The Wolf In Winter by John Connolly Emily Bestler Books/Atria, a division of Simon & Shuster, $26.00, 418 pages, ISBN 978-1-4767-0318-3 Can you believe it’s already October? Where did the summer go? Oh well, fall is here now, and that means Halloween . . . which is giving Christmas a run for its money in the popularity department. To commemorate the holiday, all our book reviews for the month
Last Winter We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura SOHO Press, $25.00, 216 pages, ISBN 978-1-61695-455-0 If the novel in this weeks MBR could only be described in one word, the one that comes to mind is inscrutable. It is defined as mysterious, enigmatic or incomprehensible, and its synonyms include words such as: hidden, impenetrable, and blank. None of those adjectives however, will lessen your enjoyment of this short, but multi-layered
The Cartel by Don Winslow Alfred A. Knopf, Random House/Penguin, $27.95, 617 pages, ISBN 978-1-101-87499-8 PART TWO: The Cartel, by Don Winslow has been published to rave reviews by the likes of: Lee Child-Sensationally good, Harlen Coben-Absolute must-read, Michael Connelly-First rate thriller, James Ellroy-Stunningly plotted . . . to which I’m going to add my own humble accolades. The Cartel is a big, hefty novel that will give the
The Cartel by Don Winslow Alfred A. Knopf, Random House/Penguin, $27.95, 617 pages, ISBN 978-1-101-87499-8 PART ONE: Every now and then, a fictional novel comes along that informs as it entertains, and in doing so, the-word-of-mouth buzz about it creates a public dialogue of national significance where none existed before. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ironweed, by William Kennedy are
Endangered by C.J. Box Putnam, $26.95, 369 pages, ISBN 978-0-399-16077-6 I’m going way out on a limb with our review this week, and it’s a scary proposition, because it concerns a subject that engenders a wealth of strong feelings . . . The Endangered Species Act. It’s a concept that everyone has an opinion about—and pro or con—they all have validity. We’re not going to try hashing it out
The Swimmer by Joakim Zander Harper Collins, $27.99, 417 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-233724-5 International thrillers—good old spy yarns—have long been favorites of many readers around the world. Personally, I never tire of them. It seems however, that all the great espionage writers have passed . . . novelists like John Gardner, Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Steig Larsson, Graham Green and Eric Ambler have all left us and perennial
Green Hell by Ken Bruen Mysterious Press-Grove/Atlantic, $25.00, 232 pages, ISBN 978-0-8021-2356-5 It’s no secret that I have a Jones for contemporary Irish writers of crime fiction, reading and reviewing their work whenever possible. Atop the pantheon in my opinion is a capricious, ever unpredictable, but always exceptional creative genius by the name of Ken Bruen. He’s the author of thirty-some novels, a collaborator on several more, and the
The Organ Broker by Stu Strumwasser Arcade Publishing, $24.99, 280 pages, ISBN 978-1-62872-523-0 Are you aware that there are now more than 120,000 patients—folks just like you and me who are on waiting lists for organ transplants in America . . . or that there are three-hundred thousand more on kidney dialysis, but not yet on transplant lists . . . and shamefully, that here in America, twenty people
World Gone By by Dennis Lehane William Morrow/Harper Collins, $27.99, 309 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-000490-3 Doesn’t it seem that the older we get, the more complicated our lives become . . . and the more complex our lives . . . the more we yearn for the good old days when things ran better, life was somehow easier and more quaint? A cowboy poet named Badger Clark summed it up
Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman W.W. Norton & Company, $24.95, 281 pages, ISBN 978-0-393-24302-4 Are there any among us—living in Twenty-First Century America—who hasn’t heard of hydraulic fracking? It’s commonly referred to as Fracking and everyone has an opinion about it, good or bad, pro or con, informed or ignorant. It’s one of several hot-button words that polite folks don’t utter in social groups lest an