Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“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 [...]

“So, you’ve been looking for an early 19th-century novel about metempsychosis? Look no further. Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is back in print. What? You are not an ardent follower of tales of the metempsychotic? Let me explain. Metempsychosis is the transference of the soul or spirit from one body to another [...]

“Susan Choi looks for essential American characters in the most peculiar places. Five years ago, she wrote a novel about Patty Hearst called American Woman that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and now she’s back with A Person of Interest, a piercing story about the Unabomber that’s one of the most remarkable novels [...]