The Fixer by Joseph Finder Dutton/Penguin/Random House, $28.00, 375 pages, ISBN 978-0-525-95461-3 Do you remember a public works scheme called The Central Artery/Tunnel Project? It was started in 1982 and completed on the last day of December 2007. It was projected to cost 2.8 billion dollars, the final tab amounted to some 14.6 billon and will ultimately cost the taxpayers about 22 billion after interest on the bonds is
Chain of Events by Fredrik T. Olsson Little, Brown & Co/Hachette, $26.00, 432 pages, ISBN 978-0-3163-3500-3 A thrill is defined as: a trembling sensation caused by fear or emotional shock, and a thriller as: a person or something that thrills . . . buckle that together with the word phenomenon, anything that can be perceived as a fact by the senses, and you come up with thriller phenomenon .
You Know Who Killed Me by Loren D. Estleman Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.99, 233 pages, ISBN 978-0-7653-3735-1 I came late to the party for this week’s MBR author . . . he’d already written seventy-five novels by the time he made it to my radar screen . . . so shame on me. Now that he’s on my personal head-up display however, that oversight will get corrected in the coming
The House of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic, $24.00, 248 pages, ISBN 978-0-8021-2246-9 Today is an individual milestone with this, the 200th Mysterious Book Report, and I wanted it to be something special to commemorate the occasion. The selection is personal, one of my favorite novelist who’s influenced any number of other writers and readers with his unique ability to transform the tough grit and blood
Spark by John Twelve Hawks Doubleday, Random House, $25.95, 301 pages, ISBN 978-0-385-53867-1 My Oxford Dictionary defines the word dystopia as an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be . . . which makes it the exact opposite of utopia, and an ideal descriptor for end-of-the-world type literature. Lately, with the popularity of works like The Hunger Games and Gotham, dystopian novels, movies and TV
A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva Forge / Tom Doherty Associates, $25.99. 315 pages, ISBN 978-0-7653-7431-8 In the food for thought department, here’s a juicy little nugget to chew on: Remember when gambling was underground, illegal and in the hands of organized crime? Now it’s legal, and available most everywhere, but in my opinion, still in the hands of organized crime . . . called government. Look anywhere
Sniper’s Honor by Stephen Hunter Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 416 pages, ISBN 978-1-4516-40212 Earlier this year, the world’s attention was riveted on a movie depicting the life and times of an American serviceman named Chris Kyle—the deadliest sniper in US Army history, with 160 confirmed kills. Suddenly, there was a national debate about the morality of lying in ambush and killing enemy combatants at long range with high-powered rifles
The Empire of Night by Robert Olen Butler Mysterious Press, $26.00, 401 pages, ISBN 978-0-8021-2323-7 One hundred years ago, all of Europe was in the midst of what was then called the Great War, or World War I as we now know it. It was the first fully mechanized war and the battlefield casualties were so great that they’re almost incomprehensible by today’s standards, due to the invention of
Suspicion by Joseph Finder Dutton Penguin Random House, $27.95, 387 pages, ISBN 978-0-525-95460-6 There’s times, it seems, in everyone’s life when there’s just not enough money on hand to pay all the bills coming due. The reasons for this, and the excuses, are many and various, but the bottom line is called insolvency . . . and no matter how badly you want to . . . you just
All Day and A Night by Alafair Burke Harper Collins, $26.99, 352 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-220838-5 In the argot of the penitentiary—prison slang—an inmate saying that he’s “got all day” means that he’s serving a life sentence. The term “all day and a night” means a life sentence without the possibility of parole, also referred to as life without and sometimes as LWOP. I know these terms because I just