It’s intimidating to pick up a book that’s not the first in a series. There’s the fear of not understanding the back stories of the characters or the references to previous books, because as hard as the author might try, there are important aspects to the story or hero that might be missing for the new reader. It’s even more intimidating when it’s the 16th novel in the series. While in a small airport and looking for a book to read, I came across Ian Rankin‘s A Question of Blood. I knew Ian Rankin was the best selling mystery writer in the United Kingdom, so I decided to take a chance and boug ..read more

Murder mysteries in which a police detective also suffers the loss of his partner are commonplace in books and movies. The plot usually follows a standard procession from the aggrieved detective vowing vengeance or justice, often dealing with his own shortcomings along the way, until he finally cracks the case and discovers some enlightenment about himself. The person ultimately responsible for the crime is often a wealthy or well-connected person who is just out of reach of the long arm of the law, or so it seems, until sheer dogged determination by the detective brings about the evildoer’s a ..read more

The journey a book takes from hard drive to hardback is usually far from short, so even though David Blaine’s Perspex box starvation stunt took place a few years ago, there’s something slightly disconcerting about reading about it in Nicola Barker’s latest novel. A deserved member of the 2003 Granta Best of British list, Barker is an unavoidably talented writer with a sharp ear for dialogue and well developed sense of the absurd. But choosing to base her new novel around the whole Blaine-in-a-box media circus was perhaps not the great idea it may have initially appeared.  Whate ..read more

John Burdett’s Bangkok series of mysteries featuring Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep bring a fresh perspective to the murder mystery genre with its combination of wit, humor, and surprising bits of insight into human nature told from an Asian and Buddhist perspective. If you’re a fan of this genre, then you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not reading the Bangkok novels. Bangkok Haunts is as gripping, thrilling, and entertaining as any you might read. Letting Sonchai be your travel guide through his world is icing on the cake. For those who haven’t read the previous novels a ..read more

With the end of the Cold War, authors of spy thrillers have had to turn to different forms of deceit, betrayal, and double-crossing to provide the suspense in their novels. Fortunately, there’s still plenty of that behavior to be mined for fictional purposes. In The Mission Song, John le Carre uses a mix of politics and business to provide the thrills and plot twists. Perhaps it’s a bit ironic that the new villains and their actions seem more realistic and believable than the shadowy world of spying. The fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance, unless it’s your corner of the world they’v ..read more

The dangerous ideas Dennett won’t touch Daniel Dennett missed out on a career as a whodunit writer. But I, for one, am glad, because what he has to tell us is more important than what you’ll find in the average crime novel. He boldly storms onto the philosophical crime scene, takes every puzzle ever to have exercised the human mind, gives it a good rinse in what he calls Darwin’s universal acid, and leaves us with the solution to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. You may not like the answers he comes up with, but you can’t help but admire the way he approaches his task. He out ..read more

In 1989 China’s Tiananmen Square stood submerged in a bloody stand off between students protestors and the People’s Liberation Army. The image of the, to date, anonymous young man halting a line of tanks continues to resonate through out the world as it did with author Terence Cheng. Cheng’s debut novel Sons of Heaven weaves a fictional life story for this dissident civilian, his soldier brother and the leader Deng Xiaoping who supposedly gave the go ahead for the army crackdown. Through these three men Cheng explores the personal costs of resistance, obedience and the meaning of freedom. Xiao ..read more

John Lynch’s film credits include Sliding Doors (1998), Moll Flanders (1996) and In the Name of the Father (1993) in which he turned in a compelling performance as Paul Hill, one of the wrongly accused Guildford Four. An accomplished actor, Lynch has decided to turn to writing. Torn Water is his underwhelming debut. Like the Newry-born author, James Lavery is a “border man”. This is his coming-of-age tale. James’s father Conn is dead (he “died for Ireland”, his aunty Teezy tells him gnomically) and seventeen-year-old James is not coping well with the difficult business of growing up. His mothe ..read more

2003 marked the centenary of George Orwell’s birth, an anniversary preluded by Christopher Hitchens’ welcome eulogy, Why Orwell Matters (2002), and consolidated by two new biographies from Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor. Back in 1999, fifty years after the publication of 1984, the Waterstone’s poll for the (pseudo-)millenial novel put it in third place in tandem with The Lighthouse, behind the winner Ulysses and runners-up Proust and The Great Gatsby. As is still too often forgotten – his 1991 biographer Michael Sheldon well calls it his most misunderstood work – the novel is satire, not predic ..read more

Readers of Francis Wheen’s previous book, his highly entertaining biography of Karl Marx, will probably buy this one expecting a fun few evenings in the company of a witty and effortlessly compelling storyteller. They will not be disappointed. How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World is a humorous polemic against all things irrational and unscientific, and few gurus are spared Wheen’s scorn: New Age and management gurus, Margaret Thatcher and other “free market fundamentalists”, Tony Blair, Islamic fundamentalists, creationists, and Diana worshippers, among others. Wheen claims a serious agenda: hi ..read more