENEY’S, THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING, NERVE, BLACK BOOK, and other anthologies and journals. He teaches creative writing at Goddard College’s MFA program in Port Townsend, Washington, and blogs about film at therumpus.net. He lives in Seattle.

Editorial Reviews

“[Ryan Boudinot] is a second- or even third-generation slipstreamer himself, and it’s interesting to see how easily the mode fits him. . . . His work illustrates the dictum that to channel the zeitgeist accurately, you need to go pretty much round the bend of sanity, logic, and good taste. . . . Boudinot’s style is light, breezy, and colloquial, hiding much craft and thought behind its addictive surface. . . . With its leitmotif of ‘superposition,’ the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative. . . . Blueprints of the Afterlife exists in a shining lineage that extends right back ultimately to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the novel that taught us all how to conflate esoteric conspiracy theory with history with lowbrow pop culture with surrealism and absurdity with transgressive assaults on propriety and the bourgeoisie. . . . Boudinot’s novel, with near-Neal Stephensonian intricacy and panache, is a brave attempt to forecast the ‘afterlife’ subsequent to our culture’s imminent, nigh-inevitable collapse. Yet it’s no preachy tract, but rather a glorious carnival of errors, terrors, and numinous possibilities.”—Paul Di Filippo,Barnes & Noble Review (online)

“Blueprints of the Afterlife is strange, frequently mystifying, entertaining, bizarre, and very well written. . . . This book is to the typical novel what cubism is to art. . . . There’s a brilliant aliveness to this book, a joyful throwing together of extrapolated pop culture, really cool ideas about medicine and technology, a preapocalyptic vision of the current world and a bizarrely livable postapocalyptic afterworld, and a near total lack of genre boundaries. . . . When we get to the end, there’s the impression that we have been given a glimpse of a world, rather than being told its whole story. It’s a strange, overly colorful, scary, shallow, complicated glimpse, and it’s full of things so weird that they kind of force a sense of the sublime that sci-fi is always reaching for. Blueprints of the Afterlife feels like something new while maintaining that perfect balance between wildly different and recognizable. It’s hard to describe, but it’s easy to read, easy to get involved with. It’s artful, it’s affecting, and it’s more than worth the read, so long as you’re willing to go along for the ride. Do not fight this book: Let it take you where it’s going, and let it show you what it wants to show you. You’ll be glad you did.”—Samantha Holloway, New York Journal of Books

All Sorts of Strange Stuff Happens When You Destroy the World

The New York Times Book Review – January 25, 2012 (Excerpt)

Near the end of Ryan Boudinot’s bracingly weird new novel a man asks his girlfriend, an editor, about the book that she’s working on.

“It’s about the beginning of a new world,” she says. “There’s a rampaging glacier in it. Clones. Giant heads that appear in the sky.”

Her companion responds, “One of those.” “Blueprints of the Afterlife” has within it, in fact, all of those things. Its dystopian plot also has a world-champion dishwasher whose sister’s body is being used to grow and harvest donor tissues. (Penises are growing on her breasts.) Corporations have extended their product lines in ways that allow Mr. Boudinot to write sentences like “His hand crawled inside his jacket to flip the safety on his Coca-Cola.”

This novel is, in a word, freaky. Woo-jin, the dishwasher, finds a young woman’s body. It is taken away by the police, and he finds it again. But the first body is still in the morgue. [Read the full article...]

Need You Now: A Novel Of A Madoff-Like Character Pilfering Billions by James Grippando

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:34:33 +0000

The New York Times bestselling author returns with a gripping, new stand-alone novel ripped from the headlines, in which a young financial advisor and his girlfriend uncover a conspiracy that reaches from Wall Street deep into the halls of government.

Abe Cushman, the evil genius behind a $60 billion Ponzi scheme, has killed himself and taken his secrets to the grave.

For Patrick Lloyd, a young Wall Street advisor at the world’s largest Swiss bank, Cushman’s fall has unexpected—and deadly—repercussions. Lloyd’s girlfriend, Lilly, is directly tied to billions of dollars in losses suffered by Cushman’s most dangerous victims, a group of powerful investors whose identities and dirty finances are well hidden. What Lilly knows can get her and Patrick killed, and now the pair are in a run for their lives that leads to the heart of a clandestine operation, and to a cabal of powerful officials determined to keep their agenda hidden from the public.

With nowhere to turn and no one to trust, Patrick and Lilly must uncover the truth before they become collateral damage in a “financial war” in which casualties are no longer measured in dollars and cents.

About James Grippando

James Grippando is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels, including Afraid of the Dark, Money to Burn, Intent to Kill, Born to Run, Last Call, Lying with Strangers, When Darkness Falls, and Got the Look. He lives in Florida, where he was a trial lawyer.

Editorial Review

Abe Cushman was the hot-from-the-headlines Ponzi purveyor who pulled a Houdini with $60 billion. Now his suicide has left the money lost in the shadows. Patrick Lloyd is a young financial analyst for the International Bank of Switzerland, a too-big-to-fail institution luxuriating on huge accounts accessible only by code numbers. The SEC is hamstrung, but the FBI isn’t. Patrick is persuaded by an FBI agent to seek assignment in Singapore. He agrees for selfish reasons. In Singapore, Patrick met and bedded Lilly Scanlon, another BOS analyst. Lilly was the agent for the electronic transfers of $2 billion flowing between Cushman and Gerry Collins’ GC Investments in Florida, one of the scheme’s feeder funds. Now Collins has been garroted, and Lilly is on the lam. Tony Martin, a witness-protected mobster bilked by Collins, confessed to the murder, but there are other bad actors involved. One is Manu Robledo, an Argentine with connections to South America’s Tri-Border region, a lawless outpost where guns and drugs are sold and terrorists find warm welcome. Lilly lands in New York seeking Patrick’s help, and as they investigate, the innocent and the guilty are kidnapped, tortured and killed. A complex and mind-dizzying shell game, Grippando’s tale is heavy on action and filled with the stereotypical characters necessary to keep pages turning. The new BOS chief is a former Treasury official who must find the money or lose more than his career. There’s Mongoose, a one-time covert agent. And then there’s a lowly quantitative analyst, a “quant,” who diagrammed a plot tracing the billions through a mysterious project code-named BAQ and into hawalas, a worldwide informal banking and money-transfer system often used by the wrong kind of people.

Agreeably entertaining, Grippando’s novel adds up the collateral damage when billions belonging to the wrong kind of people go missing. – Kirkus Reviews

James Grippando’s financial thriller “Need You Now”

The Washington Post Book Review – January 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

If you’re going to read James Grippando’s new financial thriller, “Need You Now,” be prepared to scatter bread crumbs. Otherwise, you’ll never find your way back home after wandering through the thicket of aliases, double crosses, back stories and red herrings that litter the narrative path. Indeed, late in the novel, one of the characters resorts to drawing a “plot map” of sorts all over the walls of his one-room New York apartment. Here’s what it looks like:

“Scores of unframed photographs dotted the walls from floor to ceiling, each connected by a thick hand-drawn line. The lines were in various colors — red, blue, green, and yellow — and sometimes more than one colored line connected one photograph to another. . . .Hand-drawn arrows directed the flow from left to right, from the kitchen, past the window, around the door, and then back to the kitchen — a three-hundred-sixty-degree flowchart of some sort.” [Read the full article...]

Fangtastic – A Novel About A Teen Vampire And Glamour Queen by Lucienne Diver

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:53:13 +0000

Can you work for the Feds and still be fabulous? When “undercover” involves infiltrating a lair of nightclub poser vamps killing people in Florida (like, real murderers!), the only way to blend in is to stand out. The job certainly has its upside: five-alarm hotties, wicked fashion tips from the steampunk crowd, and partnering with my BFF Marcy and my gorgeous, genius boyfriend Bobby. And it helps to have a team behind me when facing my deadliest mission yet, where we might not actually be the scariest things to go bump in the night.

Perks of this assignment: I get to spend a lot of time in clubs and my undercover outfit is smoking hot, with no VPL (visible panty lines for those playing along at home).

Downside of this assignment: I have to offer Bobby to the killers as bait!

About Lucienne Diver

No stranger to fantasy and romance, Lucienne Diver is the author of Vamped series and has worked as a literary agent for many years. Her authors have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists, and won numerous awards including the RITA and the National Readers’ Choice. Diver lives near Tampa, Florida.

Editorial Review

Gina Covello, teen vampire and all-around glamour queen, is back in a new adventure that pits her and her heartthrob Bobby against enemies new and old.

Dressed to kill but never taking more than a sip, Gina’s working for the Feds, who keep her on a tight rein, cutting into Gina’s idea of a good time. Her job here is to act as bait while hunting a teenage killer who is far too bloodthirsty to be a regular human boy. The wardrobe is to die for, but Gina’s not enthusiastic about her task, which quickly gets even hinkier than usual…just who is the enemy now? No longer sure whom to trust, Gina must walk a tight line between her government handlers, the old vamps making Tampa, Fla., their new headquarters, an inventor who can’t get a patent to save his soul and a growing gang of murderous teens who are way too into the whole goth look for comfort. Add in her very first human servant-wannabe, and Gina’s nights are becoming more than full. As ever, Gina’s feisty, funny narration carries the day. Gina never fails to please, as she strides down the runway of afterlife with just the right mix of humor, make-up advice, youthful lust that never crosses the line and a kung-fu style all her own. - Kirkus Reviews

The Whisperer – A Haunting Portrait Of Evil by Donato Carrisi

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:36:22 +0000

A gripping literary thriller and smash bestseller that has taken Italy, France, Germany and the UK by storm.

Six severed arms are discovered, arranged in a mysterious circle and buried in a clearing in the woods. Five of them appear to belong to missing girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. The sixth is yet to be identified. Worse still, the girls’ bodies, alive or dead, are nowhere to be found.

Lead investigators Mila Vasquez, a celebrated profiler, and Goran Gavila, an eerily prescient criminologist, dive into the case. They’re confident they’ve got the right suspect in their sights until they discover no link between him and any of the kidnappings except the first. The evidence in the case of the second missing child points in a vastly different direction, creating more questions than it answers.

Vasquez and Gavila begin to wonder if they’ve been brought in to take the fall in a near-hopeless case. Is it all coincidence? Or is a copycat criminal at work? Obsessed with a case that becomes more tangled and intense as they unravel the layers of evil, Gavila and Vasquez find that their lives are increasingly in each other’s hands.

THE WHISPERER, as sensational a bestseller in Europe as the Stieg Larsson novels, is that rare creation: a thought-provoking, intelligent thriller that is also utterly unputdownable.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Donato Carrisi

Donato Carrisi studied law and criminology before he began working as a writer for television. THE WHISPERER, Carrisi’s first novel, won five international literary prizes, has been sold in nearly twenty countries, and has been translated into languages as varied as French, Danish, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Carrisi lives in Rome.

Editorial Review

In an ambiguous country, an ephemeral nameless land, Dr. Goran Gavila and a squad of police detectives hunt a soulless killer, a murderer single-mindedly intent on destroying families.

Passers-by stumbled upon a bizarre gravesite in a fog-shrouded forest. Five left arms, buried in a circle, five arms amputated from little girls gone missing. Gavila, professor and criminologist, and his squad are certain it is a serial killer’s work. Then a sixth arm is discovered, a limb of a child no one has reported missing. Gavila knows the psychopath’s ugly work has destroyed five families, each victim an only child. But the sixth girl cannot be identified, has never been reported missing, may in fact still be alive. With that, Mila Vasquez, a specialist in locating missing children, is assigned to the squad, bemused by an equivocal welcome and puzzled by the vacuous chief inspector. Carrisi’s debut thriller deviates from the conventional thriller’s modus operandi, often employing the graceful turns of phrase common to literary fiction—“one number to add to the cold accountancy of death.” Add the enigmatic geographical setting, ominous weather and character names drawn from assorted ethnic and cultural milieus, and the book resonates symbolically, a reminder that evil is universal and unforgiving. Gavila and Vasquez, each burdened by personal tragedy, are the protagonists, their stories amplified by other team members. The investigation widens, and the killer lures the detectives down the circles of hell exposing first a pedophile, then a sociopath masquerading as a good guy. Coping with disruption and deceit within the squad, Gavila and Vasquez eventually discover the killer’s identity and the obscene method he employs. Carrisi’s villain is a suitable cohort for Hannibal Lector, and his detectives are intelligently nuanced, each struggling, sometimes failing, to cope with the depravity into which they immerse themselves in the name of good. – Kirkus Reviews

The Flame Alphabet – The Language That Will Kill You by Ben Marcus

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:30:04 +0000

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.

With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.

The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction–Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String–and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City and Maine.

Editorial Reviews

“To people who just want to read a good yarn and who think Ben Marcus is too weird for them, I’d say: Think again . . . The novel can operate on multiple registers: as metaphor, sociology, conventional thriller, and, at bottom, discourse on parenthood and family that is freakishly sad and incredibly good.”
—Fiona Maazel, Book Forum

“Incandescent . . . [The] apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus’ blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Language kills in Marcus’s audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness . . . Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus’s novel twists America’s quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review and Pick of the Week)

‘The Flame Alphabet’: When Language Turns Toxic

NPR Book Review – January 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

In an election year, nasty rhetoric is par for the course. But what if all that toxic language was, well, actually toxic?

That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet, the new novel by Ben Marcus.

When Sam and his wife begin feeling sick, they’re not sure why. But when their teenage daughter, Esther, leaves the house, the couple recovers. The horrifying prospect dawns on them that their daughter — specifically, her speech — is poisoning them. Soon it becomes clear that the sickness is spreading beyond their small Jewish community.

“I’ve always thought of language as extremely potent,” Marcus tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. “It seems to change us at the chemical and biological level. When I think of it like that, it’s as though it’s a drug — and what would happen if we took too much of it, if it overwhelmed us and started to make us sick?”

Language — its power and limitations, abundance and poverty — have long preoccupied Marcus, whose knotty, formally experimental books The Age of Wire and String andNotable American Women pushed the novel and short story genres to their frontiers of their forms. But to prepare for The Flame Alphabet, he delved into the past. [Read the full article...]

When Children’s Speech Turns Lethal

The New York Times Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

In a career spanning nearly 20 years, Ben Marcus has written just four spare volumes: a story collection, two novels and a chapbook. Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic, this work has earned him critical praise and a small army of devoted fans. His prose is heavily metaphorical yet coolly ironic; it traffics in the language of scholarship, myth and history, and until now has forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative. Indeed, the pieces in “The Age of Wire and String” (1995) function more like prose poems than stories; their emotional impact is derived from their distinctive diction and syntax. The opener, “Argument,” might serve as a map of Marcus’s early career, with its stated goal of “cataloging a culture” through “an array of documents settling within the chief concerns of the society, of any society, of the world and its internal areas.” The book’s archness is both bracing and absurd; it attempts to reinvent story by repurposing, gleefully, the jargon ordinarily used to analyze it.

“Notable American Women” (2002) is an allegorical black comedy featuring a cult of silence, creepy sexuality and literary doppelgängers of the author and his family. It is like an exploded diagram of itself, spilling out from between its covers and into the real world — even its epigraphs and cover blurbs feature quotations from its own characters. The story “The Father Costume” (2002), published as a chapbook with illustrations by Matthew Ritchie, is an extended exploration of metaphor, where words float on water or can be sewn out of thread, and time has physical substance.

Since then Marcus has written short stories and essays, most notably a spirited defense of experimental fiction published in Harper’s — but “The Flame Alphabet,” his first new book in a decade, has the feel of an event. And though it is recognizably by the same author, it is also something of a surprise. It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller. [Read the full article...]

‘Flame Alphabet’: Are Your Kids Making You Sick?

NPR Book Review – January 31, 2012 (Excerpt)

With our endless wars, collapsing economies and Snooki’s ever increasing celebrity, is it any wonder that dystopias are all the rage?

The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus’ first novel since 2002′sNotable American Women, pitches us into an alternate and unremittingly grim reality. The book fits neatly alongside recent work by authors that Marcus has influenced (think Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Joshua Cohen’s Witz), but a number of fatal flaws suggest that Marcus might now be playing catchup to the very writers he once inspired.

In the world of The Flame Alphabet, Jews are outcasts, forced to pray alone in huts hidden in the woods. It’s never entirely explained why they are so despised; Marcus draws only hazy parallels to the Jews who secretly practiced their faith and traditions during the Spanish Inquisition and in Nazi Germany.

One pair of clandestine worshipers, Sam and Claire, discover that they are being poisoned by the speech of their daughter, the adolescent and moody Esther. The effect is gradual (“the retching, the speech fever, the yellow tide beneath my wife’s skin”) but becomes deadly. The sickness spreads; the world slows to a crawl. Fingers are pointed at possible culprits, and the Jews first to be blamed. [Read the full article...]

Review: ‘The Flame Alphabet’ leaves reader cold

The Washington Post Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

Many a reader is bound to balk at the premise of Ben Marcus’s second novel, “The Flame Alphabet”: In a United States bearing a vague similarity to the real thing, the speech of children kills adults. If this were a droll take on the wearing nature of parenthood, comical possibilities might present themselves. But the execution here is fairly sober-sided, leaving the premise to seem, in sci-fi terms, overtly dumb.

To a surprisingly successful degree, this iffy idea is carried quite a distance by Marcus’s skillful prose. The concept’s goofiness is mitigated by signals that this is not merely a dystopian novel, but an allegory about language. For the first half, owing to the high quality of the writing, I was able to park my skepticism about why, as the protagonist observes, “children’s language should be toxic while the language of adults was not. The acoustics were the same. . . . It doesn’t make any sense.” However, at the midpoint, something happened (not in the novel; indeed, nothing happens in the novel, which was part of the problem), and I suddenly would do anything to avoid reading this book: scrape the ashes from the wood stove, bury the organic waste in the compost pile. I still look back on those little respites, wind whipping my hair while fat pink earthworms squirmed in moldy cauliflower leaves, with grateful affection. [Read the full article...]

A Million Suns: An Across the Universe Novel by Beth Revis

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:30:27 +0000

Godspeed was fueled by lies. Now it is ruled by chaos.

It’s been three months since Amy was unplugged. The life she always knew is over. And everywhere she looks, she sees the walls of the spaceship Godspeed. But there may just be hope: Elder has assumed leadership of the ship. He’s finally free to enact his vision – no more Phydus, no more lies.

But when Elder discovers shocking news about the ship, he and Amy race to discover the truth behind life on Godspeed. They must work together to unlock a puzzle that was set in motion hundreds of years earlier, unable to fight the romance that’s growing between them and the chaos that threatens to tear them apart.

In book two of the Across the Universe trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis mesmerizes us again with a brilliantly crafted mystery filled with action, suspense, romance, and deep philosophical questions. And this time it all builds to one mind-bending conclusion: They have to get off this ship.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Beth Revis

Beth Revis (www.AcrosstheUniverseBook.com) is the New York Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe trilogy. A Million Suns is her second book. Beth lives in rural North Carolina with her husband and dog, and believes space is nowhere near the final frontier.

Editorial Review

Opening soon after the bleak ending of Across the Universe (2011), this captivating middle volume takes Godspeed’s 2,763 residents through commotion, twists and game-changers.

Sixteen-year-old Elder (he refuses the title Eldest, despite being the ship’s leader now) learned in the trilogy openerthat Godspeed’s weakened engine offers no chance of planet-landing for many decades. But Elder’s been studying physics, and he’s newly skeptical. Confronting the Shippers who physically run Godspeed begins a string of surprising reveals, and so does a set of clues left by a cryogenically frozen rebel. Among this population that’s been shipborn for generations, Earthborn Amy sticks out like a sore thumb (in race-coded ways that are troubling when examined closely). Amy wants off the 10 square miles of this metal-walled spaceship. The environment (levels; elevators; fields under a solar lamp; crammed stacks of city buildings) gives the plot (food hoarding, rape, riots, revolution) an acute tension. Amy and Elder alternate narrating in first person. Their voices aren’t distinct, their actions and characterizations frustrating in many ways, but it hardly matters: Revis’ shining brilliance is the fierce tension about survival (is Godspeed deteriorating? can people survive terrorism inside an enclosed spaceship?) and the desperate core question of whether any generation will ever reach a planet.

Setting and plot are the heart and soul of this ripping space thriller, and they’re unforgettable. (Science fiction. 14 & up) – Kirkus Reviews

Not Just for Kids: ‘A Million Suns’ by Beth Revis

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – January 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

More than 80 years ago, Aldous Huxley imagined a genetically engineered society whose inhabitants were willfully drugged into submission. In the “Across the Universe” trilogy, author Beth Revis takes that pioneering concept and sets it afloat in space with a cast of cloned and cryogenically frozen characters who, in the second installment of this bestselling sci-fi series, become increasingly mutinous.

As “A Million Suns” opens, it’s unclear if the ship, known as Godspeed, will live up to its well-intentioned name. Is it moving toward its destination or merely floating motionless in some unknown galaxy? No one understands Godspeed’s exact location in relation to the planet it’s been traveling toward for 250 years, but one thing is certain: The ship is falling apart.

The Feeders, or farmers, aren’t able to produce enough food. And Godspeed’s leadership is in question now that its new ruler, 16-year-old Elder, has taken its inhabitants off the drug that had supplicated them into allegiance for more than two centuries.

Elder is a clone who was bred to lead, but he’s new to the job. The former leader was killed off in the series opener, and his successor, Orion, was put on ice. But before Orion was bathed in cryogenic fluid and put in a deep freeze along with the other “frozens,” he recorded a series of video messages and hid them for Amy — who was born on Earth and, as Orion believes, can figure out the best solution to the ship’s problems, both mechanical and otherwise. [Read the full article...]

The Plot Against Hip Hop: A Novel About A Community’s Predilection For Violence by Nelson George

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:37:35 +0000

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard and security expert D Hunter, suspects there are larger forces at work.

D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hardcore fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Nelson George

Nelson George is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture, seeing Kool Herc in a Bronx schoolyard in the late ’70s. He would go on to write several award winning books on the subject, including ‘Hip Hop America’ and Russell Simmons’ autobiography ‘Life and Def.’ He directed Queen Latifah in the award winning HBO film, ’Life Support,’ and executive produces VH1′s long running ‘Hip Hop Honors’ broadcast. He can be contacted at www.nelsondgeorge.net.

Editorial Reviews

“George’s prose sparkles with an effortless humanity, bringing his characters to life in a way that seems true and beautiful. The story — and the conspiracy behind it — is one we all need to hear as consumers and creators in the post-hardcore hip-hop world.”
–Shelf Awareness

“Part procedural murder mystery, part conspiracy-theory manifesto, Nelson George’s The Plot Against Hip Hop reads like the PTSD fever dream of a renegade who’s done several tours of duty in the trenches . . . Plot’s combination of record-biz knowledge and ghetto fabulosity could have been written only by venerable music journalist Nelson George, who knows his hip-hop history . . . The writing is as New York as ‘Empire State of Mind,’ and D is a detective compelling enough to anchor a series.”
–Time Out New York

“The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time.”
–New York Journal of Books

‘The Plot Against Hip Hop: A Novel’ by Nelson George

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 28, 2011 (Excerpt)

Music critic and author Dwayne Robinson, a middle-aged black man, has been murdered with a box cutter, and his friend, D, wants to know whodunit.

When Dwayne shows up at the front door of D Security, D’s office, wearing a bloody beige trench coat and a blue Yankees cap, clutching a cassette tape and mumbling the Biggie lyrics “It was all a dream,” D doesn’t know what to make of it.

To police officers, it looks like a gang initiation. Witnesses, who describe the killers as two slim, tall young men, wearing red doo rags and tracksuits, serve to strengthen the cops’ belief that the Bloods are at fault.

But D isn’t so sure, and the rest of the book follows his journey to find the truth. And it’s an arduous journey complete with a wealthy hip-hop mogul, a “hip-hop cop,” a hip-hop conspiracy theory website, a contentious book manuscript and more deaths.

Author Nelson George definitely knows his hip-hop history. There were plenty of real hip-hop artists’ names used as D’s fictional clients. Hip-hop songs, lyrics, pioneers and pondering about the deaths of rappers Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. were scattered throughout the book. The problem is the book spent too much time reminiscing on old school hip-hop and not enough time making readers care about Dwayne’s death. [Read the full article...]

A Charitable Body: A Novel of Suspense by Robert Barnard

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:54:28 +0000

Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond Dagger–winning crime writer, dissects family bonds at their best and worst in this stunning novel of suspense.

What an honor—to become trustee of an English stately home museum. Yorkshire Detective Inspector Charlie Peace’s wife, Felicity, is initially thrilled when she’s asked to join the board that oversees Walbrook Manor, an eighteenth-century mansion that’s now part of a charitable trust. She’s in for some surprises.

With its shabby salons and drafty hallways, Walbrook shows signs of the financial burden it caused its recent owners, members of the related Quarles and Fiennes families, known more for feuds than for affectionate familial ties. They are known also for shadowy intrigues, great and small, some of which may emerge now that Walbrook and its archives are open to the public. The revelations could be devastating . . . and dangerous.

Rupert Fiennes and Sir Stafford Quarles represent two lines of Walbrook’s lords of the manor. Rupert seems relieved to have relinquished the estate to charitable hands, while Sir Stafford clings with perhaps unseemly pride to his position as chairman of the Walbrook Manor Trust Board. A tentative peace reigns, but when the wreck of a car and the remains of a body turn up in a nearby lake, it soon becomes clear that one of Walbrook’s grimmest secrets may date to the years between the two world wars and may involve something much worse than mere malice.

With police resources focused on more timely cases, Charlie and Felicity are left to discover that old sins are never forgotten, that “family” means more than a slot on the ancestral tree, and that sometimes there can be a good reason for murder.

Suspenseful, witty, and, as always, superbly insight-ful, A Charitable Body shows acclaimed master of mystery Robert Barnard at his clever best.

About Robert Barnard

Robert Barnard is the winner of the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievemetn and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he is a member of Britain’s distinguished Detection Club, and in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel is A Stranger in the Family, published by Scribner in 2010. He lives with his wife, Louise, in Leeds, England.

Editorial Review

Rupert Fiennes is thrilled to dump Walbrook Manor, Yorkshire, in the hands of the National Trust and take up residence in a flat with all the mod cons, but his dear cousin Mary-Elizabeth is saddened at the prospect. Sir Stafford Quarles, representing a different branch of the original owners and eager to establish himself as Lord of the Manor, has assumed chairmanship of the Walbrook Trust, slipped a proviso into the deed that he and his wife will have tenancy there and ruthlessly hired and fired board members to insure his plans for the property, which include a fete replicating the musical song cycle performed there back in 1939. Once novelist Felicity Peace joins the board, she and her copper husband Charlie (The Killings on Jubilee Terrace, 2009, etc.) wonder what else Sir Stafford has up his sleeve now that he’s fired the former Manor museum director, the current one may be on his way out, and archival papers are missing. Some of these documents focused on the Manor’s peace seminars, which attracted the surprising attention of a Fifth Column of Nazi sympathizers. When old bones are dredged up from a nearby pond, Charlie, anxious to put a name to them, discovers a surfeit of missing ladies in the Manor’s history—especially Sir Stafford’s mum, who according to one story died of ill health and according to another decamped to London and ran a posh wartime brothel, which, as it happens, both Mary-Elizabeth and Lady Quarles know a thing or two about. – Kirkus Reviews

‘A Charitable Body’: Murder Most Genteel

NPR Book Review – January 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

There are mystery novels that keep a reader up all night and there are milder mystery novels to doze off to: Robert Barnard is a much-decorated old hand at writing the latter. (Among Barnard’s veritable vanload of awards for his forty-some novels are the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing; the Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Award; as well as the Anthony, Agatha and Macavity awards.) His mysteries are witty and assured; they send a drowsy reader off to bed confident in the belief that justice and order will prevail over chaos. Even when Barnard produces a middling effort, which his latest, A Charitable Body, certainly is, it’s a gentle pleasure to read. After all, how much fault can anyone but the most dyspeptic critic find with a mystery that contains this delightfully old-fashioned cliffhanger of a chapter ending: “‘Everything in the garden is lovely,’ said Charlie. But of course that was before the discovery of the body.”

The rather clueless Charlie who’s commenting on that garden is Charlie Peace, the Yorkshire police detective who, with his novelist wife, Felicity, is the hero of one of Barnard’s several mystery series. The garden Charlie is admiring belongs to the grounds of Walbrook Manor, a great house dating from Queen Anne’s reign that has recently been turned over to the nation to be opened as a museum and arts center. When Felicity is asked to serve on the Board of Trustees of Walbrook Manor, she becomes fascinated by the troubled domestic history of the place (“Walbrook seemed a house made for collapsing marriages”) and by the odd rift between the two families that once owned the manse. Long before that aforementioned body is discovered, Felicity becomes convinced that something rotten is festering in the nooks and crannies of Walbrook. [Read the full article...]

I’m Not Stiller – A Case Of Mistaken Identity by Max Frisch

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:18:31 +0000

Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: “I’m not Stiller!” He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by “the morbid impulse to convince,” but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account–part Kafka, part Camus–of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I’m Not Stiller has come to be recognized as “one of the major post-war works of fiction” and a masterpiece of German literature.

About Max Frisch

Max Frisch was born in Zurich, Switzerland before the First World War and was a soldier in the Second. In the interwar years, he traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe as a journalist. After serving as a gunner on the Austrian and Italian borders, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became an architect. These experiences helped forge the moral consciousness and the concern for human freedom that mark his writing. The author of I’m Not Stiller, Homo Faber, Man in the Holocene, Montauk, and Gantenbein, Frisch was one of Europe’s most important postwar writers.

Editorial Reviews

“It exudes postwar high seriousness: it cannot wait to show off its many layers of meaning. . . . Then comes the voice of Stiller himself: treacherous, evasive and compelling as an Edgar Allan Poe murderer or a Raymond Chandler detective. . . . When the curtain comes down one last time on the life of Anatol Ludwig Stiller, it is truly harrowing: it is a spiritual blackout.” –New York Times

“Readers cannot but feel the force of what remains one of the most important novels of the post-war years.” –Times Literary Supplement

“A single consciousness contains multitudes: in fathoming it, Frisch evokes the complex reality of a dangerous and enthralling world.” –New Statesman

Imprisoned In A Mysterious Mistaken Identity

NPR Book Review – January 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

I was a college student in New York City when security checks became the norm. Being half-Filipino with a Scottish last name, I wasn’t easy to profile. And since I was always carrying a big backpack of textbooks in and out of the subway on my way to class, I came to expect that I would be stopped once or twice each week.

And the fear, which I felt each time I was asked to step aside, was that I would be mistaken for someone else — a suspect out to disrupt the city I’m from and love most of all. There is no book that encapsulates this fear better than I’m Not Stiller, by the Swiss writer Max Frisch, which begins just so.

While traveling through Zurich, our narrator is stopped by the authorities because he closely resembles one Anatol Ludwig Stiller, a somewhat unsuccessful sculptor, husband, lover and all around failure of a man, who disappeared six years earlier. One smack to an official’s ear later, Stiller (presumably) is detained in a very humane Swiss prison until he will admit that he is the missing man.

From the confines of his cell, Stiller reports on his life in detainment with invigorating rage, insisting that he is most definitely not Stiller, but an American named White: a cowboy who has traveled the Mexican desert and beyond, and who isn’t afraid to commit a murder or two when pressed. [Read the full article...]

Breakdown – A New V.I. Warshawski Novel by Sara Paretsky

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:50:07 +0000

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago’s Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying.

The girls include daughters of some of Chicago’s most powerful families: The grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is one of the world’s wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is the Illinois Democratic candidate for Senate.

For V. I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles for answers, she finds herself fighting enemies who are all too human.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky is the author of eighteen books, including her renowned V. I. Warshawski novels. She was named 2011 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and is also the recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award given by the British Crime Writers’ Association. She lives in Chicago. You can learn more about Sara at www.saraparetsky.com.

Editorial Review

V.I. Warshawski’s 14th case entangles everyone in Chicago from a murdered private eye to a pair of Senate candidates and the world’s 21st-richest man.

Little do the seven tween girls invoking the spirit of that famous fictional vampire Carmilla, Queen of the Night, at a secret ceremony in Mount Moriah Cemetery know that only a few yards away lies the fresh corpse of one Miles Wuchnik, very recently added to the rolls of the dead. V.I., leaving a high-rolling party for right-wing media darling Wade Lawlor to respond to her cousin Petra’s plea to find Kira Dudek, one of the tweens, wakes up the next morning to learn that although she succeeded in getting the girls away from the murder scene before the police arrived, Lawlor and all his dittoheads are implicating her in the murder of the colleague she never met. It’s entirely plausible that V.I. might be taking money from billionaire Chaim Salanter to protect his granddaughter Arielle Zitter, another of the tweens. And since Salanter is a prominent contributor to the senatorial campaign of University of Illinois president Sophy Durango, it figures that Lawlor, a big booster of Sophy’s opponent, creationist Helen Kendrick, would go after both Salanter and V.I. But the sad fact is that Salanter hasn’t hired Warshawski (Body Work, 2010, etc.); in fact, he meets with her repeatedly only to warn her to stay off the case. Not that she’s not distracted all on her own, since her old law school friend, bipolar attorney Leydon Ashford, has just been thrown from a height at Rockefeller Chapel and lies near death. Leydon’s last cryptic message—“I saw him on the catafalque”—seems to connect the attack on her to Wuchnik’s murder. Can V.I. put together the pieces in time to save the young witnesses from the killer?

Plotted with all Paretsky’s customary generosity, this standout entry harnesses her heroine’s righteous anger to some richly deserving targets, all linked together in a truly amazing finale. – Kirkus Reviews

A ‘Breakdown’ Full Of Thrills, Chills And Social Ills

NPR Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

The opening scene of the latest V.I. Warshawski novel confirms the worst fears of any parent whose daughter has been swept up by the Twilight craze: Namely, books can be dangerous. It’s a dark and stormy summer night in Chicago, and V.I. is tracking a bunch of 12- and 13-year-old girls through an abandoned cemetery. The tweens — all members of a reading group transfixed by a series about a supernatural shape-shifting character called Carmilla, Queen of the Night — have sneaked out of their respective houses to do something secret. V.I. finds them in the cemetery, getting ready to perform an initiation rite on one of their members. But just as V.I. is about to intrude on the mumbo jumbo, one of the girls screams and points to a nearby gravesite. There, a dead man is laid out on a stone slab, a metal rod protruding from his chest. A few minutes earlier, V.I. had glanced at the slab as she crept up on the girls, but she’d thought the corpse was a statue. In middle age, V.I.’s eyesight isn’t what it once was.

All of V.I.’s other powers, however, as well as those of her creator, Sara Paretsky, are as vital and limber as they were 20 years ago when she first charged down the mean streets of Chicago and into hard-boiled history in her debut adventure, Indemnity Only. If anything, the Warshawksi novels have only grown better: more ambitious in their construction and fiercer both in their feminist politics and in their commitment to storylines about social justice. A typical Warshawski investigation not only zooms in on the genre’s “usual suspects” (greedy opportunists, professional con artists, dysfunctional families), but also the larger social ills plaguing contemporary America. Recent novels have explored the subjects of homelessness, illegal immigrants, domestic violence and the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement. Breakdown, the 18th novel in the series, tackles the ever-widening class divide in America, as well as the unchecked power of media pedagogues. If you’re a fan of Bill O’Reilly, you probably won’t like Breakdown, since he is clearly a model for the faux populist, right-wing ranter Wade Lawlor, who is pilloried in the novel. Then again, O’Reilly’s audience and Paretsky’s probably don’t overlap a whole lot anyway. [Read the full article...]

‘Breakdown’ review: V.I. Warshawski on the case again

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – January 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

One of the many pleasures of Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels is that the sharp-tongued, short-tempered detective often seems to be following clues that lead not just to the heart of whatever mystery is at hand, but also into the red-hot center of the zeitgeist itself.

Recent books have dealt with the trauma of the Iraq War and the dangers of the Patriot Act. In the 1980s, when V.I. burst onto the scene as one of publishing’s first “hard-boiled” female detectives, the plots were spun of the concerns of those times, from corporate malfeasance to labor racketeering.

And now, as the presidential campaign heats up, her latest venture, “Breakdown,” features a Michele Bachmann-esque character running for Senate, a bloviating yet powerful conservative talk-show host, anti-immigrant hysteria and, because Paretsky also has a sense of humor, a “Twilight”-like young adult horror novel penned by the delightfully-named Boadicea Jones.

The book opens with V.I. in a dark cemetery, rain pelting her evening gown, looking for a group of girls obsessed with books about supernatural shape shifters. Before the first chapter is over, a man has been stabbed through the heart, vampire-style, in a nearby tomb. [Read the full article...]

The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen: A Novel by Thomas Caplan

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:13:38 +0000

A former soldier turned movie star turned spy must stop a catastrophic nuclear weapons deal.

This gripping thriller from Thomas Caplan propels readers around the globe-from Hollywood to Rome, the Black Sea to the Mediterranean-and to the very brink of nuclear abyss.

The novel’s charismatic hero, former covert operative Ty Hunter, has become, almost by accident, the number one film star in the world. When he is recruited on a clandestine mission to thwart the transfer of nuclear warheads into rogue hands, he must deploy every skill he has as an actor, soldier, and spy. Donning his fame as a disguise, Ty matches wits and muscle with the enigmatic billionaire Ian Santal and his nefarious protégé Philip Frost-two supremely sophisticated adversaries- even as he falls in love with the entrancing young woman closest to them both, the jewelry designer Isabella Cavill.

In prose that is both elegant and powerful, The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen gives us a breakneck parable of good and evil-and a hero in the tradition of James Bond and Jason Bourne, who is sure to become an icon of the genre.

About Thomas Caplan

Thomas Caplan, a founder of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is the author of three previous novels, Line of Chance, Parallelogram, and Grace and Favor. He lives in Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

“Thomas Caplan has crafted an absorbing thriller of intrigue and menace that draws you into a vortex you can’t escape until the end. The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen is the most ingenious thriller I’ve ever read.”
-Clive Cussler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kingdom

“A highly sophisticated and entertaining thriller! With enviable finesse and accelerating tension, Caplan introduces us to a world of high and low life, West Wing officials and computer paladins, Hollywood stars and global financial wizards. Don’t pick up this book if you have made plans for the evening.”
-Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent

“The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen is a thrilling novel of espionage and derring-do, high jinks and high stakes, that unfolds rapidly against a canvas of seductive international glamour. But its grace note is the siren song of Hollywood that, out of nowhere, attracted then transformed its astonishing hero.”
-Kevin Starr, author of Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance

‘Spy’: A Nuclear Caper, With A Nod From Clinton

NPR Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

In author Thomas Caplan’s new novel, The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen, the president asks movie star Ty Hunter to return to action as a secret agent.

Caplan himself is personally acquainted with a former commander in chief. President Clinton and he were once roommates.

“I was a student at Georgetown University. When we arrived as heady freshmen in 1964, because of the alphabet, I was assigned a room next to Bill Clinton,” Caplan tells Morning Edition host Linda Wertheimer. “And we’ve remained friends ever since.”

Such good friends, in fact, that Clinton not only helped edit an earlier draft of Caplan’s novel but also wrote an introduction for it.

“I know he’s a great fan of thrillers and reads them sort of one after the other and knows an awful lot about them, and when I’d done this, which was my first thriller, I asked him to read it and he made some wonderful comments,” Caplan says.

The book is about the world of loose nukes — people trying to negotiate a sale of supposedly decommissioned nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.

“When I showed President Clinton the early draft, the first thing he said to me was, ‘Who told you all this about nuclear weapons?’ ” Caplan recalls, laughing. “I said no one really. I just read all the available books and chatted to people, but obviously I have no access to such things.” [Read the full article...]

Thomas Caplan’s ‘The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen,’ reviewed by Patrick Anderson

The Washington Post Book Review – January 15, 2012 (Excerpt)

The first question you might ask about Thomas Caplan’s “The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen” is just why Bill Clinton has — as the novel’s front cover proclaims — written its introduction. Clinton quickly answers that question: The two men met as freshmen at Georgetown University nearly 50 years ago and have been friends ever since. Caplan helped in Clinton’s race for freshman class president and, several decades later, contributed to his inaugural addresses. Now, with his generous and readable introduction, Clinton returns the favors.

Along with several other writers who have blurbed the book, Clinton declares that it is stylish, sophisticated and in the James Bond tradition. All this is true. The novel has its faults, but at best it’s a fanciful, enjoyable romp that centers on three stolen nuclear warheads — the fate of mankind! — even as it carries us deep into the world of people who are as dangerous and degenerate as they are rich. [Read the full article...]

The Retribution – A New Crime Thriller by Val McDermid

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:38:23 +0000

Val McDermid is a world-class crime writer whose books have sold millions worldwide. Now joining the Atlantic Monthly Press list for the first time, she is back with a chilling, high-velocity thriller featuring her immensely popular creations, clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan.

Tony Hill has had a good run. He and detective Carol Jordan have put away scores of dangerous criminals at a rate that colleagues envy. But there is one serial killer who has shaped and defined their careers, and whose evil surpasses all others: Jacko Vance, ex-celebrity and sociopath whose brilliance and utter lack of remorse have never left Tony’s mind in the ten years since his imprisonment. Now Jacko has escaped from prison—even more twisted and cunning than before, he is focused on wreaking revenge on Tony and Carol for his years spent in prison.

Tony and Carol don’t know when Jacko will strike, or where. All they know is that Jacko will cause them to feel fear like they’ve never known. A chilling, utterly gripping tour de force, The Retribution is the ideal introduction or re-introduction to the world of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. It is an unforgettable read.

Editorial Reviews

“Be very afraid as you meet a truly inventive serial killer. Val McDermid’s 25th novel is stunningly good, but it comes with a health warning. It is truly disturbing. Not in the sense of too many detailed descriptions of violence or post mortem examinations, but in what she does in entering the mind of a wholly evil, exceptionally inventive serial killer of teenage girls.”—The Times (UK)

“[McDermid’s] writing…remains taut and unflinching. In The Retribution, criminal psychologist Hill and DCI Jordan are back on the trail of Jacko Vance, the charismatic sports and TV star and serial killer of The Wire in the Blood. He has escaped from prison with a head full of vengeance and heart full of malice. As in all her novels, McDermid creates a brooding tension that allows readers to get close to characters whose lives are about to be ripped apart.”—Danuta Kean, The Independent (UK)

“Val McDermid…has done more to establish the British variant of the serial killer than anyone else—so successfully, indeed, that everyone else’s serial killers seem pale imitations…McDermid handles the multiple viewpoints of this complex narrative with assurance. She flicks from crisis to crisis, constantly misdirecting her readers. She is brilliant at sensational set-pieces… and Hill and Jordan have a psychological depth that’s rare in crime fiction…She also has the ruthless psychological scalpel that forms part of the equipment of all good novelists, whatever their genre. And, fortunately for us, she knows just how to use it.”—Andrew Taylor, The Guardian (UK)

Val McDermid’s ‘The Retribution’ a big disappointment

The Washington Post Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Nearly a century ago, when Agatha Christie and others were pioneering the English mystery novel, to provide one corpse at the outset was considered sufficient and a second might be tolerated, but anything beyond that was thought to be in extremely poor taste. No more. My best estimate is that I’ve read 187 serial-killer novels in the past decade (and escaped, as I keep insisting, with my sanity). Most were mercifully forgettable, but I do remember a few with admiration. John Katzenbach’s “The Traveler” (1987) was inspired by Ted Bundy, whose trial Katzenbach covered as a young reporter. Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs” introduced arguably the most memorable villain in modern popular fiction, that charming cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is at heart a serial-killer novel, even though the wondrous Lisbeth Salander steals the show. Michael Connelly’s “The Poet” was his breakthrough novel in 1996 and remains one of his best.

I would add a novel I reviewed 10 years ago, the Scottish-born writer Val McDermid’s“Killing the Shadows,” which managed to make a series of killings darkly hilarious. The killer targeted celebrated crime writers and disposed of them in ways they had made famous in their novels. It was a delicious concept, neatly executed; the book made clear why McDermid had won numerous crime-fiction prizes in England and sold millions of books all over the world. [Read the full article...]

The Sabrina Strong Series – Fervent Review in the United Kingdom

Lorelei Bell — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:46:34 +0000

A Contribution by Lorelei Bell, author of Vampire Ascending. For more information, see her Facebook Page and her section on this website.

Lorelei Bell has created another unique and mesmerizing mystery masterwork that tops its prequel Vampire Ascending in drama, fast-paced action, love, passion, heartache, and devastation.

New friends, new adventures, shocking revelations, and harrowing experiences make for riveting reading in this second installment of the Sabrina Strong Series.

Sabrina learns more details – through Vasyl’s recounting of his human and vampire life – of what her role as a sibyl means and how the past and the future will come together. She finally learns what role Vasyl has played in his search for the next sibyl and why she is so tremendously important.

As Sabrina’s partner Dante puts himself at risk to help all of mankind, Sabrina learns why newcomer Bill Gannon is so interested in her, and she works to protect Bjorn Tremayne from losing it all. Sabrina’s past catches up to her, and she discovers that not everyone is, or was, what she thought. New characters, some kind and trustworthy and some not, contribute to a captivating story line, and Sabrina finds herself on a journey she never thought possible.

Reviews on Amazon.co.uk:

Vampire Ascending: I don’t read many vampire books but i am so glad i stumbled across this one.
The tangled and troubled web that is Sabrina Strong ups and downs she goes through not just in love but in her everyday life had me hooked from the very beginning to the very end.
I highly recommend this book to everyone whether you are into reading action or a troubled love story this has it all. – Emma Hinks

Vampire’s Trill: After reading the first part of this series (Vampire ascending) i was eager to jump straight into reading this one and i must say i wasn’t disappointed.
I love the way at the end of the books i am left with so many unanswered questions and eagerly awaiting the next installment. This is an amazing series full of so many loveable characters and plots that i have trouble putting them down….. to be honest i didn’t put it down until i had finished it. I can’t help but think of the main character, Sabrina Strong, like a very dear friend and thouroughly enjoy accompanying her on her epic journey. – Emma Hinks

The Outlaw Album: Crime Stories by Daniel Woodrell

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:32:58 +0000

Twelve timeless Ozarkian tales of those on the fringes of society, by a “stunningly original” (Associated Press) American master.

Daniel Woodrell is able to lend uncanny logic to harsh, even criminal behavior in this wrenching collection of stories. Desperation-both material and psychological–motivates his characters. A husband cruelly avenges the killing of his wife’s pet; an injured rapist is cared for by a young girl, until she reaches her breaking point; a disturbed veteran of Iraq is murdered for his erratic behavior; an outsider’s house is set on fire by an angry neighbor.

There is also the tenderness and loyalty of the vulnerable in these stories–between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and comrades in arms-which brings the troubled, sorely tested cast of characters to vivid, relatable life. And, as ever, “the music coming from Woodrell’s banjo cannot be confused with the sounds of any other writer” (Donald Harington, Atlanta Journal Constitution).

About Daniel Woodrell

Five of Daniel Woodrell’s eight published novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel in 1999. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Editorial Review

Twelve spare, haunting and brutal slices of country noir from the genre’s most gifted practitioner.

From Woodrell, author of the brilliant Winter’s Bone, which was richly adapted into the Oscar-nominated 2010 film, now comes a collection of short fiction, previously published in outlets ranging from The Missouri Review and Esquire to hard-hitting anthologies like A Hell of a Woman. And boy, does Woodrell have a way with words. The first sentence of the first story captures its essence: “Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him.” In a sort of redneck therapy, one of the locals takes a squirrel rifle to his Northerly neighbor, then buries him back in the woods where he can take a hatchet to the man whenever he’s feeling ornery. The Edgar Award–nominated “Uncle” is even worse. When a country girl tires of her uncle’s raping and murdering lost tourists, she takes a pick-axe to him. There is “Twin Forks,” in which a man tries to recapture his youth only to stare murder in the eyes. And “Florianne,” which delves into a man’s paranoia over his daughter’s disappearance. There are war vets in “Night Stand” and “Black Step,” reeling in a world where violence follows them home, and even a brief visit to the old outlaw Jake Roedel in “Woe to Live On.” Woe, indeed.

Hard words and harsh trials from a writer who knows all too well the frozen ground he occupies. – Kirkus Reviews

Ozark Justice

The New York Times Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

After eight novels centered mainly on the poor and criminal in his native Missouri Ozarks, including the much lauded “Winter’s Bone,” Daniel Woodrell has published his first story collection, “The Outlaw Album,” and for readers of both crime and literary fiction, there is much to celebrate. Woodrell writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today, in compact, musical prose that doesn’t dwell on visceral detail. An unerring craftsman, he can fully describe a murder in one rich sentence: “The first time he killed the man, Jepperson, an opinionated foreigner from Minnesota, he kept to simple Ozark tradition and used a squirrel rifle, bullet to the heart, classic and effective, though there were spasms of the limbs and even a lunge of big old Jepperson’s body that seemed like he was about to take a step, flee, but he died in stride and collapsed against a fence post.” Every story is loaded with gems like that.

As the title indicates, trouble is as pervasive in “The Outlaw Album” as rats in a corncrib. A Vietnam vet kills an intruder in his home, only to discover the man is another veteran from a more recent war suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. An adolescent girl dumps her uncle, an odious, brain-damaged rapist, in the river to drown after she realizes he’s recovering from the injuries she inflicted. A grieving, paranoid father studies his neighbors, wondering which of them might be responsible for his daughter’s disappearance. Gritty stuff, to be sure, but Woodrell always takes the high road, concentrating on the causes of violence and its psychological impact on people’s lives. As an elderly man says to a young, idealistic woman who’s trying to get his treacherous son released from prison early: “If I love Cecil now it is like the way I love the Korean conflict. Something terrible I have lived through.” [Read the full article...]

Locked On – Tom Clancy On Top Of His Game

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:09:06 +0000

Tom Clancy’s All-Star lineup is back. Jack Ryan, his son, Jack Jr., John Clark Ding Chavez and the rest of the Campus team are facing their greatest challenge ever.

Jack Ryan, Sr. has made a momentous choice. He’s running for President of the United States again and thus giving up a peaceful retirement to help his country in its darkest hour. But he doesn’t anticipate the treachery of his opponent, who uses trumped up charges to attack one of Ryan’s closest comrades, John Clark.

Now, Clark is in a race against time and must travel the world, staying one step ahead of his adversaries, including a shadowy organization tasked to bring him in, all while trying to find who is behind this.

Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, Jr., Ding Chavez, Dominick Caruso and other members of the Campus-the top secret off-the-books intelligence agency founded by Jack Ryan during his first term in the White House-deal with a question of their own: Why is a Pakistani military officer meeting with Dagestani terrorists? The answer will ultimately lead to a desperate struggle, with nothing short of the fate of the world at stake.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney

Tom Clancy is the world’s favorite international thriller author. Starting with The Hunt For Red October, all of Mr. Clancy’s books have hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Mr. Clancy lives in Maryland and owns an interest in the Baltimore Orioles.

Mark Greaney is the national bestselling author of The Gray Man series of books, the most recent of which, Ballistic was just released. Mr. Greaney lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Locked On” by Tom Clancy

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 28, 2011 (Excerpt)

“Locked On” comes to us as the latest production out of the Tom Clancy studio of researchers and assistants. He wrote this one with an intelligence studies wonk (or so Mark Greaney’s bio on the book flap would attest) with firearms and combat training from around the world. The novel picks up the Jack Ryan family saga without missing a beat from “Dead or Alive”: Ryan Sr. is trying for a return to the White House while son Jack has become deeply enmeshed in the anti-terror forays of The Campus, the off-the-books covert intelligence unit staffed by alums of various other Clancy novels.

If you recall, Richard Nixon’s memoir was called “Six Crises.” Clancy’s Jack Ryan books might be called The Endless Series of Crises. In this novel there’s a plot by a rogue Pakistani general to destabilize the Pakistani civilian government so he can take control; there’s a plot to destroy Moscow with a nuclear weapon; and there’s a plot by a weakened Democratic president named Kealty to undermine Jack Sr.’s campaign in the last weeks before the election.

There’s even a romance plotline that portrays Jack Ryan Jr. becoming putty in the hands of a beautiful CIA operative from Texas who has ulterior motives when it comes to young Jack, an aspiring black ops expert. [Read the full article...]

1222: An Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen Mystery Novel by Anne Holt

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:23:41 +0000

From Norway’s bestselling female crime writer comes a suspenseful locked-room mystery set in an isolated hotel in Norway, where guests stranded during a monumental snowstorm start turning up dead.

A TRAIN ON ITS WAY to the northern reaches of Norway derails during a massive blizzard, 1,222 meters above sea level. The passengers abandon the train for a nearby hotel, centuries-old and practically empty, except for the staff. With plenty of food and shelter from the storm, the passengers think they are safe, until one of them is found dead the next morning.

With no sign of rescue, and the storm continuing to rage, retired police inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen is asked to investigate. Paralysed by a bullet lodged in her spine, Hanne has no desire to get involved. But she is slowly coaxed back into her old habits as her curiosity and natural talent for observation force her to take an interest in the passengers and their secrets. When another body turns up, Hanne realizes that time is running out, and she must act fast before panic takes over. Complicating things is the presence of a mysterious guest, who had travelled in a private rail car at the end of the train and was evacuated first to the top floor of the hotel. No one knows who the guest is, or why armed guards are needed, but it is making everyone uneasy. Hanne has her suspicions, but she keeps them to herself.

Trapped in her wheelchair, trapped by the storm, and now trapped with a killer, Hanne must fit the pieces of the puzzle together before the killer strikes again.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Anne Holt

Anne Holt has worked as a journalist and news anchor, and spent two years working for the Oslo Police Department before founding her own law firm and serving as Norway’s Minister for Justice in 1996-97. Her first book was published in 1993 and she has been translated into 25 languages. She lives in Oslo with her family.

Editorial Review

A train accident strands retired Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen in the middle of a fierce snowstorm with 268 other passengers, one of whom begins to murder the others in this brainy page-turner.

When ice on the tracks derails a Norwegian passenger train outside a tunnel, Wilhelmsen, not exactly a Pollyanna type ever since she was left paralyzed by a gunshot to her spine four years ago, considers herself lucky to be carried off to Finse 1222, an ancient, practically deserted hotel nearby. Other rescued passengers are less sanguine. Adrian, an accomplished thief at 15, whines constantly; sketchy financier Steinar Aass offers a local mountain man a fortune to snowmobile him back to civilization; and investigative writer Kari Thue nearly succeeds in mounting a full-scale insurrection against the authority figures who’ve taken control of the situation. After all, there was certainly an extra carriage added to the train, and the rumors that the royal family was aboard are only fueled by the news that a section of the hotel has been cordoned off, reserved for a group of passengers no one can identify. Even the passengers who aren’t especially impatient to get on with their lives, however, would certainly change their minds if they knew that Cato Hammer, an Oslo priest with a fondness for soccer, has been found shot to death—and that soon after Roar Hanson, another priest, tells Hanna that he knows who killed his old schoolmate, he follows him into the great beyond.

Holt (What Is Mine, 2006, etc.) makes curmudgeonly Hanna the perfectly astringent guide to this nightmare whodunit out of Ellery Queen’s The Siamese Twin Mystery and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. – Kirkus Reviews

Anne Holt’s ‘1222’: Snowbound thriller has a wealth of personality

The Washington Post Book Review – December 30, 2011 (Excerpt)

The enigmatic title of Anne Holt’s “1222” refers to Finse, a railway station and old-fashioned hotel far up in northern Norway, 1,222 meters above sea level. Several years ago Hanne Wilhelmsen, a retired policewoman, was shot in a gunfight that left her crippled. As the novel opens, she finds herself in a train accident near Finse during one of the worst blizzards and bitterest cold spells she has ever experienced.

Villagers appear to rescue the 269 passengers and get them to shelter. Oddly, in such an obscure place, the hotel kitchen is supplied with enough food for the chef to serve up gourmet meals for the several days they’ll be snowbound. There aren’t enough rooms and people have to double up, but the passengers are safe in the otherwise empty hotel. (The setting brings to mind Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”) The only thing out of the ordinary is the extra carriage on the train, rumored to have been carrying members of the royal family, though why anyone from that clan would want to take a trip to Bergen during the coldest spell in decades remains a mystery. There were plenty of clergymen on the train on their way to a conference, and they offerChristian platitudes and schedule a prayer meeting in the hotel lobby, but somebody puts a stop to that by murdering a particularly obnoxious priest and, within a few hours, doing away with another. Wearily, Hanne is dragged into the inquiry. [Read the full article...]