2009 books, #44-54

Long time, no blog. Hoping to catch up a bit this evening, so here's a book review post which has been hanging around forever...

A lot of Michael Connolly in this bunch: I think I've read more or less everything he's written now though...

Thank you for the days : a boy's own adventures in radio and beyond, by Mark Radcliffe. London: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

I loved this book. I'm a fan of Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie on their Radio 2 show, but I don't think you'd need to be to enjoy this (or any of Maconie's wonderful books). You'd just need to have been at all interested in popular culture, and particularly popular music, over the last 30-40 years or so - and I suspect being British is probably an essential, too... It's a cross between an autobiography and a series of short stories, all called "The Day I..." and ranging from the rather beautiful ("The Day I Heard That John Peel Had Died") to the slightly surreal ("The Day I Went to Kate Bush's House for Cheese Flan") to the ridiculously funny ("The Day I Took Bros into a Goods Yard"). And "The Day I Saved Neil Hannon's Bacon" probably has the best (4-page) description of the atmosphere at the Cambridge Folk Festival I've ever read. As the review from David Bowie on the front page says, "Steal this book!" Although obviously I didn't as I got it from the library and that would be Very Wrong. I did go out and buy a copy for a friend's birthday as soon as I finished it though...


The brass verdict, by Michael Connelly. London: Orion, 2008.

Another good one from Michael Connelly; this time a legal thriller with Lincoln lawyer character Micky Haller. But we get cameos from Harry Bosch and Jack McEvoy, too - I do like it when an suggesting Connelly is Balzac or anything, but it's fun. Greg Iles does something similar. This one author creates a whole universe and we get to see people from different angles. Not that I'm keeps you going all the way to the end, with a couple of very late twists and turns. If Connelly ever decided to concentrate on courtroom drama, he'd beat Grisham into submission in no time...

Fearless fourteen, by Janet Evanovich. London: Headline Review, 2009. Plum lucky, by Janet Evanovich. London: Penguin, 2009.

I love these books; they're funny, the plot races through, the cast of (mostly) insane characters are wonderful (Grandma Mazur is a particular favourite); they're sexy, rude, surreal, and a fabulous quick read. If anything can go wrong when Stephanie's involved, it will go wrong; this one involves home-made potato rocket-launchers (operated by Homegrown Security), a kid who spraypaints anything available, including dogs and a 61-year-old country-rock star called Brenda (who should never, ever, ever be brought into contact with Franklin's Dolores - actually, you could say the same for Grandma; and Lula, come to think of it; there's enough destruction and mayhem already). You couldn't make these novels into films with actual actors; but they'd make absolutely wonderful stylised animations...


The scarecrow, by Michael Connelly. London: Orion, 2009.

Another classic from Michael Connelly; another one with Jack McEvoy. Tightly plotted, very scary, and even though it's one where you know who the killer is from fairly early on but the detectives and journalists don't, it's still gripping. Again, we get characters from other strands of Connelly's writing, in this case Rachel Walling and Keisha Russell... Weirdly, I went over to Connelly's website to check Keisha's surname, and there's a short quiz on the book; given the speed I read it at (someone else is waiting for it so I couldn't renew it), I was gratified to get 10 out of 12...


Justice, by Faye Kellerman. London: Headline, 1995. Prayers for the dead, by Faye Kellerman. London: Headline, 1996.

More Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus books - I've raved about these elsewhere. The plot in Justice is pretty shaky, to be honest, and doesn't really fit with what we know about Decker's integrity, but because you're involved with the characters it's still very readable... Prayers for the dead works much better and is very moving in the end.



Far cry, by John Harvey. London: Heinemann, 2009.

I still haven't forgiven John Harvey for what he did in the recent Resnick book Cold in hand; but this one is really very good - read it more or less in one session. Lots of twists and turns and some genuinely interesting characters...

The overlook, by Michael Connelly. London: Orion, 2007.

A curiously short Harry Bosch book but none the worse for that - a highly entertaining couple of hours' reading and well up to Connelly's usual high standards. Bosch doing what he's best at - solving crime while remaining completely irritated by The Powers That Be...

Crime beat : true stories of cops and killers, by Michael Connelly. London: Orion, 2006.

Something slightly different; a compilation of Connelly's journalism from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s (for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the LA Times). Rather than being a ragbag of different pieces, or just a chronological compilation, Connelly has divided it into different sections - The Cops, The Killers and The Cases. It's easy to see why Connelly won awards for some of these pieces, and fascinating to read them.

Iron council, by China Miéville. London: Pan, 2005.

This has taken much longer than anything else I've read this year, because it's both rich and strange - rich in terms of the amazing language and descriptions, and strange in its ideas - Remade people made up of pieces of other creature, or mechanical items; a train which is also a city, steaming into forbidden territory with its citizens pulling up the rails after it in order to lay them down before it; unlikely love stories; a maker of golems. After reading The city and the city in July, I wanted to try again with some of Miéville's trademark weird fiction (and a friend suggested this one was accessible) - it was a fantastic read and fully deserved its Arthur C. Clarke award. I'll have a bit of a pause while I try and read some of the many other books which have built up in the meantime, and then try again with Perdido Street Station, the first book set in this universe.