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    Just finished:

    William Boyle “Shoot Out The Moonlight”. Named after a Garland Jeffreys song, it’s another of his South Brooklyn* set small time criminals sagas in which the seeds ofnruined lives are sewn early. I like his stuff though I think he’s still yet to find his groove. That’s four Ive read now and I’ll keep checking the library shelves for more.
    *Ursus off again on his Brooklyn geography analysis trip again?

    George Pelecanos “The Man Who Came Uptown”. As usual GP sets his tale in Washington DC. Wrongly(or was he?) convicted man with a prison developed reading habit is released early and determined to go straight. Not GPsfinest work but decent enough, if the characters never reappear I wouldn’t be too bothered.

    Walter Mosley “Blood Grove”. Eighteenth! in the Easy Rawlins series (I’ve missed more than a few). Dunno what happened when I wasn’t looking but it’s now 1968 and Easy is living in a very posh part of LA, owns a PI agency and drives a yellow Rolls Royce he received in part payment for a case. A black PI driving a yellow Rolls Royce in 60s America isn’t gonna do much successful tailing or staking out even I can figure that out. A PTSD suffering white viet vet needs Easys help to find out if he really did kill a black man or just imagined it…….and that’s just for openers. Mouse is still around. It’s good but not great. I read Easys debut “Devil In A Blue Dress” the week it was released in the U.K. and still think it’s the best of the series though I’ve missed a few by the looks of it.


    Ive got the third of William McIlvaneys Laidlaw series to start tonight. I think that’ll be the lot reread since I heard Rankin was finishing off a part written fourth last year.

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      Originally posted by Sunderporinostesta View Post
      They’re forty! Aaaargh I’m getting old. Duffy s the PI with the limp after the shooting isn’t he? On/off girlfriends a WPC I think. Must be twenty years since I read one. I was always surprised they never became a TV series though there probably wasn’t enough of them.
      That's the one (though not the limp, that's JK Rowling's guy, no?) They do seem like excellent TV fodder. There's four books so four season's-worth at least. More if Barnes was willing to licence the character.

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        Rowling's character has an artificial leg

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          Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post

          That's the one (though not the limp, that's JK Rowling's guy, no?) They do seem like excellent TV fodder. There's four books so four season's-worth at least. More if Barnes was willing to licence the character.
          The one I’m thinking of isn’t Rowlings feller, he was injured in the military. The one I’m thinking of is a cockney PI ex Met with a limp from either a gunshot or explosion. An 80s book series that wasn’t filmed. It’s gonna drive me nuts this.

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            The Jimmy Jenner series by John Milne. Five books. Jenner lost his leg on Met Police duty in a terrorist bombing incident. Rowlings taking the piss isn’t she? I’m sure I mentioned these books to MrsSundep when Rowlings bloke first appeared on tv. My memories going. I’ll be posting on here with no trousers on soon.

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              So much enjoying this.

              https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Nov...t%2C695&sr=1-1

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                Thanks for the recommendation

                99p, so I couldn't say no

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                  Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View Post
                  Thanks for the recommendation

                  99p, so I couldn't say no
                  No problem. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Maybe the fun element dissipated the longer the novel went on but it still a story that subverted a lot of the tropes I have experienced with crime fiction.

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                    Colton Whitehead-Harlem Shuffle or Joe Ide-The Goodbye Coast up next. I think I’ll plump for Ides updating of the Phillip Marlowe cash cow.

                    Read TGC while suffering Covid. Thought it rubbish and disconnected in parts with characters seemingly doing things on a whim. On telling MrsSundeps mate this she advised reading it again as she’s now had Covid three times and every book she’s read during self isolating has seemed that way to her but on rereading was better.
                    HS was similar and in fact I didn’t finish it.
                    I’ll give em both another go.
                    Last edited by Sunderporinostesta; 24-12-2022, 21:32.

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                      Harlem Shuffle's very readable, but not particularly memorable I found.

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                        I've been listening to the audible version of Heat 2. Does that count as crime fiction?

                        https://www.amazon.com/Heat-2-Novel-.../dp/0062653318

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                          Holiday reads included Jonathan Ames A Man Called Happy (LA-based PI with small dog stumbles into trafficking ring- it was quite entertaining but since he wrote You Were Never Really There I wasn't expecting so much wit and whimsy)
                          and Tana French The Likeness. Just what I needed being kept awake by stinking cold and fever, followed by lengthy journey, so I devoured its 555 pages in 2 days. The Dublin Murders series, quite well adapted for TV a couple of years ago and, like the first volume, credibility stretching but compelling- this one has a great set up: female cop, former undercover, sent to murder scene where 'she' ( her alias, and her double...?!) has been found dead.

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                            Just finished Donato Carrisi's The Lost Girls of Rome. Really enjoyed it. Probably has enough pseudo history to keep your average Dan Brown fan happy, and suspect the translation lets it down at times - or maybe some of the dialogue and characterisation is as bad in the original Italian - but cracking plot, and it moves along at just the right pace for me. Also, I like a mystery where the writer explains everything at the end, but without spelling it out too much, and this book did.

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                              It is the first volume of a trilogy and has a completely different name in Italian

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                                Is it? No mention of that on the copy I read. I'll have to look out for the rest of the trilogy then, thanks!

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                                  Originally posted by Kevin S View Post
                                  I'm most of the way through my third in the 'Jackson Brodie' series by Kate Atkinson. They're as much about relationships, hopes and fears and attitudes as the crimes themselves. And as AdeC said on another thread, Atkinson is extremely witty and pleasant to read. (And I think Big Sky is the next one in the series for me.)

                                  (Edit, no, Big Sky is #5)
                                  Coming late to the party (again),but I've just read the first four Kate Atkinson 'Jackson Brodie' novels. Loved them - she's really good at voicing that internal dialogue, while holding together a whole load of darkly comic tragedies all intertwined. Jackson Brodie reminds me a lot of Arkady Renko - how things tend to happen to him while he's in the wrong place.

                                  I'm keeping 'Big Sky' for later.

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                                    The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer.
                                    Bob mines his autobiography for a debut novel. His lead character is a Leeds born South London solicitor who studied law in Manchester and investigates the murder of a PI acquaintance in a London-Brighton set tale of police corruption. Middlesbrough born Bob who studied law in Manchester and Brighton and practiced it in South London was a work acquaintance of real life murdered PI Daniel Morgan who was thought to have evidence of police corruption. It wouldn’t have been published if he’d been Bob Mortimer plumber and aspirant novelist that’s for sure. Don’t bother.

                                    Desert Star by Michael Connolly.
                                    Standard Harry Bosch novel by one of the masters of the form. Harry’s back helping LAPD as a volunteer in their reformed cold case unit…..you know how it goes.

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                                      Meantime by Frankie Boyle.
                                      Frankies going for a Glasgow Carl Hiassen vibe with corruption, drugs, paranoia and swearing issues substituting for corruption, drugs, sun and ecology issues. It’s far better than I expected once he settles down and stops squeezing one liners or comedy metaphors into every paragraph. Which is about half way through so maybe he’d ran out of them? I’ll be slipping a few of the one liners into conversation when I’m back to work no doubt. Easily the best of the celeb author detective fiction craze.

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                                        Bloody hell, they're all at it, aren't they? I'm glad you're reading them so I don't have to, Sunderporinostesta.

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                                          Originally posted by Jon View Post
                                          Bloody hell, they're all at it, aren't they? I'm glad you're reading them so I don't have to, Sunderporinostesta.
                                          Lockdown projects I believe. All library books. These people have more than enough money already.

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                                            Here's another one that made me grimace while in the bookshop the other day. Murder before Evensong and his forthcoming A Death in the Parish. No prizes for guessing the Rev Richard Coles as the author.

                                            (If he were mining his old career for possible crime fiction angles he could have used Murder before the Smash Hits Photoshoot or a A Death at the Top of the Pops Rehearsal).

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                                              SA Cosby - Razorblade Tears. Two ex cons set out to find the killers of their gay sons. He writes well on their regrets at their treatment of their sons while alive but the rest is standard gunfight and car chase stuff.

                                              David Ross - Dashboard Elvis Is Dead. A Scottish indie bands early 80s first tour of the US comes to a halt during a gig in Phoenix. Years later in the weeks after the independence referendum various witnesses both Scots and American to that gig are in Glasgow. The premise is better than the reality of the tale.

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                                                Originally posted by Jon View Post
                                                Here's another one that made me grimace while in the bookshop the other day. Murder before Evensong and his forthcoming A Death in the Parish. No prizes for guessing the Rev Richard Coles as the author.

                                                (If he were mining his old career for possible crime fiction angles he could have used Murder before the Smash Hits Photoshoot or a A Death at the Top of the Pops Rehearsal).
                                                He’s retired from the clergy racket and moved to the Sussex/Kent coast. Jimmy Somerville and wotserface who sang with them are also down that way…..hmmmm.

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                                                  I'm wondering whether to check out a writer called Rick Shefchik:

                                                  A mystery/thriller set at the Masters Tournament of golf, Amen Corner centers on Minneapolis police detective and amateur golfer Sam Skarda, as he competes in his first Masters and hunts for a crazed killer determined to put an end to the tournament. It is the first in a series about Skarda and his adventures investigating crime in the sports world. The second, Green Monster, has Skarda traveling to the East Coast in response to an anonymous note received by the owner of the Boston Red Sox, claiming the 2004 World Series was fixed. Frozen Tundra concerns Skarda’s attempts to prevent the Green Bay Packers football team from being sold to a private owner, which somebody is murdering various board members to try to bring about. Rather See You Dead is a thriller about the contemporary repercussions of a possible meeting between Elvis Presley and John Lennon in 1960.
                                                  https://profilesinfo.com/rick-shefch...-networth-age/

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                                                    Paul Cane's Fast One is a pretty wild 'Golden Age' (1933) noir. It begins in chaos, umpteen characters are introduced at once, and it's written like the author ingested most of the cocaine that serves as the story's McGuffin. It ends suddenly with a surprise that Hollywood at the time would never have dared. In between you can just about catch your breath, but not for long. It's a great ride.

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