Genre: Crime

Dexter’s Final Cut by Jeff Lindsay

Posted September 18, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: Dexter's Final Cut (Goodreads)
Author: Jeff Lindsay
Series: Dexter #7
Published: Orion, 2013
Pages: 384
Genres: Crime
My Copy: ARC from Edelweiss

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Hollywood has made a deal with the Miami Police Department to help them research a new TV show. Star Robert Chase has been shadowing Dexter Morgan to learn how to be a forensic analyst. This will put a dampener on Dexter’s nighttime activities. Camera shy and hunting down one of the worst killers who escape the justice system, and now a movie star watching his every move, how will he manage?

I’ve been a big fan of the Dexter series; both the TV shows and the books. I want to say they are like a guilty read but I don’t feel guilty at all. Darkly Dreamy Dexter was one of the first books I read when I first became a reader and one of the few series that I’ve read in its entirety. I do enjoy crime novels and love the way Jeff Lindsay gets into the mind of this sociopath.

Dexter is back in the seventh book in the series and while I love the series, the books have been rocky, some are really enjoyable and some just fell a little short. Dexter’s Final Cut was luckily one of the stronger books in the series. I really liked the way this book focused less on the hunting and killing but more on Dexter as a character.

If you’ve read any of the Dexter series or watched the show you will know that Dexter struggles to pretend to be human and at times he gets really good at it. In Dexter’s Final Cut they spotlight is on Dexter in a big way and the struggle becomes the most important part of the novel. His social interactions, his marriage and his work have all been watched carefully by star Robert Chase and possibly the paparazzi.

I like this new direction, it works really well for this type of novel but if I judge by the title of this book, it might be the last one in the series (I hope not). I love the internal monologue of this series and how light and entertaining they are, if this is the last in the series I will need something to replace it so I am open to suggestions. Dexter Morgan is a well-developed character and the series has always been witty and entertaining but this would have to be one of my favourites in the series so far.

The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard

Posted September 12, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: The Hot Kid (Goodreads)
Author: Elmore Leonard
Series: Carl Webster #1
Published: Harper Collins, 2005
Pages: 320
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

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Carl Webster was fifteen when he witnessed his first murder. Now he is the hot kid in the Marshall services; polite, respectful and can shoot a man driving away from 400 yards. He is on his way to being the most famous lawman of the 1930s. Jack Belmont wants to rob banks, become the most notorious outlaw and show his millionaire father he can live his own life. In the time of the Volstead Act comes The Hot Kid, a fast paced crime novel from a master of his craft; Elmore Leonard.

I love the Volstead Act; without it there may never have been organised crime in America and that makes for some interesting reading. Of course, love is the wrong word to describe the Volstead Act but I do have a huge interest in the era. For those who don’t know about the Volstead Act, it was the National Prohibition Act that became the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition in the United States in 1919. This led to a surge in bootlegging and organised crime and made for some great stories for me to enjoy, from Boardwalk Empire (wonder if there are books that are like this show) to The Hot Kid.

I was saddened to hear about the recent loss of Elmore Leonard; though I hadn’t read anything by this crime master it really affected me. The very next day I reserved The Hot Kid from the library. I didn’t know where to start with this legend; he has written so many novels and they all looked good but a book set in the 1930s was right up my alley. Researching Elmore Leonard I realised that he was more successful that I thought. If you measure a writer’s success in adaptations (which I really don’t want to do) then you can’t go past some of his best adaptions like Jackie Brown, 3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Killshot, Out of Sight and the TV show Justified.

The Hot Kid was a fast paced crime novel that I ended up reading in two sittings which is a big surprise because I feel like I’m a slow reader. I really enjoyed the way Leonard writes; it was so well plotted that he makes writing look so easy which I’m sure is very difficult to do. He is a prolific author with novels set in western times all the way up to the modern era. But I enjoy a time when organised crime reigns and tend to enjoy crime novels set there.

The only major issue I had with this book was that it never really felt like it was set in the time of speakeasies, tommy guns and organised crime. Every now and then I get a reference to the Volstead or a Thompson that pulls me back into the correct era. For the majority of the book I felt like Carl Webster was far too similar to Raylan Givens (from the TV show Justified) and that threw me off a little but didn’t really effect the overall enjoyment of the book.

Maybe this wasn’t the best place to start when exploring Elmore Leonard’s craft but I have no regrets. I will read the next book in the Carl Webster series but I think I might like to try something else by this crime master first. The problem I often face is the fact that I want to continue with an author but have so many other books I want to read and more often than not I never return to a writer I enjoy. But I’ve only been reading for a short time and I’m sure Elmore Leonard and the Carl Webster series will be read sometime in the near future.

Joyland by Stephen King

Posted July 22, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: Joyland (Goodreads)
Author: Stephen King
Series: Hard Case Crime #112
Published: Hard Case Crime, 2013
Pages: 283
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Hardcover

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Devin Jones has gotten a job working as a ‘carnie’ in a small North Carolinian town. The amusement park Joyland was a site of the legendary unsolved murder. The house of Horrors was where this murder took place, half way through the ride a man cut the throat of his date and threw the body out of the carriage. It wasn’t until the end of the night that they found the dead body (most people thought it was part of the house of horrors) but by then the man was long gone.

Stephen King is best known for his fantastical and horror elements but since this was a Hard-Case Crime novel, I expected more of a pulp novel rather than what I got. There was that pulp and gritty whodunit element but true to King style there was some supernatural components within the novel as well which for me seemed unnecessary; I felt like King sets up the novel in his normal horror fashion and then completely forgets about it. It wasn’t till right near the end that he returned to this plot arc, almost like he needed to wrap everything up in a nice neat bow so he had to finish off that arc as quickly as possible. Without these supernatural elements the novel would remain just the same and maybe even more realistic. There is the fortune teller who gets more air time but then that could be just a character that is really good at reading people and wouldn’t need to be explained.

Both the whodunit and horror genre styles don’t really fit this book anyway; this is a coming of age novel, dealing with Devin’s first real job, his first heart break, first sexual experience, as well as friendship and loss. The story feels like a noir or pulp novel by the way it is written but that all takes a backseat to the building of characters. Not that there is anything wrong with that but in pulp novels it’s all about the minimalism and jamming the novel with a fast paced plot. Joyland didn’t do this and I struggle to find a reason why this book was added to the Hard-Case Crime series.

So once I got past my initial expectations, Joyland does turn out to be a fairly enjoyable novel. It’s not what I wanted but it was still good. I’ve not read much of King in the past (The Gunslinger and 11/22/63) and both those novels really were not what I would have expected from a Stephen King novel. I must remember to read some of his classic novels like The Shining, The Stand or It just to see if what I expect from this author is different. I never expected so much character development and I never expected his books to focus more on the relationship with other characters, but it seems I might be misinformed about his works.

Joyland mainly focuses on Devin’s heartbreak, the girl he thought was the one and everything was perfect. You know your typical young adult, love struck thinking that never seems to be correct. This heartbreak really affects Devin, as all first heartbreaks do, but then he meets single mum Annie and her son Mike. Mike is such a great character and probably the only one I actually liked within the book and the relationship between the three blossoms in a somewhat awkward way. I felt like King had a good handle on the difficult relationship but some of the directions he took left me perplexed. This plot arc took up about two hundred pages and that only left 80 pages to really return to the mystery of Joyland.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I feel this book wasn’t marketed properly, this is not a noir style mystery and I don’t think it deserved to be put in the Hard-Case Crime series. As a standalone Stephen King novel I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it wasn’t marketed the way it was. Interestingly King didn’t release this book in eBook format, he wanted everyone to go into their local bookstore and buy the book. Yet he didn’t restrict the sales of the book on those online bookselling websites; so really his attempt to get people into bookstores failed. Don’t go into this novel expecting pulp, this is a coming of age story, with a dash of attempt at the pulp genre.

Fetish by Tara Moss

Posted July 18, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime, Thriller / 0 Comments

Title: Fetish (Goodreads)
Author: Tara Moss
Series: Makedde Vanderwall #1
Published: Harper Collins, 1999
Pages: 325
Genres: Crime, Thriller
My Copy: Library Book

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Makedde Vanderwall is a Canadian model on assignment in Australia. The advantage with some work down under is the fact that she will get to see her good friend Cassandra again. But when Cassandra is found dead by Mak she finds herself in a cat and mouse game to catch the killer before he gets her. Who can she trust and where can she turn when she’s a stranger in a land without any friends?

Makadde is a beautiful, tall and curvy international model who is studying psychology; she’s basically Tara Moss. Model turned author Tara Moss gets to live out all the thrilling adventures she wants through Makedde, not that I can say this is semi-autobiographical but I’m sure Moss wishes it was to some extent. These similarities really give this novel an authentic voice, about modelling as well as the creepy stalker (in which I suspect Moss has had) that ends up being the serial killer known as the Stiletto killer.

Not that I have anything against this book, in fact it is off to a good start for a thriller series, I just never really get into this bestseller formula. All those bestselling crime thriller writers enjoy great success with their books but I tend to think they all feel the too similar. I’m glad Tara Moss broke into the market with such success. It opened up to more in this series and then eventually trying something a little different with her Pandora English series.

Makadde is a tough intelligent woman in the wrong place at the wrong time but I would have liked to see her be more of a bad ass and really kick butt. There are times where this side of her comes out but for the rest of the time everything feels very convenient. Moss has a lot of great ideas for Mak and I did think maybe too many of them were pushed into this novel. It’s a case of first novel, too many ideas. I’m not sure what to expect from the rest of the series but I suspect now she has dealt with a similar situation she can now kick ass and take names. I hope to see her become more of a Phillip Marlowe type character, but with a model turned PI it may be wishful thinking and too much to expect.

There are six books in the series but I have to wait till book four for Mak to become forensic psychologist and PI, so I’m not sure if I want to wait that long. Fetish was an entertaining read and maybe the series is just off to a slow start. Part of me wants to continue and watch Moss grow as a crime writer but part of me thinks there are too many books in the world to read already. I feel conflicted and I’m not sure what to do, I think I will keep Split close by for when I need something light and entertaining. When I say Fetish was just a light read, this doesn’t mean it’s predictable; I found myself surprised with some of the twists this book takes and I never did work out who the killer was till Moss was ready to reveal it.

There are good and bad parts of this book, I was not fully satisfied with the novel but as this is the first novel, I’m willing to forgive far more. I will let you know how I go if I ever pick up Split but for now I would like people to tell me what they thought of Fetish, Makedde Vanderwall and the rest of the series. I need to know if I should continue and what people think of the novels. Tara Moss’s influences include Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell and I can see these influences coming through. I would like to see more of Thomas Harris in her books; I like the dark and psychological elements of the Hannibal series.

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Posted June 15, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 15 Comments

Title: Winter's Bone (Goodreads)
Author: Daniel Woodrell
Published: Back Bay Books, 2006
Pages: 193
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

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Ree Dolly’s father has just skipped bail for Crystal meth charges. They will lose their house if he doesn’t show for his next court date. With two little brothers depending on her, Ree knows she must find and bring back her father dead or alive. But life in the Ozarks is harsh and she learns quickly that asking questions could be fatal.

I really wanted to read something dark and gritty like The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock and I was recommended Winter’s Bone. Daniel Woodrell describes this style as country noir and that was enough to sell me on the book, I knew nothing about the novel except there was an adaptation recently starring Jennifer Lawrence but I’ve still not seen it. The novel takes place just outside a fictional town in Missouri Ozarks where the Dolly’s have been known to be involved in the manufacturing of methamphetamine. This bleak landscape full of terrifying people makes for a dark southern novel that should satisfy most noir fans.

The plot is pretty straight forward but the continual helplessness of 16 year old Ree Dolly’s situation is what makes this book deliciously bleak. As many noir fans know, the dark and unforgiving landscape mixed with the bleakness of the plot can only strengthen a novel like this. For such a simple story line, I was presently surprised just how well Daniel Woodrell executed this novel; blurring the lines of morality and motivating the protagonist to protect her two unruly brothers and her catatonic mother from the bail bondsman and the sins of her father.

The rest of the world seems to have a negative opinion of Ree and her family, some often hostile and violent. While I understand why people hate the Dolly’s because of the meth they are selling to their community, I found it interesting to experience this from Ree’s perspective. I use to live across the road from a meth lab and while I didn’t know about it, the reactions of the people when they hear this story is really interesting, my experience was the increase in police patrols seemed to be a positive. So while we don’t know just how innocent Ree is and how involved she was in her father’s entrepreneurial ventures, I was more interested in the stigma that came with her name.

I’m not sure if we can call Ree the hero of this novel, most of the time she is just walking around and getting assaulted but she isn’t a villain or anti-hero either. So I have to wonder what role does she play in this novel. She was strong, stubborn and takes a lot of physical punishment without complaining, so this is more of a survival story.

I’m sure this book might be considered as controversial in the Ozarks; I don’t think Daniel Woodrell is suggesting these people are all like the people in his book but I have to wonder if maybe he was a little too harsh. I accept this harshness as part of the country noir style and not a true representation of the people of Missouri so I hope they do as well.

I was really surprised how well this simple little story worked with all the dark and noirish themes. Granted it wasn’t as dark or as enjoyable as The Devil All the Time but it was still worth reading. If people have recommendations of novels that are like The Devil All the Time I would love to hear them (or I could just reread that novel). I was impressed with Daniel Woodrell and will venture to read some more of his novels. Country Noir is a great style and I am fast becoming a fan of the style.

Crooked Letter Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Posted May 20, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: Crooked Letter Crooked Letter (Goodreads)
Author: Tom Franklin
Published: Pan Macmillan, 2010
Pages: 318
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

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When another girl disappears, suspicion falls on the suspect of a twenty year old missing persons case. Larry has been living a solitary life never being able to escape the whispers of suspicion, now another girl disappears, it is starting all over again. Old boyhood friend Salas is now in law enforcement and this new case forces both men to confront the past that they have buried for so long.

Tom Franklin lived in a small southern town in Alabama, and while struggling to make it as an author he went through multiple manual labour jobs and once worked for the city morgue. In 1997 he got his first break when his short story collection, Poachers was named Best First Book of Fiction by Esquire. Since then he has been having great success with southern crime novels, winning a few awards, including the Edgar Award (for Poachers, a short story found in the book of the same name) and The Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger (awarded for best crime novel of the year) for Crooked Letter Crooked Letter.

This novel has been compared to the works of Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy, so I went in to this novel expecting a good southern crime novel and this is what I got. Except there was a little more in this novel, while you have the elements you expect, I never expected the book to explore the idea of being misunderstood and isolation. From the beginning of the novel Larry is shot and yet he is sympathetic towards his mystery attacker. He even forgave him because “all monsters were misunderstood”.

The idea that Larry thinks of himself as a monster brings up some interesting concepts, which I really want to explore but that would lead to some spoilers. He even owns an old monster mask which is hugely symbolic when it comes to the concept of being a monster living within society. This mask plays a big role throughout the novel and what it represents within each scene it shows up in only served to increase my enjoyment in exploring Crooked Letter Crooked Letter.

The relationship between Larry and Salas is an interesting one; they were childhood friends living in Mississippi in 1970. Larry comes from a working class family while Salas is an African American, I was expecting a lot to do with racism around their friendship, being a southern novel but Franklin went a whole different route. Instead he explored their changing relationship from kids to adults, with the pressure of the world and the suspicion placed on Larry. This was unexpected and it added a really interesting look into the two characters relationship.

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The title of this novel references an old American children’s song used to learn how to spell Mississippi and I’ve never heard of it. Being an Australian, it is odd that we were taught how to spell Mississippi as children as well; we were never expected to spell other American states so it seems weird. Though I was taught differently and I’ve found out my wife learnt it a different way to that too. Not really important to the novel except knowing where the book is set but it a interesting thought to have about the ways we learnt to spell this word.

This is a relatively morbid novel but I honestly was hoping for something as dark as The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock (seriously I need more like this novel) but as far as melancholic books, this one is worth check out. Not only does it have some interesting themes that I think are worth exploring, I found the prose lyrical and in parts stunning. It is not without its flaws and I don’t want to go into those, for fear of spoilers but I still think highly of Crooked Letter Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin; he seems to draw a lot from Cormac McCarthy’s style, so check it out.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Posted April 28, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: The Thirteenth Tale (Goodreads)
Author: Diane Setterfield
Published: Atria Books, 2006
Pages: 406
Genres: Crime, Gothic
My Copy: Personal Copy

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Amateur biographer Margaret Lea finds a mysterious handwritten letter waiting for her one night. The letter is a request from what could be considered Britain’s most prolific novelist Vida Winter. Winter’s wishes to recount her life’s story but has been notorious for her abilities to evade journalists’ questions in the past, making up a different story for every journalist. This project will force both women to confront the mysterious paths that have been haunting them and if we are lucky we might find out the mystery of The Thirteenth Tale.

The Thirteenth Tale is a tapestry of two threads weaved together, Margaret’s story both past and present as well as Winter’s past. A gothic mystery that deals with death, identity, isolation and for me it felt like it was a novel about how evil twins are. I’m not sure if it was the current mood I was in when reading this book but I felt like this book was trying too hard to be something it couldn’t live up to. Two alternating narratives can be a difficult literary technique to get right but I never really felt it worked. Sure, many people loved this book but I wonder if they were too caught up in the narrative to notice the problems.

It is true, the writing in the novel is spectacular and I did find myself being swept away in this gothic narrative but then when I reflect back, I notice all the flaws. The novel sets out to piece together the puzzle of both Margret and Ms Winter but some of the pieces were lost and we are left with all these holes. I’m not satisfied with the amount of questions that were left unanswered, I was just left feeling disappointed and have no desire to try and reread this in the hopes to find what I might have missed.

For a gothic novel, I felt like it moved into the realm of clichés; from the mysterious manor to the mysteries of their pasts, everything felt rather predictable in that aspect. I felt like this book was borrowing rather heavily on some gothic classics, there were elements of Rebecca here and even the Brontës. Now I haven’t read Jane Eyre but with the amount of references made to this book in The Thirteenth Tale, I suspect that this was a major source for Diane Setterfield gothic attempts. I never felt like there was anything new or interesting with the plot of this book.

I wish I knew what make people give this book such a high rating, sure the writing was beautiful but I felt like Diane Setterfield tried to do too much in her first novel and it didn’t quite work. Maybe if you are new to the Gothic genre this might be a decent contemporary novel to give you a taste of what to expect but I feel like this book left me high and dry. I would recommend Sarah Waters over Diane Setterfield but ultimately I would rather some of the gothic classics.

A Treacherous Likeness by Lynn Shepherd

Posted April 24, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime, Historical Fiction / 5 Comments

Title: A Treacherous Likeness (Goodreads)
Author: Lynn Shepherd
Published: Corsair, 2013
Pages: 336
Genres: Crime, Historical Fiction
My Copy: Personal Copy

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

In 1850, a young detective takes on a new case unlike anything seen before; Charles Maddox’s client is the surviving son of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. Maddox has to track down some papers concerning the Shelleys that could be used for blackmail and ruin their literary legacy. This will take him into investigating the dark lives of not just Percy Bysshe Shelley but all the young Romantics and question the cause of death for Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

This was a really difficult book to review but I will try hard to be fair and explore the two contradicting opinions I have about this book. First of all, I read this book with not much knowledge of the Romantics; I knew basics but I hadn’t explored them as much as I would have liked. I’ve been a fan of this literary movement even since the start of my reading life and most of you know that Frankenstein remains my favourite novel of all time. So when I heard about this book, I knew I wanted to read it.

Reading the book, I found it interesting; the writing style really reminded me of the time. Yet at times I felt like the writing was trying to reflect the time and sometimes it just did not feel right. I found myself rereading paragraphs trying to pick up what bothered me about them. I never really found the problem, I do not even think it was the writing that was my problem but more of the tone, but more on that later. When it comes to the mystery, everything felt pretty straightforward, piece by piece slowly revealed until the reader finally knows what was going on.

While I did have some problems with the book, all in all I was enjoying the book and would give it a rating of three stars, maybe three and a half. I didn’t find out much about the protagonist Charles Maddox as I would have liked but this could be because this detective appears in Lynn Shepherd’s other novel Tom-All-Alone. If I had read this book first I might have a different opinion towards Maddox. Which brings me to my problems; A Treacherous Likeness would have been a decent novel if it wasn’t using literary legends. This book made me want to explore more about the Romantic Movement, to its credit, but this was also its downfall.

After finishing this novel, I’ve been dipping in and out of three different books; The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler; Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay; and Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes. All these Non-Fiction books are vastly different but I picked them to get more of an insight on the lives of the Shelleys. Now the Romantics are wonderfully complex people with equally complex relationships and I don’t understand what their lives were like but the creative licence this author took in A Treacherous Likeness to weave this story through only leads me to think one thing. With all I’ve learnt about Percy Bysshe Shelley and the others I’ve come to the conclusion that Lynn Shepherd mustn’t like them at all.

I’ve got more to learn about the lives of the great poets but after reading some of the non-fiction of the time and reflecting back on A Treacherous Likeness I can’t help thinking, while the author has excellent knowledge on these people there has to be hatred towards them as well. In A Treacherous Likeness there are the controversial statements of Mary Shelley not writing Frankenstein, killing her baby and with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s help pushing Harriett to suicide. While they have merit and we can’t be sure if these are true or not they still point towards a dislike of these people, Mary Shelley in particular. This could be the author’s attempt to weave her story through the facts and create this complex mystery; for me, after all the research it just comes across in a negative way.

I have a lot to learn about the Romantic Movement and I have to give A Treacherous Likeness credit for the re-spark in my interest in these people. I am not trying to be negative towards Lynn Shepherd; I think she has a great writing style and hope that she continues writing historical mysteries. I would prefer if it wasn’t based on real people because when it comes to the Romantics and Mary Shelley, I still adore them and don’t like to read anything that paints them in a horrible light. Sure they were not the nicest people, they made many mistakes but we can’t deny what they did for literature. I think I will have to try Tom-All-Alone one day just so I’m not judging this author on just one experience; her writing is worth reading, I just had some issues with this novel.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus

Posted March 28, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: Snow White Must Die (Goodreads)
Author: Nele Neuhaus
Translator: Steven T. Murray
Series: Bodenstein & Kirchhoff #4
Published: Minotaur Books, 2013
Pages: 384
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

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Skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony and lips as red as blood… Snow White Must Die is far from a fairy Tale. In a small German town, after serving 10 years for the murder of two 17 year old girls, Tobias Sartorius is released. The town is not happy with his return and when another pretty girl goes missing the suspicion obviously is put on him. As the police race to find the missing girl they start to discover things are not as black and white and maybe Tobias isn’t the killer they all thought he was.

Snow White Must Die is my first German crime novel and I was very impressed with the way this book played out. You start off with a suspicion and slowly through the complex twists you discover that this is just a huge web of lies. The book starts off with Tobias return and the whole town angry toward him, it reminded me a little of We Need to Talk about Kevin with the author exploring the psychology of trying to live in a town where everyone hates you.

Then you discover all the evidence that convicted Tobias was circumstantial and that’s when the questions start. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the motivations of each of the characters, always suspecting they are hiding something. Nele Neuhaus plays with the reader really well, always hinting but never showing her hand too early. The complexity of this case grows but Neuhaus beautifully handles it all without going overboard.

I love the way Nele Neuhaus starts off the story with Tobias as the lead and then when things start getting more centred around the crime it shifts focus toward the detectives working the case. I think this was masterfully done and left it open to kill off lead characters if she wished without throwing the story out. As the corruption and the conspiracy within this town begins to be uncovered, no one is safe and this leaves the reader with an anxiety when they put the book down.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve read a police procedural that I’ve enjoyed this much, I’ve noticed this is book four in a series but it reads like a standalone book. I really hope they translate more of Nele Neuhaus novels because I’m really impressed with her style and would love the chance to enjoy more of her books.

Snow White Must Die is a well crafted thriller that while brutal and violent, it still remains accessible. I would have liked this book to be a little darker but it was still a brilliant book of lies, greed and corruption. I would love to read some more German novels, crime ones in particular if anyone has some good recommendations. Nele Neuhaus showed real skill when she wrote Snow White Must Die and it was a real pleasure to experience it. I wish I could read German to enjoy this book in its original text.

Gun Machine by Warren Ellis

Posted March 25, 2013 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Crime / 0 Comments

Title: Gun Machine (Goodreads)
Author: Warren Ellis
Published: Mulholland Books, 2013
Pages: 308
Genres: Crime
My Copy: Library Book

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Warren Ellis reimagines New York City as a puzzle with the most dangerous pieces of all: GUNS.

After a shooting on Pearl Street claims the life of Detective John Tallow’s partner, he unwittingly stumbles into an apartment stacked high with guns. When examined, it is found that each gun is connected to a previously unsolved murder. Someone has been killing people for twenty years and keeping each gun as a trophy. Tallow has been put on the case and with the help of two CSU employees they are soon on the hunt for what could be the most prolific mass murderer in New York History.

I recently read Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein and while I enjoyed the book I felt it was missing something. Gun Machine has that missing element; blending Ellis’ humour this book offers the violence with that dark cynicism that his other book was missing. Gun Machine starts out with the loss of Detective Tallow’s partner and while he should be mourning this tragedy he has been forced into what could be the biggest case of his career. Pairing with a couple of gothic CSU agents to help with forensics, Tallow begins to uncover a huge New York conspiracy.

Tallow is the perfect lead for this type of story, stuck between hating his job and the sudden loss of his only friend and partner; he is thrown into the deep end with no help at all. He struggles to make sense of this room full of guns and with the help of his two misfit sidekicks they begin to form an unlikely team.

While Ellis does favour the hard-boiled genre a little, this is more of a crime thriller than anything else. The blend of humour and his cynical outlook are what make this book worth reading. Crooked Little Vein tried to blend the two together but ended up focusing too heavily on the humour and the weird fetishes to really work too well. Gun Machine seems to get that balance right, turning this into a purely entertaining escapist novel.

Gun Machine really works at what it sets out to do, not too heavy on the humour, violence or dark aspects. It’s been creating a buzz about it and it is well deserved, I loved reading this book and didn’t want it to end. Sure it’s not without its flaws but for the escapist element, this book really is worth reading.