Hi All,
Miker wrote:
> I was familiar with several of them,
> like Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and Vachss, but
Amazon also
> recommended Ken Bruen's THE GUARDS, Eisler's RAIN
FALL, and
> Jonathon King's BLUE EDGE OF MIDNIGHT.
....Any comments on these writers would be
> appreciated.
I loved Bruen's The Guards which is set in Ireland. Jack
Taylor is an alcoholic who's been thrown out of the police
force and is now a PI - a profession almost as disliked in
Ireland as the Garda, given the similarity of the profession
to Informer. However, he's not really a very good PI since he
spends most of his time in an alcoholic haze. Out of
desperation he's hired by a woman who is sure that her
daughter's death was not suicide, but murder. This is a
really powerful book, beautifully written and haunting. Jack
could easily be a totally unlikeable character - he's a
selfish, unthinking alcoholic who's more concerned about
where his next drink is coming from. However, he's saved by
the honesty, wit and caring nature hidden underneath. The
plot element of The Guards is pretty thin, and the crime
feels like more of an aside, but I was hooked by Jack, his
outlook on life, his humour and his sadness. I really loved
the writing style as well. A very original book. Bruen also
very obviously has a love of crime fiction as there are loads
of references to hardboiled authors.
He has another series set in London which is also apparently
very hard-boiled (I have them but not read them as yet), and
he's labelled as Brit-noir.
Donna
-- Visit Donna's Page at: http://freespace.virgin.net/donna.moore -- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Jul 2003 EDT