This week’s books
Here’s a quick pic of this weeks books (requested, sent, bought, found or otherwise)
After the jump take a closer look at them…
Found this Thompson at a used store and it’s one I haven’t read yet. I’ve heard it’s lesser Thompson but what the hell.
Dr. Peter S. Murphy runs a clinic to cure alcoholics. But his charges believe that the only thing that will fix them is another drink. To this bitter struggle of wills, add an orderly who doubles as a quack practitioner, a nurse who is both alluring and ingeniously sadistic, and a misplaced patient whose main problem is his lack of a frontal lobe, and the result is one of Jim Thompson’s most harrowingly funny yet deeply sympathetic novels.
This is the new Gil Brewer coming out from New Pulp Press in a few weeks. More on this soon.
Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer
Frank Garth is a Korean War veteran who has spent the last several months of his life in a psychiatric ward. There, he becomes romantically involved with a nurse named Leda, who seems to have more than just a passing interest in the inheritance that Frank is due to receive once his ill mother passes. When Frank is fingered for a brutal murder, an incident that he doesn’t remember happening, he begins doubting his own sanity. Is he a delusional killer, or has he been set-up?
The Delphine books are…a modern telling of the Snow White tale from the Prince’s perspective but filtered heavily through noir sensibilities. Very cool. More on these soon.
A mysterious traveler gets off the train in a small village surrounded by a thick sinister forest. He is searching for Delphine, who vanished with only a scrawled out address on a scrap of paper as a trace. In his newest mystery, Richard Sala takes the tale of Snow White and stands it on its head, retelling it from Prince Charming’s perspective (the unnamed traveler). This twisted tale includes all the elements of terror from the original fairy tale with none of the insipid saccharine coating of the Disney animated adaptation. Be sure not to miss the first volume of what promises to be Sala’s best work.
The new trade of Scalped and Calvario Hills (don’t really no what to make of this one now that I’ve read it. Scalped continues to be excellent.
Calvario Hills by Marti
Back in the 1980s, American comics aficionados were bowled over by the hardboiled Chester-Gould-on-crack stylings in the graphic novel The Cabbie courtesy of Spanish cartoonist Marti (who also made mind-blowing appearances in several anthologies, including RAW). Now, after a long drought, Marti is finally back in the U.S.A. with a vengeance in the all-new “Ignatz” title Calvario Hills. The eponymous main story, set in a not-very-fictionalized American big city that mashes together elements of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C., is a conspiracy fantasia in which the sinister NRA (spearheaded by Charlton “Preston”) is attempting to sabotage the election to mayor of Marion “Parry,” while an imprisoned gangster kingpin, working the other side, schemes to enlist an army of crackheads to put him over the top. Can you say… “entrapment”? The back-up is the first chapter of an all-new “Cabbie” story in which our naively heroic protagonist’s fare turns out to be the disgraced President of the nation; the Cabbie, loyal to the end, tries to assist him in his flight out of the country, with the help of the Cardinal who’s said to have the inside track on being the next Pope… but an out-of-control gay parade, a garbage truck, and an infestation of lice abort the escape in a most disagreeable fashion.
Scalped: High Lonesome by Jason Aaron
In this volume, we see the landscape of the Prairie Rose reservation through the eyes of a newcomer - a card shark and con man - whose presence could spell doom for one of our main characters.
If you are a fan of crime comics then you should read these two. Brilliant.
Wish You Were Here #1: The Innocents by Gipi
A decade after his days as a roaming punk, Giuliano takes his nephew Andrea down to the seaside, his old stomping grounds, to visit with one of his old friends: Valerio, who has just finished serving a long prison sentence after having been framed, tortured and imprisoned by two rogue members of an anti-terrorist squad. “The Innocents,” which includes two narrative tracks in different drawing styles, is a contemplative, beautifully drawn graphic novelette about these three characters’ meeting. Future issues will focus on other members of this group of friends, a bit like Jaime Hernandez’s “Locas” stories, with supporting characters stepping into the spotlight as former “lead” characters become part of the background…
Wish You Were Here #2: They Found The Car by Gipi
A late-night telephone call about a mysterious car which went missing seven years ago and has now been recovered causes a chain reaction of violence in this all-new comics novelette from Gipi; ultimately this crime story (which is not so much a “sequel” to The Innocents as another story set in the same milieu with a different cast of characters) turns into a tale of religion and hypocrisy.
Two from St. Martins that I haven’t heard of and don’t know much about.
Where Armadillos Go to Die by James Hime
Sylvester Bradshaw owns the Bouree restaurant, home of the best catfish in Brenham, Texas. He’s also known to be one of the most unpleasant residents of Brenham, and not just because he’s stubborn, racist, and mean. Sylvester also happens to have invented a machine that several venture capitalists and one former NFL star would like to invest in, but he’s not sharing. When the restaurant is ransacked and he goes missing, the only person willing to take his disappearance seriously is Jeremiah Spur. The retired Texas Ranger and rancher is a dedicated customer if not a friend, and decidedly more competent than the local law enforcement.
The Sting of Justice by Cora Harrison
The autumn has come to the Burren, it’s a time of harvest: of gathering for the winter to come. The end of summer for most and the end of life for others. When Mara attends the funeral of a local priest of the Burren, the last things she expects is another corpse to be found on the church steps - a man stung to death by bees. Sorley the silversmith was a greedy and distrusted man: there would be no shortage of people who wanted him dead but who really stood to profit from his murder? As Mara investigates, she must use all her cunning and prowess as a lady judge to bring the sting of justice to a killer with hatred in their hearts and murder on their mind.
The Death of the Detective I heard about recently from Jeffrey Ford, can’t wait to jump into it.
The Death of the Detective by Mark Smith
A madman is on the loose in the city. Alone and on the verge of psychic collapse, detective Arnold Magnuson follows clues in murder’s wake - through the Chicago of society clubs and nightclubs and the city of small-time hoods and big-time Mafia, the slums smelling of machine oil and riverside tanneries and pristine lakeside villages - through subtle interrogations, split-second lies, and improvised stories, moving ever closer to a culprit who begins to feel alarmingly like himself. “The Death of the Detective” is a quest novel in the tradition of Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, and Dead Souls. During his frenetic and blood-soaked odyssey, Mark Smith’s detective moves through the city on highways, boulevards, side streets, and alleys. He tracks “the death-maker” from a mansion in Lake Forest to the underbelly of the South Side, from a glass high-rise on the Gold Coast to a run-down tavern in the northwestern suburbs, and everywhere in between. In this New York Times best-seller and finalist for the 1974 National Book Award, Smith takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go until the last page of his relentless journey into the dark recesses of the American soul.
Union Station by Ande Parks
Kansas City, 1933. Frank Nash is a petty criminal being escorted back into town by train. FBI agent Vetterli, waiting for the convoy at Union Station, is expecting a routine assignment. What happens at Union Station that day is a massacre, with no one knowing who really pulled the trigger first. Newspaper reporter, Charles Thompson, is a witness to the events at Union Station and begins a personal investigation that may cost him his life, and that of his family. In the tradition of Torso and Road to Perdition, Union Station is the true story that started J. Edgar Hoover’s “war on crime” and helped shape the FBI into the agency it is today.
Shadow Season I hope to have done this weekend. The Block was on the giveaway table at work. I’ve never read it so I grabbed it.
Shadow Season by Tom Piccirilli
An ex-cop, Finn was left literally blinded by violence. The one thing he can still see is the body of his wife, Dani, and a crime scene that won’t fade from his mind’s eye. Now a professor, Finn never would have guessed that an isolated girls’ prep school could be every bit as dangerous as city streets. Especially when he stumbles upon a local girl lying in a graveyard in the middle of a raging blizzard.
Finn may live in a world of total darkness, but it’s about to get a splash of red. The memories that torment him still have the power to kill, and a group of innocent students has been put in harm’s way by a pair of vicious criminals stalking Finn for unknown reasons. Secrets are creeping from the shadows around him—the kind that even a man with perfect vision never sees until it’s too late. They’re about to become terrifyingly clear to Finn—and it all begins with the scent of blood.
The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block
Bernie Rhodenbarr is actually trying to earn an honest living. It’s been an entire year since he’s entered anyone’s abode illegally to help himself to their valuables. But now an unscrupulous landlord’s threat to increase Bernie’s rent by 1,000% is driving the bookseller and reformed burglar back to a life of crime — though, in all fairness, it’s a very short trip. And when the cops wrongly accuse him of stealing a priceless collection of baseball cards, Bernie’s stuck with a worthless alibi since he was busy burgling a different apartment at the time . . . one that happened to contain a dead body locked inside a bathroom.
So Bernie has a dilemma. He can trade a burglary charge for a murder rap. Or he can shuffle all the cards himself and try to find the joker in the deck — someone, perhaps, who believes that homicide is the real Great American Pastime.
