Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“Years before its publication, Alan Moore described “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier” as “not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin … and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It’s quite good.” The third [...]

“Mask Market’ is the (Andrew) Vachss’ 16th book starring Burke, “a two-time felony loser” and abuse survivor who works this other side of the city for those that need to rent his code of ethics, allowing themselves the illusion of not soiling themselves. The novel opens with Burke having recently recovered from being shot in [...]

“In the absence of something genuinely profound,’ says a character in “The Art Thief,” “always say something quotable.” There’s a whole lot of quoting going on in Noah Charney’s debut novel, a pleasant if diluted stew of police procedural, art history and mystery writing.’ Read the review at the Charleston Post and Courier.

“Here’s a very human story with the plot nearly buried among the twists and turns of the characters’ lives. A heavy hitter from the Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrives in a seaside village armed with new evidence she thinks will finally nail a slippery crook. Entwined are subplots about child abuse, pregnancy, career sacrifice, unrequited [...]

“Zugzwang, Ronan Bennett informs us in the beginning, is a German term that in chess is used to describe a position in which a player “is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse.” Something similar can be said of the state Otto Spethmann finds himself in. A psychoanalyst, Spethmann is [...]

“After the enormous commercial success of Kate Mosse’s “Grail gripper”, Labyrinth, no doubt many readers are eagerly awaiting the pleasures of her next book. When building a brand (and that will certainly be how her publishers now think of Mosse), it’s vital not to veer wildly away from the qualities that have already proven popular [...]

“Activist and cemetery caretaker Oliver Stone has removed his tent across from the White House - at the insistence of the Secret Service. However, his sign of protest proclaiming “I want the truth” remains. He still has a bone to pick with the United States government, a huge one. And it has a lot to [...]

“The title of this book, “City of Fire,” promises a great deal of suspense, tension and do-or-die action especially when factoring in the story setting of Los Angeles, a loony-tunes city full of bizarre and exotic plot possibilities. Unfortunately, despite being competently written by Robert Ellis, the murder mystery does not deliver. Making the situation [...]

“As ever more implausibly ghoulish serial killers flay, chainsaw, and cannibalize their way through contemporary crime lit, the creepiest villain to amble along in recent months is a drab middle-aged nurse named Solana Rojas. The wily evildoer in “T Is for Trespass,” Sue Grafton’s 20th Kinsey Millhone mystery, Solana is loathsome precisely because she’s not [...]

“There’s something oddly unsatisfying about tales of Australian spies. Perhaps I’m just guilty of some kind of cultural cringe, but any espionage that requires a meeting in a coffee shop in Canberra’s “Civic centre” lacks a necessary frisson of interest. Trenchcoats by Lake Burley Griffin suggest porn-trading politicians rather than Cold War capers to me. [...]

“Because he’s a damn good writer James Lee Burke knows how to keep a plot going from start to finish with no loose ends or out-of-the-blue surprises that amateurishly attempt to explain and finish off a narrative. He easily weaves several ancillary situations into the story line of “The Tin Roof Blowdown.” These are of [...]

“Geoffrey Household’s spy classic, “Rogue Male,” was published in 1939 by Little, Brown. A new copy sold for $2. The New York Times book critic wrote: “We haven’t read as exciting a man-hunt as this one in years. There are scenes here - mostly underground, literally as well as figuratively - you won’t soon forget.” [...]

“John le Carré’s latest spy story, “The Mission Song,” revisits the capitalist exploitation of Africa he probed in “The Constant Gardener.” Rather than starting with a character of rectitude, le Carré focuses on Bruno Salvador, a 29-year-old interpreter of African languages who, as he puts it, “is not hired to indulge his scruples.’ Read the [...]

“In ‘The Draining Lake,’ the new and most accomplished (Inspector) Erlendur novel, his private life seems on the brink of an upbeat nudge. Valgerdur, a good-looking biotechnician he met on an earlier case, is interested in pursuing a relationship with Erlendur. Naturally there are obstacles to the romance. Erlendur can’t imagine what she sees in [...]

“Tiny in person, Manda Scott deserves some sort of authorial heavyweight-championship belt. Scarcely a year after the final volume of her massive Boudica quartet of historical novels, she bounces back into the ring with her challenge for the Cryptic Treasure Cup of 2008. Will she successfully slug it out with the numerous contenders who have [...]

“There’s been a symbiotic relationship between Scandinavian and British crime fiction for almost 50 years. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s 1960s/70s crime series featuring the introspective, troubled Inspector Martin Beck inspired a generation of British crime-writers who then gave it right back. Beck partly begat John Harvey’s Resnick, who helped beget Mankell’s Wallender. Swedish author [...]

“Malorie Blackman’s groundbreaking Noughts & Crosses trilogy cleverly used the sci-fi-style premise of a parallel world to shine a light on society’s inherent racial problems. Apart from editorial duties on an anthology to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade, The Stuff of Nightmares is her first major work since then and much more of [...]

“Hanna Heath, the star of Geraldine Brooks’s “People of the Book,” is a hardboiled Aussie. She drinks beer “straight from the tinnie,” calls her colleagues “matey,” and views children as “a midlife luxury.” The daughter of a father she’s never known and an absentee mother who’s a neurosurgeon, Hanna is the kind of woman commonly [...]

“David Wellington, with his novel “13 Bullets” and his latest, “99 Coffins,” the first two parts of a planned trilogy, is moving the literature of the undead into the 21st century with new levels of brutality. The central character in “99 Coffins,” Laura Caxton, voices Wellington’s clear contempt for the sympathy-for-the-demon-style of author, pioneered by [...]

“On the face of things, the fictional memoir “An Ordinary Spy” is, as its title implies, a rather ordinary story, about a young man who tries to surmount adversity in a difficult profession, about which the author, a former CIA operative, actually knows something. But then in the world of espionage, nothing is as ordinary [...]

“Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz survived the Nazi death camps only to languish for four decades under communist rule . . . Kertesz’s autobiographical novel Fateless closed with its narrator proclaiming the “happiness” of the concentration camps and opposing efforts to sentimentalise his experiences. His tight-knit mystery Liquidation finds a survivor’s marriage dissolving upon his [...]

“Money can’t buy love, but it can buy everything else, including a victory at the polls. That’s the compelling, if hardly unique, backdrop for The Appeal, John Grisham’s rant-against-dirty-politics legal thriller, on sale Tuesday.Grisham’s last legal thriller, The Last Juror, arrived in 2004, and since then he has published two other novels and the non-fiction [...]

“Morley Swingle makes a living as chief prosecutor in Missouri’s Cape Girardeau County. As a sideline, he writes books. “Bootheel Man” is his third book and second novel, and it proves that some lawyers can actually write entertainingly. At the center of “Bootheel Man” is a Cape Girardeau woman, lawyer Allison Culbertson. She’s 27, attractive [...]

“Like most exhilarating works of copious bloodshed, Toby Barlow’s debut novel, Sharp Teeth, begins on a quiet note: with a solitary, mild-mannered figure named Anthony Silvo, flipping through want ads at his East L.A. breakfast table. After several fruitless phone calls, he happens upon a position with the city’s animal-control department, which triggers the memory [...]

“Best known in America as an acclaimed director, actor, and producer, in Japan Takeshi Kitano’s fame extends beyond well beyond the medium of film. His face is known nationwide as a popular television personality on “Beat Takeshi’s TV Tackle” and the game show “Takeshi’s Castle” . . . A tiny twenty-year old collection of short [...]

“In Ma Jian’s 1985 short story collection “Stick Out Your Tongue,” Tibet emerges instead as place of isolation, desperation, and ignorance. Twelve years later, the stories in this reprinted volume are still not only riveting but relevant, even as Chinese control over Tibet has mostly changed from militarism to vacation colonialism.’ Read the review at [...]

“Comprising seven stories and a novella, “Minimal Damage” centers on characters that have disappeared (or will soon disappear) into the cracks . . . Barnes already proved himself as one of today’s best, and unjustly obscure, literary war writers. His 2000 debut collection, “Gunning for Ho,” pulled no punches in depicting the abject horror and [...]

“We may know him best as a novelist, the author of the prize-winning “Independence Day” (1995), and, more recently, “The Lay of the Land” (2006), but Richard Ford is a champion of the short story. A fine story writer himself, Ford has also done his best to encourage us to read more of the genre [...]

“Big names stud the list of contributors to this bold, inviting collection, and readers are bound to see these pages as a guide to the health of contemporary fiction. Zadie Smith explains in her introduction that each contributor was told to “make someone up,” and name the resulting story after that protagonist. Profits will go [...]

“The stories in “The Jew of Home Depot” begin in lightness and even, at times, guarded optimism, but by book’s end, they resolve in muted tragedy. In the last, title story, a Jewish family from Brooklyn relocates to Marshall, Texas, in order to help a wealthy businessman realize his dying wish, to spend his final [...]

“Flying to America’ caps a project by author and bookseller Kim Herzinger to bring Barthelme’s entire opus into print . . . “Flying to America” offers 15 previously uncollected stories, including three never before published, as well as 30 stories left out of Barthelme’s two self-selected anthologies, 60 Stories (1981) and 40 Stories (1987), where [...]

In January 2005, Nadine Gordimer composed obituaries for two friends, Anthony Sampson and Susan Sontag, who died within ten days of each other. Her writing was uncharacteristically stiff, almost numb, as if she’d been forced to comment before she was ready. In “Dreaming of the Dead,” one of the finest stories in her new collection, [...]

“The title of Irvine Welsh’s latest short story collection, ‘If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work,’ suggests something about the tone of the pieces and the characters we’re about to meet. It might suggest that Welsh’s heroes will be tragically distant hipsters, or that the world they inhabit is hopeless (but isn’t it a laugh!). [...]

“This anthology of short fiction is a wonderfully varied exercise in creativity. Without doubt, love looks different in the 21st century: harder, more disposable, subject to the whims of the mobile phone and internet technology, which is ironically frequently referred to here. Love at its most sublime is expressed in short spurts, or through a [...]