As BOOKGASM grows in popularity and nears its one-year anniversary, it’s time to expand the staff. We’re in immediate need of one book reviewer who doesn’t mind getting paid anything except in free books and glory. Particularly, we’re looking for one whose tastes run toward all types of thrillers and general literary fiction (and if you like other genres, too, even better).
If that’s you – and you fit the rest of the qualifications below – e-mail me a couple of sample book reviews (old, new, whatever) and tell me a little about yourself and what kind of things you like to read. We’ve got a few titles waiting for whomever gets the “job.”
You must be:
1. Able to read
2. Able to write
3. Able to read a book and write a review within a fair deadline
4. Able to e-mail that review
Fire away!
UPDATE: The position is filled, but keep checking back for future opportunities!
Starting June 1, Dynamite Entertainment is offering comics readers a may-as-well-be-free sneak peek at its hotly anticipated BATTLESTAR GALACTICA monthly series, based upon the Sci-Fi Channel’s ratings scorcher.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #0 (yep, zero) will be sold for a mere 25 cents in comic shops everywhere, under variant covers. Personally, we don’t know why anyone would pick a drawn cover over the one at right, featuring a photo of the may-as-well-be-nude Tricia Helfer, unquestionably the series’ sexiest Cylon. The issue also will provide readers an advance look at Dynamite’s future comics revival of THE LONE RANGER.
As they did with last year’s RED SONJA, Dynamite will be going the quarter route once again in August to promote its launch of a HIGHLANDER title, based upon the inexplicably popular Christopher Lambert films.
Sometimes it’s just so pleasant to get a mystery that revels in its own competence. No flashy literary gimmicks, no eccentric characters, no prurient interests – just a decent, straightforward tale of murder and criminal detection. Or in Peter Robinson’s PIECE OF MY HEART, two tales of murder rolled into one case spanning 36 years.
The first murder takes place at giant rock concert in Yorkshire in September of 1969. While Led Zeppelin take the stage, a young girl is murdered. Her body is found by the concert cleanup crew, and Det. Insp. Stanley Chadwick is called in to investigate. This story is told in parallel with another murder that goes down in the same general area, albeit in the fall of 2005. A music journalist is found with his head bashed in by a poker, and this case will be handled by Det. Chief Insp. Alan Banks.
Obviously, the two cases are linked by the reader, but it takes quite some time for the authorities to make the connection, and it’s done through good, solid policework. Robinson is especially adept at depicting late ’60s England, the cultural revolution that was slowly taking place and the older, more authoritarian generation alienated by the youth, the drugs and the music. Ah, the ’60s. It’s great to see references to bands like Hawkwind, Fairport Convention and even Jan Dukes De Grey!
Inexorably, Banks – for whom this is novel number 16 – pieces together enough facts to connect the two murders and must go on a quest to interview police and suspects from long ago in order to help solve his own case. Robinson moves the parallel stories along with a swinging pace, relying on natural dialogue, slick characterization and some intriguing musical atmosphere to draw you in and have you care about Banks and the other members of his investigative team. If you’re looking for a quality mystery, and you remember the 1960s at all, you’ll definitely enjoy this one. –Mark Rose
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If I start liking somewhat unethical lawyer characters like those in Paul Levine’s THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI and now William Lashner’s MARKED MAN, I’m going to have to revise my Hierarchy of Despisement™ to move reporters to the bottom of the list instead of legal beagles. It is true that Lashner’s series protagonist, Victor Carl, certainly has an illicit and devious mind, but he also has that clichéd heart of gold and a relentless drive just not to get results, but the right result.
In the opening, Carl wakes up after a wild night on the town to discover that he has a new beautiful heart-and-flowers tattoo emblazoned on his chest (hence the title) and sporting the unknown-to-him name of “Chantal Adair.” Who is Chantal and how did this happen? Well, alcohol consumption might answer that second question. But the first can only be answered by a full-scale investigation which Carl undertakes. However, he’s soon distracted by a request from a dying Greek woman who only wants to see her criminal son one more time before she passes. Carl then discovers that the woman’s son participated in an ages-old heist of a local Philadelphia art museum that managed to score an authentic painting by Rembrandt. And you know these cases are going to be connected, don’t you?
Lashner writes in the first-person, allowing him to present Carl as a cynical, jaded ironist who sometimes has pertinent things to say. I bookmarked half a dozen pages to use here but as an example of Carl’s thinking, this one is especially apropros: “There’s a line that you pass, Joey told me, it’s hard to see, a bit blurry, but there for sure. On one side of the line, all the dreams in your life are still possible. On the other side they’ve become fantasies you only pretend to believe, because having nothing to believe is too close to death. Fool’s dreams, Joey called them, sad little lies. There’s that line, and the four of them, they had blown past that line years before, never looking back.”
This is the underlying motivation behind some of the choices that Carl makes, choices he might have wanted to give a second thought to making, if you get my drift.
Dialogue here is brisk and realistic, and keeps the book moving at an action-film pace. A couple of the characters are just completely outrageous, though, including the antique buyer Lavender Hill and the gratuitously repellent and unlikely ultimate perpetrator. Carl’s best interactions come with Monica Adair, Chantal’s sister, who also is searching for the mysterious Chantal. Their teamwork would be welcome to explore in a future installment, although the final disposition of Monica seems way too off-base to accept.
Anyway, MARKED MAN has great Philadelphia/New Jersey flavor, and while it doesn’t have a lot of art gallery atmosphere, that world does serve as an important cog in the plot. Victor Carl is one of those larger-than-life bon vivants who has a welcome streak of insecurity, giving him a nice factor of likability. This is an action thriller, with a little bit of clever courtroom antics thrown in, and it should appeal to a broad audience of mystery lovers. –Mark Rose
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Given the line’s stellar track record, I never thought I’d say this about an offering from Hard Case Crime: Eh.
An unabridged reprint of his 1986 novel, Madison Smartt Bell’s STRAIGHT CUT is a little more literary than the usual get-it-done language that has become a Hard Case signature, but it’s not necessarily to its benefit. This first-person narrative is told by Tracy Bateman, a Kierkegaard-reading film editor recently ditched by his wife. He’s called in by an old friend for a freelance editing job in Italy. The pay is double than what he’d expect, so Tracy suspects his pal Kevin has a surprise in store for him. All his instincts tell him not to go; he does anyway.
As it turns out – albeit many, many chapters later than I would have liked – Kevin indeed has a duplicitous intention in bringing Tracy halfway around the world, and it involves a suitcase full of heroin and his estranged wife. With so much history between the two friends, they speak kind of an inside-joke shorthand that makes this tale difficult to fully access, and Bell isn’t up for filling in the blanks. So we’re not always sure what’s gone on and what’s going on between them, so by the anticlimactic end, you wonder what the point even was.
STRAIGHT CUT is not bad on the whole, but at times it’s definitely boring. Though I learned a lot about the process of editing film and the jargon they speak, it sure didn’t advance the narrative. Nor did the 50-odd pages in the middle during which Tracy does little but skip from town to town, shacking up in hotels and finding nearby cafés for sustenance. Bell may have brought visions of the Italian countryside to life, but the main story just lies there.
And where there is no buildup, there is no payoff. The STRAIGHT dope on this suggests it’s for Hard Case completists only. I suppose a disappointing Hard Case is akin to bad sex: At least you had it, but you could have better. –Rod Lott
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