by vjbooks | Oct 15, 2009 | We're Talking Books!
Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995’s American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision, and his characters—many of whom readers will remember from The Cold Six Thousand and from American...
by vjbooks | Aug 3, 2009 | We're Talking Books!
James Ellroy fans will find a lot to like in this gritty look at post-WWII Hollywood from Edgar-winner Kanon (Los Alamos). Ben Collier, recently returned to the U.S. from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, travels to California after his sister-in-law, Liesl,...
by vjbooks | May 12, 2009 | We're Talking Books!
The current generation of Irish crime writers had something of an annus mirabilis in 2008, when John Connolly, Tana French, Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes and Ruth Dudley Edwards were all nominated for prestigious crime-writing prizes in the US and the UK. Connolly, Dudley...
by vjbooks | Feb 19, 2009 | We're Talking Books!
(Publisher’s Weekly, Feb. 9) The 1921 rape/manslaughter trial of silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle provides the gritty backdrop for Atkins’s outstanding crime novel, in which Dashiell Hammett, then a Pinkerton operative living in San Francisco,...
by vjbooks | Nov 8, 2008 | We're Talking Books!
(www.miaminewtimes.com, Nov. 07) Every corner of the country worth a damn seems to have a signature author painting its streets in the darkest shades on the palette – from Tony Hillerman hiking the parched Navajo desert to Dennis Lehane lurking in Boston’s...