Observations from the Balcony

-Laura Lippman’s new Tess Monaghan serial starting in The new York Times

-An interesting post:“Are crime novels Aristotelian? Or should they be?” (But again paragraph breaks are your friend)

-A few thoughts on Bouchercon fron Jon (Plus a photo of our very cool Barnes & Noble)

-PS Publishing and Wildside/Prime books 60% off at Shocklines

-Regarding the “purpleness” of prose

-The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US by David Simon

-A viewers thoughts on The Wrestler

More below the cut

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-Where oh where can I find Sanctuary?

-Would having access to a digital copy of a nearly-complete book inspire you to purchase the ink-and-paper version?

-What upcomig books are you looking forward to?

-The genres aren’t dying. They’re evolving. They always have, otherwise no subgenres would be born. Only now the genres are all reaching critical mass. They leak their fluids into each other waiting for the day when their formulaic membranes burst.

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All of the Bookspot sites are in the process of a complete overhaul and becoming Book Spot Central.

The behind the scenes work rolls on and I’ve just been informed that the sites and blogs will be down for a couple of hours sometime this evening.

How far will one man go to protect the secret of the woman he loves? How will holding on to the secret for so long affect him?

Normally the typical Carroll book is a kind of North American magical realism that is filtered through European sensabilities. Every Carrol book is unique, original and is guaranteed to surprise.

But in After Silence Carroll plays it tighter and hews much closer to realism in this uniqe and dark family drama. Jonathan Carrol is a great writer and one of my all-time favorites. I actually re-read Carroll’s entire catalogue last year and the unmitigated emotional power of this book really stood out.

I would even go so far as to say that it should be re-considered as a lost noir classic.

It also has one of my favorite openings of all time:

“How much does a life weigh? Is it the product of our positive or worthwhile acts, divided by the bad? Or is it only the human body itself, put on a scale - a two-hundred-pound life?

I hold a gun to my son’s head. He weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds, the gun no more than two. Another way of thinking about it: My son Lincoln’s life weighs only so much as this pistol in my hand. Or the bullet that will kill him? And after the shot will there be no weight?

He is smiling. I am terrified. I’ll pull the trigger and he will die, yet he’s smiling as if this fatal metal against his head is the finger of a loved one.

Who am I? How can I do this to my own son? Listen- ”

And from that opening a dark drama is told. This is a powerful book.

-Gabe does a quick take on Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace:“It is amazingly written; taut and filled with rhythmic incantation that serves to draw the reader directly into Minami’s psyche. Very powerful stuff, somewhere between the triumvirate of Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami.”

-Meg Gardiner eats her young

-a swift, exciting horror-thriller

-”It’s Friday Craig, anything can happen”: Patti has all of your Friday Forgotten Book highlights

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-Interview with Charlie Huston

-TV Review: Sons of Anarchy

-Interview with Greg Hurwitz

-Book Review: The Spoke by Friedrich Glauser

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A couple of months ago I read The Given Day by Dennis Lehane and struggled with a review. There was a struggle because there is so much happening in the book that it’s hard to process it all after one read. But I did finally finish a review for it. It’s not perfect and there is a lot left to be said but it will do.

My quick take is:

I will say this clearly, The Given Day was worth the wait. There are echoes of the plot mechanics of the Kenzie & Gennaro books; there are echoes of the densely compacted intensity of a few decades of history of Mystic River; there are echoes of the Gothic and dramatic setting of Shutter Island. The Given Day incorporates them all (and more) into a book that should be read, thought about and grappled with on its own terms, using the previous books only as a solid foundation.

For the full review go here

Yesterday I walked over to Borders and some book covers caught my attention.

A couple of days ago in the Carnival post I started a flash fiction contest using any of 8 images as inspiration. This was one of them:

Then I saw this book on the shelf, Tethered by Amy MacKinnon. The image I used came off of a vintage photographs blog so I don’t know the origins of the picture itself.

Now the next one isn’t exactly a case of copy cat covers but still the design is remarkably similar.

-Issue 27 of Thuglit

-“A one-legged hooker was killed in Brooklyn after a john hit her over the head,
causing her to fall backwards out of her wheelchair and slam her skull against
the wall, cops said yesterday.”

-John McFetridge wants to know why are hitmen so popular?

-If a book is truly written poorly–spelling errors, typos, incorrect punctuation, etc.–that’s the failure of the line editor. And if it’s built on weak or sloppy writing (massive plot holes, 2-dimensional characters, stilted dialog, pacing issues, redundancy, cliche, etc.), that’s the fault of the acquisition editor. In both cases, the book should not have been published. Dammit and here all along I’ve been blaming Dan Brown for The Davinci Code.

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The Nerd of Noir reviews the fifth season of The Wire

The Nerd of Noir reviews the first season of Brotherhood

A free online James Bond game to encourage reading

Meg Gardiner is guest blogging this week over at Jeff Vandermeer’s

Duane Swierczynski interview

More after the jump

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