Michael Harvey takes a few steps beyond the comfort zone of his popular Michael Kelly series in his latest crime novel, THE INNOCENCE GAME. It’s without question a stand-alone in that it focuses on a new set of protagonists, and presents a fascinating and somewhat contemporary take on the standard murder mystery formula. The locations are slightly varied, too, but include Harvey’s beloved Chicago. And P.I. Kelly even makes a cameo appearance in the last quarter of the novel.
 
Judged on its own merits, it’s a fast-moving, absorbing and suspenseful story that stretches credibility to the near breaking point, yet still manages to be entertaining.

Ian Joyce, a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University, is excited to be part of the journalism school’s “innocence seminar.” For one thing, one of his two classmates is Sarah Gold, a young woman he has had a crush on since undergraduate school. Beyond that, the seminar is highly exclusive and devoted to proving the innocence of criminals who may have been falsely accused.
 
When Jake Havens, the seminar’s third participant arrives, he immediately presents the other two with their first case. Havens produces an envelope he received that contains a bloodstained piece of a shirt worn by a young boy who was brutally murdered 14 years ago, along with an anonymous note taking credit for the killing.
 
The case, and possible resulting news story, presents several challenges — most notably the fact that the man accused of killing the boy died in prison several years ago. Still, the three grad students trace down the files and evidence from the case, as well as any surviving witnesses or investigators who worked it.
 
Yet just as the three discover similar traits between their case and a few other murders, it becomes alarmingly clear that there are those who prefer that they immediately drop their investigation. In fact, the deeper their research takes them, the number of people of authority they can truly trust grows smaller, until their own lives are threatened.
 
Harvey wastes no time presenting the murder case and getting his characters into the thick of it. Indeed, with the exception of a few brief shifts of perspective — presumably from the killer himself — the pace remains vigorous and lively.
 
The story is told mostly through Joyce’s narration. Here, Harvey incorporates the modern interpretation of the classic hard-boiled sarcasm and insights that made his Michael Kelly stories so much fun to read. Like Harvey himself, Joyce is intimately familiar with the lesser-known areas of Chicago, as well as those locations both north and south of the city with their varied weather conditions and equally varied residents and customs.
 
The background of the novel’s main characters proves essential to the plot. Leading up to this, Harvey tosses out a cartload of unanticipated revelations and twists. At first, they are creatively incorporated into the narrative and underscore the creeping paranoia that haunts the three young students. As the conclusion approaches, however, Harvey continues to pile on new surprises, bringing things dangerously close to contrived coincidences.
 
This information overload is what prevents THE INNOCENCE GAME from being the breakthrough book that would bring the author to the attention of a wider audience. Fortunately, the earlier Kelly novels hold up well and are recommended while Harvey cautiously, yet admirably expands his writing skills. —Alan Cranis

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For many, Stephen King’s “The Body” (part of his collection DIFFERENT SEASONS, so memorably adapted to film as 1986′s STAND BY ME) is like a hypodermic full of nostalgia jammed straight into the heart. In a story that both conveys and creates a deep sense of loss and longing, King makes you feel the rich potential and the real pain of being young in the summer of 1960 — even if you weren’t young then, or alive.

His new novel, JOYLAND, will be to such fans — and maybe a host of new ones — a glorious return to his glorious returns, a reminder of his artistry in tapping that moment when youth stumbles away from romance into realism.

Devin Jones, stung by a breakup, takes on summer work in a North Carolina amusement park. While there, he finds hidden talents and catches the first glimpse of the man he’s going to become, while grappling with a haunted Haunted House, a never-captured murderer, and a mother and son who need his help.

But while these out-of-the-ordinary plots propel the book, King is as much invested in exploring the park day-to-day. Dev wrestles with the particularities of his gig at Joyland, and King delights in the arcana of the job. He showboats with the argot (much of which, he admits in an afterword, he made up); he zeroes in on the feel and perils of “wearing the fur” (putting on a character suit) in the mid-summer Southern heat; he creates a tangible sense of 1973 via a panoply of pop-culture head-nods and digressions.

Despite its Hard Case Crime frame and lurid cover, this novel lacks the vicious kick of his scariest or most brutal tales. Its ghost, its serial killer, are hooks to get the rubes to take the ride. But once you’re on the ride, he’ll take you places you didn’t expect.

King is, for better and at times for worse, a helluva carnival barker. He promises entertainments that are overdetermined and almost tawdry in their sensationalism; he shamelessly deploys the hokiest of conventions and melodramatic plot devices; he falls prey to ham-handed spelling-out of his big themes and ideas.

For instance, King never met a mawkish moment he didn’t feel obligated to milk. The aforementioned son is not just dealing with a divorced, unhappy mother — he’s terminally ill. And vaguely, conveniently psychic.

However, like the greatest pop entertainers (or with dazzling carny confidence), he does so with a deceptive precision and craft that packs a real wallop. King embraces his sentimentality, which he tempers with tough-minded reflections on pain, death, anger. There are two moments that had me stunned, emotionally undone despite the fact that I saw the guy on stage gesticulating extravagantly, tugging at our heartstrings.

At his best, and this is one of his best since the underrated BAG OF BONES, King collapses distinctions like sad or horrifying, sentimental or soberingly incisive, crude or complex, generic or literary. JOYLAND, like the best of King, reveals horror’s ability to capture a deep vein of real pain and suffering in the human experience. —Mike Reynolds

Buy it at Amazon.

On May 20, the city of Moore, Okla. (part of the Oklahoma City metro area in which BOOKGASM is located), was decimated by an EF5 tornado that killed 24 people, including seven children hunkered down at Plaza Towers Elementary School. Briarwood Elementary School also was among the hardest-hit areas.

To help the teachers of Plaza Towers and Briarwood restock the school supplies they lost (much of which comes out of their own pockets), our sister site of Buzz Books USA has organized the Authors Love Teachers OK Tornado Relief Auction, and BOOKGASM is a co-sponsor.

Starting today and ending June 30, you have the opportunity to bid on autographed books and bundles graciously donated and signed by roughly two dozen authors, and every penny earned will be used to purchase school supplies on the teachers’ wish list. Shipping is free.

You can see the full list here, but BOOKGASM readers might find these items of particular interest:
• Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s TWO GRAVES and GIDEON’S SWORD
• Max Allan Collins’ “Butcher’s Dozen Book Box” including ROAD TO PERDITION, ROAD TO PURGATORY, ROAD TO PARADISE, KISS HER GOODBYE, THE BIG BANG, STRIP FOR MURDER, A KILLING IN COMICS, NO ONE WILL HEAR YOU and many more!
• Ed Gorman’s BAD MOON RISING, CAGE OF NIGHT and FOOLS RUSH IN
• Lou Berney’s WHIPLASH RIVER and GUTSHOT STRAIGHT
• William Bernhardt’s CAPITOL BETRAYAL, CAPITOL DEFENSE and CAPITOL CONSPIRACY

Other authors include such best-sellers as Lily Koppel, Jane Porter, Beth Hoffman and Julia London. We hope you’ll bid — and bid generously — or at least spread the word!

THE HEIST is a new series and the start of a writing partnership between Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. I’ll cut to the chase: Get in on the ground floor, folks. This is a fun ride with two characters who, as much as they battle one another, are going to make a great team.

FBI Agent Kate O’Hare has been on the hunt of an elusive con man. To say he has gotten the best of her over the years is to put it mildly. He is so ahead of the game he actually uses photos of Kate as part of his schemes. He’s Nicolas Fox, an expert at pulling off crimes he gets away with, scot-free, no matter how hard O’Hare works to stop him.

I’m assuming the idea of naming the hunted Fox and the hunter O’Hare is a bit of fun by the authors. And trust me, this book is just that fun. This is not some dour, depressing crime read. THE HEIST is one of those great summer reads.

All of this leads into the two forming an uneasy partnership. I’m not going to go into details of how it all comes together, since it would ruin the fun of the story. Let’s leave it at O’Hare being none too thrilled about it, especially after all her years of chasing Fox, but there is a bigger fish to fry: a crooked investment banker who has absconded with a load of money.

Our two leads put together a team to pull a con that will not only retrieve the money, but capture the banker. Throughout the book, Evanovich and Goldberg perform great character development for O’Hare, a determined woman who is so job-centric that the rest of her life is passing her by. Fox is shown as this charming thief who is not only a master at his craft, but one who can work out a plan rather quickly.

The third act of THE HEIST is the con itself, filled with twists and turns and one very large grenade launcher. When you are a rich heiress, it just comes in handy.

Evanovich and Goldberg gel as a writing team. Never does a portion of the book feel like it’s there just for the page count. There are some truly funny little touches throughout, especially with some of Fox’s aliases that fans of 1980s TV will recognize. Hopefully, we will see more from this duo — both the authors and their pair of characters — sooner than later. —Bruce Grossman

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Jeffery Deaver’s THE KILL ROOM is the 10th novel to feature Lincoln Rhyme, the forensic investigator whose body may be restricted to a wheelchair, but whose mind is unfettered. While all the familiar characters and characteristics are present, Deaver manages to give the story a contemporary twist, resulting in one of the strongest titles of the series.

In a fancy resort in the Bahamas, a sniper’s gunshot shatters a window and kills Robert Moreno, a wealth American expatriate highly critical of his home country. In New York City, Rhyme is immediately briefed on the shooting by his contacts in the police department and is then hired by the district attorney to investigate the murder. A U.S. government intelligence organization is suspected of ordering Moreno’s death before Moreno could carry out a suspected terrorist agenda.

The case presents several unusual challenges for Rhyme and his team — which, as always, includes the lovely Amelia Sachs, his chief investigator and lover for several years. For one thing, the crime scene is half a world away; for another, what’s left has been corrupted by the resort management and the seemingly inept Bahamian law enforcement.

Nonetheless, Rhyme presses on, collecting what evidence he can as well as background on the victims and the near-impossible trajectory of the bullet that killed Moreno.
 
Meanwhile, a brutal and sadistic contract killer is busy eliminating all those who had recent contact with or worked with the murdered Moreno. The killer soon learns of the investigation and sets his sights on Sachs and Rhyme.
 
All the usual elements of this thriller franchise are here: the evolving whiteboard listing of victims and evidence, the combination of Internet research and old-school face-to-face interviews; and the more personal touches, like Rhyme’s perfectionist taunts about investigative techniques, as well as grammar, and the strained but enduring relationship between him and Sachs. Yet as familiar as they are to loyal readers, they here feel reassuring, rather than tired and redundant.
 
This is due in no small part to Deaver’s efforts to add new challenges for his characters. Rhyme is due for a round of surgery that, while highly experimental, may result in increased use of his arms. Sachs, in the meantime, hides personal injuries that could cost her career if discovered. All of these are highlighted by Rhyme making a very rare sojourn outside the security and safety of his home-based lab to secure essential evidence.
 
Even the series of narrative red herrings — a common feature to most Rhyme stories, if not Deaver’s work in general — are incorporated more as unexpected plot twists rather than frustrating dead-ends. Deaver even gives the murder weapon a highly imaginative and present-day tweak.
 
If there is a downside to this, it is the sudden series of politically tinged revelations in the novel’s last quarter. At first, they help explain the motive behind the murder. Eventually, they increase in size and complexity, like a snowball rolling downhill, to where they become confusing and exhausting.
 
Fortunately, the little extra effort needed to follow it all pays off, and THE KILL ROOM keeps the Rhyme character and his series as fresh and fascinating as the earlier titles, while leaving us wondering what’s next in store for this unique criminologist and his partners. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.
 

David Searls’ YELLOW MOON has an odd provenance, coming out this month through Samhain Publishing almost 20 years after its initial publication. Its earlier incarnation in mass-market paperback was packaged with a close-up of a child’s face with fierce yellow eyes. The new edition has a (very cool) painting of a bleak volcanic landscape; tomato-like red bulbs on snarled vines in the foreground; a sickly yellow sky; a winged, Q-like beast hovering as if to pounce on the reader.

Is this a reframing of a poorly marketed lost classic? Or something more like mere nostalgia?

Maybe mostly that latter option: MOON offers up solid monster-horror-chiller-theater thrills without much pomp or depth, but some measure of efficient craft.

Sleepy small-town Cleary, Ohio, grapples with an influx of dead-eyed vagrants who mutter vague threats about “inviting” the Yellow Moon in and seem to be communicating telepathically. Soon, voices are whispering from drains; interdimensional tunnels pop up near a ballfield and lure a ragtag group of kids into the worst nature preserve ever; and vaguely Lovecraftian things begin to zombify and physically transform the townsfolk. Cue the mayhem, gore, monsters, descriptions of the undescribable Otherness of it all. Those of us likely to pant about a painting of a monster on the cover of a book are likely to have a decent time, before we turn the channel.

Yet … voices in the drains, a big bad from beyond creeping through dimensions and fought by kids? At the time of its initial publication, the echoes of Stephen King’s IT made Searls’ novel more of an obvious theft than homage. That, too, is a pleasure of the Saturday matinee; Joe Dante’s PIRANHA has its own toothy pleasures, and takes wicked delight in riffing on (or razzing) Steven Spielberg’s JAWS. MOON, however, is alas a bit more like a Syfy cash-in than Cormanic fun. Its pleasures are often IT’s pleasures, and, while slickly effective, the novel lacks anything beyond cursory character development and monsters.

But it does have monsters. And where King builds a 1,000-page behemoth, MOON races past in a couple hundred. Maybe pop some corn and give it a go. —Mike Reynolds

Buy it at Amazon or Samhain Publishing.

All good things must come to an end. That’s how I’m going to look at THE GILA WARS, Larry D. Sweazy’s final entry in the Josiah Wolfe series. What has been some of the most solid Western writing to come down the pike these past few years goes out on top.

For those who have been reading this series from the start, yes, Sweazy ties up the loose ends. While that is great and all, things just don’t end the way you’d might like. Here’s a spoiler: Wolfe lives. But he does have to deal with some unexpected turns.

Unlike the previous entry, GILA WARS is more action-oriented. I’m talking a huge chunk that deals with gunfights and plenty of other Western action. The basic plot is centered around the Red Raids, the wholesale cattle rustling that went on between Texas to Cuba, and the hunting down of real-life figure Juan Cortina. Wolfe and partner Scrap Elliot are given the task of spying on the Mexicans, then relaying the information to the troops for attack. While I’m giving the plot broad strokes, it’s best to go into this novel so that the surprises can show themselves.

This being the last, Wolfe’s life goes through some changes — namely, his longtime sweetheart giving him the Dear John treatment. There is a death of note and Wolfe comes to terms with his years as a Ranger and how they affected him.

Sweazy does not pull a George R.R. Martin, folks, so be grateful about that. But it’s sad for this Western lover to see such a fine series end. Sweazy leaves certain things open so that at some later point, he could revisit this wonderful world of Western heroes. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

Prepare to be slimed! Alex Schubert’s bodacious and burnt-out BLOBBY BOYS are coming this September from Koyama Press, and to whet your appetite for misbehaving blobs of slime, Schubert has created an exclusive book trailer:

Buy it at Koyama Press.

The good news: Duane Swierczynski’s POINT & SHOOT is the long-awaited final book in his outrageous Charlie Hardie trilogy. The bad news: It’s the final book of the trilogy. But take heart, as this concluding novel is just as gloriously over the top as the first two titles (FUN & GAMES and HELL & GONE), if not a bit more so.
 
As punishment for having escaped the world’s most secure (and secretive) prison, former near-cop and professional house-sitter Charlie Hardie is condemned to spend his days inside a tight-fitting satellite orbiting 500 miles above the earth.

One morning, as he completes his boring daily routine of checking the various monitors and control read-outs, Hardie hears the last thing in the world he ever expected to hear: a knock on the satellite door.
 
The surprise visitor, who looks exceedingly familiar to Hardie, says he’s there to rescue him. But he’s also there to retrieve a microchip hidden somewhere in the satellite that contains information that could bring the clandestine organization that condemned Hardie — referred to as the Cabal, or the Secret America, or most often as The Accident People — to its knees.
 
Before the microchip is found, the satellite crashes into the ocean. Now Hardie is determined to find his estranged wife and teenaged son before they fall victim to the Cabal agents who once tried to kill him and sent him to prison. So Hardie and his new associate set out on a cross-country trip to find his family in their hidden, government relocated house in Hollywood — that is, Hollywood, Penn.
 
Any story that begins with an escaped prisoner serving time in a low-orbit satellite is a sure bet that you’re in for something a bit, well, unusual. Then again, those who have followed Hardie through the first two novels already know that the unusual is as near as you get to an anticipated norm in this saga. Yet, as extreme as it seems, the opening situation is only the beginning of the series of nonstop, complex and hilarious episodes Swierczynski has in store for us.
 
The prose style remains the same wonderful mash-up of hard-boiled sarcasm and pop-culture references that drove the first two books. By now Swierczynski makes it seem easy; until you take a closer look and discover how complicated and risky this style is. His voice remains one of the enduring joys of this trilogy.
 
To even hint at what Hardie and his new off-and-on frenemy face after leaving the satellite would ruin the fun. Suffice to say, they reconnect with several deadly characters from the previous adventures and meet a gaggle of new and equally threatening oddballs. Along the way, some pieces of Hardie’s hidden past are revealed. And all of it is presented with a pace so relentless that you’ll go out of your way to avoid any distractions until you finish the very last chapter.
 
Don’t even think about picking up POINT & SHOOT if you haven’t already enjoyed the earlier titles. Oh, sure, there are plenty of references to what previously, but why deny yourself so much insane fun? If you missed them, do yourself a favor and grab them all.
 
It’s by no means hyperbole to say that you’ve never read anything like this trilogy before. You’ll be glad you made Charlie Hardie’s acquaintance and, like those of us who followed him from the get-go, you’ll be sorry that there are no more of his stories to look forward to.
 
But the best news is: We’ve still got Duane Swierczynski. Now that he’s shown us his stuff and left us at the very top of his game, all we can do is sit tight for his next genre-bending, madcap novel. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.
 

Mons Kallentoft is a new (to me) voice in Scandinavian detective fiction. Outside of his standalone novels, he has written six novels featuring Superintendent Malin Fors of the Linköping, Sweden police department. MIDWINTER BLOOD is the first in this series, setting up all the characters of the department; the cold and wintry scene of southern Sweden; and the traditional cruel and brutal, but still intensely human world of Nordic noir.

Not all of the Malin Fors novels have been translated or published in the United States, and while some of them have been published in the UK, it would be nice to get the whole series released here.

The investigation begins with the discovery of a 300-pound-plus man hanging from a tree in a remote field. He has been tortured and mutilated, killed elsewhere as there is little blood on the ground, then hung up as … what, an example? A sacrifice?

Fors and her team finally identify the man as Bengt Andersson, whom everyone called Ball-Bengt, because he used to fetch out-of-bounds balls for the local soccer team. It is not a fond nickname. In fact, he seems to have led a tormented and lonely life, ignored by most, bullied by some. But who hated him so much to beat and hack him to death, and then hang him?

The investigation slows as Fors and her team are stonewalled by an uncooperative family who form the dregs of Swedish society, and by the presence of a professor who claims that this ritual murder has ties to ancient pagan beliefs. With dogged police work, and the curious insights of Fors, the team eventually discovers the culprit, but only at some emotional cost.

Author Kallentoft is very much an example of the new Scandinavian mystery writers. The genre is known for its exploration of intimate emotions, family structures, and the social and institutional bonds that connect us all. Whereas American mysteries often feature a lone wolf as a main character, these Northern European mysteries tend to focus on teamwork, connections, the family within and the family without. They can be quite intense.

Kallentoft goes a step further, experimenting with style and storytelling approaches akin to, but not quite as effective as, Karin Fossum. He will set a scene with short, choppy sentence fragments attempting for a poetic gloss on love or hate or family. He even has the corpse tell part of the story by talking to Malin Fors, who cannot hear him.

Some of this can be a bit annoying, but once you read through the first 50 or so pages and get used to his style, you’ll enjoy the story of Malin Fors and her team at Linköping. I hope the whole series gets translated. In the meantime, you can start with MIDWINTER BLOOD. —Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.

On the spectrum of Nordic noir fiction styles, Liza Marklund tends to be at the action/thriller end. She’s more Trevanian than Åke Edwardson, or for that matter, more Stieg Larsson than Karin Fossum.

Oh, the angst and gloom and dourness and cold, rainy weather are all in there as normal, but Marklund doesn’t mind throwing in, say, a professional and extremely competent assassin nicknamed Kitten who, in the brilliant opening scene, walks into the Nobel Prize ceremony, calmly shoots four individuals and kills her target with a shot through the heart, then escapes by boat. Snazzy.

In LAST WILL, Marklund’s series character reporter Annika Bengtzon is at the ceremony and is able to give the police a description of the killer. This leads to a whirlwind of disaster as Kitten continues to kill in order to hide her tracks.

Bengtzon, in her unusual relationship with Inspector Q of the police, learns of the hunt for the killer, but a gag order has been placed on her to prevent her writing anything about the murder. This threatens her employment opportunities.

Bengtzon is under threat from other things as well. She has to deal with her self-absorbed prat of a husband in a marriage that is sure to end poorly, and her new neighbor is an officious and arrogant prick who is prone to shouting matches. Her best friend seems to have become a parasite — and oh, yeah, there’s still that assassin running around.

The author’s breezy style filled with dialogue makes for quick reading and a fast-paced story. She occasionally spends too much time on distracting red herrings and way too intense self-examination, but that’s a fault of most Scandinavian mysteries. If you’ve been intrigued by Nordic noir, and you’re already done with the Stieg Larsson series, you may want to give Marklund a try. —Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.

A novella from the prolific Tom Piccirilli, WHAT MAKES YOU DIE has a small connection to a previous work, 2011′s EVERY SHALLOW CUT, in the sense that main character Tommy Pic was the author of that book. This short work opens with Tommy waking to find himself once again strapped to his bed in a mental hospital, all while his loving family looks on: his sister, mother and aunt … or his dead father and brother.

And that’s about the most normal thing about this story of coming to terms. Tommy Pic was once a screenwriter out in L.A., where his more personal scripts were made into movies most people have never heard of, while the crap he churned out about an alien has been seen by all and led to countless sequels.

WHAT MAKES YOU DIE is not lighthearted fare. But it’s also not a dark dive into the abyss that the main characters seems to think he is on. Once out of the hospital, Tommy tries to make sense of it all, especially when his agent calls to tell him his latest work is dynamite, but needs a little work and more pages; only Act 1 has been completed.

The book jumps around a bit in Tommy’s life with an eventful party that was the last straw and made him go crawling back to the East Coast to go live in his mother’s basement while also fixating on a childhood incident to which he is directly connected: a missing girl with whom he was best friends.

This novella packs a lot into its 164 pages, from Tommy feeling as though he is just one more bottle away from desperation, to making his life into a bizarre screenplay at a film club gathering, and his encounters with a witch. All of this will make sense to readers as they take this scenic trip through the mind of a struggling artist. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

Elly Griffiths is back! Her fifth novel in the Dr. Ruth Galloway series, A DYING FALL, returns the series to its former glory after two somewhat disappointing entries. For the record, the series runs in order THE CROSSING PLACES, THE JANUS STONE, THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END, A ROOM FULL OF BONES and now A DYING FALL.

The main protagonist is Dr. Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist working at a small Norfolk university. She has a young child, fathered by the local, and quite married, Detective Chief Inspector, Harry Nelson. One of her best friends is an outrageous druid named Cathbad, who loves to prance around in purple cloaks and speak mysteriously of natural magic.

These characters — all of whom have been drawn at great length, with care, affection and dynamism throughout the series — get involved in a murder investigation near Blackpool, DCI Nelson’s old stomping grounds. An archaeologist named Dan Golding has perished in a house fire, one that was deliberately set, with the door locked from the outside.

But a day or so before this murder, Golding had written a letter to Galloway, indicating he had made a significant discovery, but that he was afraid … of something. He hoped Galloway would visit so they could discuss the matter.

She gets the letter after hearing of Golding’s death and is determined to find out what Golding had discovered. At the same time, Nelson and his Blackpool pals on the force begin to investigate the murder.

Galloway is astonished to find that the discovery Golding made may have been of the bones of one Arthur Rex, King Arthur. But when she goes to examine the bones at the forensics lab, she finds that the bones come from two different skeletons and are far more recent than they should be. Someone has switched the bones.

The Galloway series is almost always charming, very human and character-driven. It’s not too archaeologically intense (in case you’re not interested in the science) and Griffiths’ writing style, although written in the present tense, is smooth. There’s a subtle sense of humor throughout that’s also appreciated.

If you’re looking for a new series to follow, I recommend this one. Books three and four had a few moments of weirdness in them, but this new entry once again sets the tone. —Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.

Here in Oklahoma City, there was an Asian restaurant called Long Wang. Or maybe it was Long Dik or Long Wong. I don’t recall exactly, but the point is, it had a name that was juvenile-level funny, completely inadvertent and totally phallic.

Whatever it was called, it would have found a fine home in PU PU HOT POT: THE WORLD’S BEST RESTAURANT NAMES. Ben Brusey’s humor title presents full-color photos of 100 such places and then throws in a caption that isn’t always needed.

Among the square-in-shape book’s eateries from all over the globe include Chickpizz, My Dung, In & Come Coffee, Lick-a-Chick and Fuku Sushi. Not all the names are accidental in nature, as places like Tequila Mockingbird and Brewed Awakening attest.

In other words, if the contents were an email, it’s the kind of thing your dad would forward to his entire list of contacts. If PU PU HOT POT is your sort of thing, I think it’s best browsed while sitting on the toilet, which is where you’re likely to end up for a spell after dining at the likes of Pee & Poo Steak House. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Two scuzzy, “spun” meth-heads take their first glance out the window after a few days’ sabbatical from the world and get a glimpse of apocalypse: They see a small girl, a vision of “innocence,” approaching a fierce-looking Rottweiler, and they fear for her. And then the dog crouches in fear, cowers away, and the child leaps for it. Hearts hammering, they shriek and close the curtain. A couple moments later, they cautiously peek back out.

… Innocence is standing two feet from the window, bloody like the First World War, and before I can scream and close the drapes, I take one close look, like really study her. Pieces of her flesh peel off her face like thin slices of gyro meat.

Peter Stenson’s FIEND opens with a needle jammed straight into your neck, and once your heart is thumping the novel feels like a three-day sleepless binge, rubbing your nerves raw. Billed as THE WALKING DEAD meets BREAKING BAD, it is another in the ever-circling skeletal family of zombie novels. The protagonists are junkies — turns out methamphetamine protects against whatever virus gets the “Chucklers” out chomping flesh — and the novel’s jitters stem as much from the itch of addiction as from the plague of the resurrected dead.

Some of these recent novels have shuffled away from the pack, riffing on the generic template established by George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as a vehicle for post-9/11 cultural anxieties: Daryl Gregory’s glorious RAISING STONY MAYHALL is a sly zombildungsroman, a coming-of-age political fable, while Colson Whitehead’s ZONE ONE is a darker satire on the Age of Terror.

Others — like Alden Bell’s THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS, stealing its baroque prose from the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor, or this novel by Stenson, plucking its protagonist from Hubert Selby (or Darren Aronofsky) and the long tradition of drain-circling, self-destructive addicted schmucks — are less concerned with the metaphorical resonance of the mythology than the authorial showboating possible within the generic constraints of zombie horror.

What Stenson does very well is make his readers scratch at their skin. Yet his zombies are far less likely to make you twitch; it’s the skeevy jittery behaviors of his survivors that frays the nerves. At his best, Stenson uses apocalyptic horror as a complement to the paranoid dread of the drug novel. He captures a feverish intensity — and deploys a bleak, sick humor, visible right in that terrific opening sequence — in staccato, pungent prose. The book zips along, and the few moments of big action (a drugstore run that ends in a zombie siege; a confrontation with a gang of Canadian addicts) are written with style to burn.

Unfortunately, drug addicts, like zombies, have their frustrating generic tics. Protagonist Chase does an awful lot of mooning over his ex, whining about his bad choices, and repeating of those bad choices. (Much like most every drug addict. To be fair, the only fictional addicts I’ve ever had much interest in were Hunter S. Thompson and Denis Johnson’s Fuckhead.) At its best, FIEND breaks bad, but a little too often it felt a bit like the interminable whining of Rick et al. on that other AMC show.

Speaking of THE WALKING DEAD, let me give a brief shout for another recent riff on the Romero universe. While many of my friends rave about the cable series, I find it fairly often a letdown, constantly missing its opportunities to develop complex characters (or interesting events) in the steady, dread-beat rhythm of the post-apocalypse.

So when I read the cover summary for John Hornor Jacobs’ THIS DARK EARTH, I quickly set the book aside. Yet another zombie apocalypse; yet another ragtag band of survivors trying to keep their community strong against the viciousness of not just the shambling dead, but the predatory survivors; yet another protagonist thrown into leadership who struggles to acknowledge the better angels of his own nature.

But, boy, was I wrong. Where other authors have smashed and reconstructed the genre in new ways, Jacobs is content to fully embrace the conventions. The novel does nothing particularly new, but from its opening at the moment of outbreak in a rural hospital to its inspired riffs on the “frontier community” long after zero day, THIS DARK EARTH is leading the pack.

It’s got everything THE WALKING DEAD ought to: smart characters you actually care about; a rigorous attention to pacing; a devious understanding of how to play familiar scenarios for maximum energy and surprise; and prose that (as each chapter shifts point of view) is varied in form, but consistently excellent. Jacobs is a fantastic writer — and he shows how much life is left in the moaning mob, even when you haven’t got some new, high-concept frame. —Mike Reynolds

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After a handful of mainstream novels and a memoir based upon his former profession, author Rick Yancey found his stride when he began writing novels for the young-adult market with occasional genre-tinged plots (THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ALFRED KROPP, THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST).
 
His latest novel, THE 5TH WAVE, continues this trend with an engaging sci-fi tale of alien invasion and dystopia. Yet, like the best of YA fiction, it’s a story whose style and inventiveness can easily appeal to older readers.

Cassie Sullivan and her family witnessed the appearance and eventual attack of the aliens when the huge mothership first appeared in the skies several years ago. Now the 15-year-old girl finds herself one of the few human survivors of the four waves of the alien domination of the planet … and on the run from the invaders.
 
After a series of near-fatal events, Cassie meets Evan Walker, a young man who also seems alone and surviving thanks to his wits and constant vigilance. They become uneasy friends, and Evan decides to join Cassie in her search for her younger brother, Sam, who was separated from her a while ago. Despite her attraction to Evan, Cassie fears that he can’t be trusted, and might even be part of the feared fifth wave of invasion.
 
Yancey has an impressive ability to completely and convincingly get into the minds and bodies of his young protagonists. This is especially true of Cassie, who drives most of the narrative. Her first-person recollections of the early days of the invasion, with humanity’s ambivalent reaction to the aliens, are drenched in a painful bitterness and loneliness that are often the hallmarks of her adolescence. She expresses a particular contempt for the way popular media always envisioned extraterrestrials — everything from the various adaptations of H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS to Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, E.T. and everything in between.
 
But Cassie’s story is often interrupted with shifts of location and perspective to a teenaged boy and former classmate now going through intense military training in a nearby facility. The boy and his teammates are told that their training must be immediate and intense because they are all the last hope for all Earthlings in preparation for the fifth wave. While the characterizations in these sections are equally convincing, the events seem too familiar and predictable, and thus eliminate the suspense of Cassie’s story and generally diminish the narrative pace to a near-fatal crawl.

Fortunately, things pick up again when she and her former classmate learn the truth of the aliens’ intentions and race to save Sam and escape before the fifth wave is initiated.
 
It doesn’t take much to conclude that this is the debut novel of a series, and that Yancey hopes to enjoy the kind of success and popularity of YA series like THE HUNGER GAMES. The novel’s conclusion is open-ended, and Yancey has launched a tie-in website.
 
What distinguish THE 5TH WAVE from earlier and similar series are its characters and the methodology of the aliens, which are just as easily believable as the novel’s narrators. These are the reasons why this first book likely will find an audience far beyond its core demographic, and why readers will follow it through its continued titles. —Alan Cranis

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Limelight Editions’ latest in its IF YOU LIKE series of pop-culture titles uses the HBO vampire smash TRUE BLOOD as its jumping-off point to recommend more than 200 movies, TV shows and other “and other oddities that you will love.” Due June 11, the book is written by Dave Thompson, who penned last year’s volume on Led Zeppelin. Below are two excerpts into which you may sink your fangs.

A-HUNTING WE WILL GO:
OR, A SPLASH OF HOLY WATER …
In October 2004, Sotheby’s auction house catalogued, and sold for $26,400, what was described as: “a vampire killing kit circa 1900. The walnut box with brass lock and red plush fitted interior contained a wood stake, a double barrel pistol, nine bullets, six bullet cloths, an ivory-mounted wood crucifix, serum and a lidded tin containing powdered flowers of garlic.”

Seven years later, a similar kit sold at the same house for an almost equally remarkable $25,000, and visitors to the various Ripley’s Believe It or Not “odditoriums” scattered around the world can see up to forty more of these fascinating items on public display.

More lurk on eBay; many more are still being manufactured, or at least fabricated from sundry antique items, today. Vampire killing kits are big business, and have been ever since …

… ever since when? Since Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing first went abroad armed with “something like a cricketing bag,” filled with the many and varied tools of his trade? Before that, in the wilds of the European East, perhaps; after that, in the golden age of manic merchandising, for certain. According to an investigation in the Fortean Times magazine in spring 2012, the earliest printed reference to an actual “real life” vampire killing kit is less than thirty years old, appearing in a House of Swords and Militaria mail-order catalog in the mid-1980s.

This is not to say that people were not making, and using, such kits years, decades, or centuries before then. Just that such specialist tools are probably best regarded as the property of specialist workers. People who really do hunt vampires for a living, people who really do need a monogrammed Gladstone bag. People whose name is Van Helsing.

Or Buffy.

Or even the Fellowship of the Sun.

A LITTLE GOTHIC INTERLUDE
We are going to be hearing a lot more about it as this book rolls on, so let’s get it out of the way right now. Gothic is irrational. It is inhuman, it is hopeless. It is the knowledge that mankind is puny, its dreams, loves, and achievements barely amounting to even atoms in the face of fate. Only one human emotion holds itself erect before the enormity of all that is laid out before, below, above, and around it; only one emotion is timeless, deathless, and endless. Fear.

Gothic is fear—the desolation and hopelessness that hold sway no matter what mankind does to crush them, the ineffable sense of self-worthlessness that dresses in black when the world is in color, that waits for death while life is in full bloom, that prides beauty over rationality, but prizes ugliness higher than even that.

The 1990s fascination with body piercing was no more an affectation than the absinthe-quaffing wastrels of the age of Byron, or the swooning damsels of Mrs. Radcliffe, sipping cumulatively lethal doses of belladonna in order to achieve the dilated pupils of beautiful fashion—and whose legacy lives on in the exaggerated panda eyes of modern gothic-chick glamour.

Gothic is self-perpetuating. When Ian Curtis, singer with the band Joy Division, was found hanging in his kitchen, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot LP was spinning on the turntable. Neither Joy Division nor Iggy were goths, but their music was certainly gothic, beholden to an aesthetic that is as old as man and as black as his heart.

But most of all, gothic is the art of performance, the ultimate artifice in and through which we might discover the ultimate reality. For what, after all, is fantasy if not the direct embodiment of our deepest dreams? And what are dreams if not the shrouded land where gothic is all there is?

At least that’s one way of looking at it.

Because you could also agree that gothic style in its purest state is deplorably dull, a featureless plain of atmosphere, imagery, and silence. For that reason, and that reason alone, great gothic, genuine gothic, has always been accompanied by so much more than its own gothic elements. Humor is a part of it. So is violence, so is sexuality and most potently of all, so is schlock. —Dave Thompson

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How to begin?

3. The garden-variety fictional serial killer — or at least any incarnation after Dr. Hannibal Lecter — is like the world’s worst poet. Every creation is a baroque manifestation of personal desires and symbology. The cop is a New Critic, reading through the signs and severed limbs to see the True Meaning, and thus, capture the killer.

And the writers of such fictions are locked into the closed loop of genre, forced to travel the stations of the cross and genuflect at each utterly familiar landmark or plot point. Lauren Beukes is having none of this malarkey.

Harper Curtis is casually vicious. He does indeed, as he travels through time dispatching his Girls, follow some ornate sense of purpose, does cut and bind and disembowel with an eye toward his own perverse aesthetic. But Beukes mentions such details merely in passing, and she avoids the overdetermined internal monologues of childhood trauma which so often spawned the killer.

Harper just appears, pursues his agenda with commitment, but is prone to homicidal distractions, falls prey to fits of unplanned aggression. He simply murders, or he doesn’t; he simply does what seems right to him, with a great deal of malice but none aforethought.

He is not the generic Icon, yielding to the protagonist’s (and our) critical interrogations, due to be captured as soon as she (and we) solve the puzzle. He simply is. And Kirby’s pursuit is equally declarative, a quest which leads to questions that are never really answered. The goal is not interpretation, but revenge and resolution.

2. The house Harper enters in depression-era Chicago has a body, and an upstairs room with an array of strange small personal objects and names scribbled on the wall, in his handwriting. And he just knows what to do; he somehow knows that the house will take him through time, that he travels and tracks these names throughout 60 years of Chicago history. He finds these girls, and he kills them.

There is no explanation for the House. Or the homicides.

Yet there’s a mad genius to Beukes’ use of the time-travel conceit. Because time-travel novels echo the pathological determinism of the insane killer. Serial killers (or our mythical variants) must return to and repeat their crimes over, and over, and over again. The time-travel plot is a variant of such repetitive determinism, like a temporal locked room — characters move from point to point but do not escape the implications of events. Instead, we move inexorably toward them.

This creates great tension and dread, and THE SHINING GIRLS is a gripping read. We know the (book’s particular) plot and the (book’s generic-template) Plots here, know what has happened or will happen — and are in some ways, like Kirby or even Harper, trapped in the loop.

1. Lauren Beukes has written a high-concept thriller that manages to ground the hyperbolic pitch of its serial-killer-traveling-through-time plot (the misguided back-cover copy touting “THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE meets THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO“) in intense human feeling. Harper Curtis is no outsized Hannibal — he’s mean, dirty, malignant, mortal. Kirby Mazrachi is no supergenius hacker, no psycho-hunting savant — she’s a smart woman who fiercely pursues her attacker. The book moves, in every sense of that verb.

5. I loved it. And loved these characters. And loved the dizzying structural play. It’s as affecting and ingenious a thriller as I’ve read in some time.

4. Kirby meets Harper as a child, in chapter one, and then again much later, as a young woman, where his assault is brutal and bloody yet unsuccessful. The wounds eventually heal, and the scars linger, but Kirby is a sneering, smart, fleshed-out character — a victim, but not a victim; the subject of great horror, but steely in her resistance to being locked into someone else’s story.

The greatest strength of this novel — one full of strengths, from its precision-tooled, time-traveling/serial-killer architecture to its understated yet lovely prose — is its unflinching attention to the horrors wrought upon Harper’s victims that nonetheless refuses to simply reduce them to victims.

The Shining Girls are, sure, illustrative of the kinds of brutal misogyny everywhere in the news, and endemic in the serial-killer novel. But they are not simple symbols. Beukes gives each a rich life, making the taking of that life all the more wrenching. The violence here is vicious, graphic, and she avoids aestheticization (where the serial killer’s elaborate homicidal artifice echoes the author’s, and our, delight in the Art of murder).

I felt the impact of these deaths despite (or enhanced by?) the fragmented shape of the novel, despite (or because of?) the killer’s flat affect. Kirby and the other Girls are drawn with care and compassion, and their deaths move.

This human dimension is what, ultimately, allows escape from the locked room of Time and Genre. Beukes is a crafty thriller technician, but such delights are means to other ends. She writes (here, as in her prior novels, MOXYLAND and ZOO CITY) about characters trapped by context and circumstance, by politics and economics and gender, but still making choices, still acting in meaningful ways. —Mike Reynolds

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John Vorhaus introduced “charming con man” Radar Hoverlander in 2010′s THE CALIFORNIA ROLL, followed by 2011′s alliterative THE ALBUQUERQUE TURKEY. Now he’s back in the Austin-set THE TEXAS TWIST. Let Vorhaus fill you in on what’s in store …

Years ago, I dabbled in situation comedy, and there I encountered something called “the page-test,” which was a way a friend of mine had of reading, and judging, sample scripts that were sent her way. “I’ll open the script and read one page at random,” she said. “On that page I hope to see three things: a good joke; a sense of the story; and a reason to read on. If I don’t get those three things, I don’t bother reading the script.”

Her test was draconian, but fair: For someone who didn’t have a lot of time to make her judgments, she could rightly suppose that if a piece of writing doesn’t work on any arbitrarily selected page, it likely doesn’t work overall. This is a lesson I’ve carried forward into my career as a novelist: I try to make every page stand up to the one-page test. So today, just as an experiment, I’m offering you one page at random of my new novel, THE TEXAS TWIST. I invite you to read it, and then you can decide for yourself whether it passes your own “page-test,” and you can decide if you want to read more.

To ensure that I’m not stacking the deck by feeding you a particularly exciting or cliffhanging page, I’m going to randomize, to the best of my ability, my selection of the sample. THE TEXAS TWIST is about 300 pages long, so I will now go to one of the Internet’s many random-number generators and ask it to provide me with a number within that range. And the number I get is … 111.

Well, here goes nothing.

Let’s see what that page looks like…

[begin inserted text]

she said fiercely. “And I’m going to, whether you help me or not.” She stood up and pivoted completely unselfconsciously into hostess mode. “So, any special food requests? Vegan? Nothing with a face?” They shook their heads. “No? Okay, well, Adam won’t know I was here. He sleeps like a log.” She slipped out the door and closed it quietly behind her.

Said Vic, “That, to me, looked like batshit crazy.”

“Was it intended to, I wonder?” mused Allie.

Before Radar could offer his observations, Sarah knocked on the door once more. This time she only stuck her head in and said softly, “I forgot to tell you: actually I sent Jonah away. To his grandma’s. She knows how to take care of him, and I need to focus all my energy on punishing Adam right now. Which is good for me, I think. You know? It takes my mind off things. Thanks for your support, by the way. You guys are good friends.” She blew them a kiss and withdrew.

Vic said again, with exactly the same inflection, “That, to me, looked like batshit crazy.”

“Yet Jonah is out of the picture,” said Radar.

“As spake the cortisol forecast,” noted Allie.

“I’m high on hormones,” said Radar. “What can I say?”

They went back to bed, but Radar lay awake, reviewing Sarah’s performance. It was contradictory, sloppy, emotionally promiscuous. It shifted shamelessly from mood to mood. It lied, got caught in a lie, and lied some more. What was the hidden logic of that? Maybe Vic’s assessment of batshit crazy was correct. Maybe Sarah just lacked the remotest trace of self-awareness. Maybe she was on a script. Maybe even a script aimed at herself. People do that all the time, tell themselves a series of lies until it sounds like the truth. In any

[end inserted text]

That must have been an odd experience for you, just falling into a story in the middle. Seeing it through your eyes, I’m now not sure this was so useful an exercise after all. It may have been nothing more or less than confusing. But I’m going to let it stand. As my high school chemistry teacher said (just before she blew up the building), “The point of experiments is to experiment.”

So that was my experiment to you, the TEXAS TWIST Test. A more orderly approach to the book is available to you through Amazon or the publisher’s website. Me, I hang out at johnvorhaus.com, and tweet for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact. Peace, out. —John Vorhaus

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If I hadn’t already crowned Austin Grossman’s YOU as the best fiction book I’ve read in the past two years, I might have awarded it to Eli Brown’s CINNAMON AND GUNPOWDER, a rip-roaring novel of the picaresque featuring Patrick O’Brian-style naval warfare action, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN-style comedic piracy romps, and GOURMET magazine-style sensitive writing on foodstuffs.

Chef Owen Wedgwood works is providing a feast for his master, Lord Ramsey, when the manor home is infiltrated by a band of scurvy pirates led by a woman named Mad Hannah Mabbot. She shoots Ramsey dead and decides to kidnap the chef.

Her plan is that every Sunday, Wedgwood will cook a dinner for her and her alone, a sign to her crew of her importance and leadership. Of course, Wedgwood is appalled, he certainly wants to have nothing to do with a pirate crew, let alone a crew that just killed the man he worked for. But he has little choice.

The rest of the novel recounts Wedgwood, Mabbot and the crew’s many adventures as Mabbot slowly reveals to her new chef just exactly what kind of scoundrel Lord Ramsey really was. As you can imagine, the dynamics of the relationship changes, but the author manages to bring this about so gradually that you are never too surprised at any character’s behaviors.

This is a wonderfully fun novel, full of comic moments but never overdone, plastered with gripping action scenes, and actually, rather touching. It brought a tear to my eye and I loved this book the whole way through. It’s not really a mystery, just a great pirate romp. Recommended. —Mark Rose

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Even as a cult-film cinephile, I didn’t know Ben Pivar’s name, but I certainly knew the man’s work. Among his more lasting projects at Universal Pictures were MUMMY sequels, the INNER SANCTUM MYSTERY series and Rondo Hatton vehicles. A producer of some 60 pictures, chiefly in the 1940s, Pivar was a genre machine, cranking out films so fast that they would have their first preview within four days of a finished score.

So says Thomas Reeder in STOP YELLIN’, an exhaustive chronicle (as in roughly 550-pages-exhaustive) of the relatively unknown Hollywood middleweight who died in 1963 at age 62.

Why a book on Pivar? Reeder asks the question himself in the paperback’s introduction. His answer: because no one else would. That’s not necessarily the wisest reason for tackling a biography, but Reeder turns in a commendable work. Pivar’s influence and legacy is arguable, but his career gets a worthy acknowledgement in a book that’s nearly as entertaining as his best works.

At first, STOP YELLIN’ is awash in a mess of names and dates as Reeder tells of his subject’s unremarkable upbringing. He also engages in an annoying habit of ending chapters with throwaway lines, i.e. “But not for too long, as we shall soon see,” “But, as we shall see, not for good” and “And so he did.”

Luckily for all, a dozen or so pages later, the author quickly treads a nice pace once Pivar lands work at Columbia before tirelessly working his way up to his true home at Universal. Chronologically, Reeder tackles each and every Pivar production, veering off-course purposely to review them, too. I’m not complaining; plot synopses are another story.

Before hitting it big — or as big as a B unit could get — with THE MUMMY’S HAND in 1940, Pivar made bank and box office through a string of Richard Arlen/Andy Devine pairings. Other highlights on his résumé of obscurities include 1943′s THE STRANGE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER and 1936′s TRAPPED BY TELEVISION.

Aside from providing the most comprehensive look at Pivar’s career we’re ever likely to see, Reeder does a great job of giving readers a general understanding of how the Hollywood studio system worked at the time, and in particular the role B movies played as wartime entertainment. Strewn into his narrative are nuggets of trivia, such as Robert Ripley having a 14-year-old bride — believe it … or not!

As many of the film-related titles by Bear Manor Media, the big book is not without plenty of poster art and photos, even if a few of them have reproduced so dark that they appear as black blobs.

The only nonvisual element missing is a sour-grapes scenario between Pivar and CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN director Edward Dmytryk. Reeder teasingly alludes to the conflict, but chooses not to give us the details because Pivar isn’t around to provide his side of the story. That’s wholly aggravating and a case of perhaps the author getting so close to his subject (or his subject’s surviving family members, as the case may be) that he’s lost his ability to be subjective. It’s the only instance in which the author didn’t do his job. —Rod Lott

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It’s the ridiculous premise of Fuminori Nakamura’s EVIL AND THE MASK that makes this new work so much less successful than his brilliant debut, THE THIEF.

At the age of 11, Fumihiro Kuki’s father tells the boy that he has been deliberately sired to be a cancer on the face of the earth. It is part of the Kuki tradition that when the patriarch gets to a certain age, he fathers a child who will be taught how to bring misery to as many people as possible for the rest of his life. Eh.

The Kuki family has adopted a young girl named Kaori, and it is this girl that the elder Kuki continues to threaten. He plans to break Kaori and, by extension, Fumihiro. But the two young people have become close and Kuki vows to kill his father and avoid his fate.

After the deed, Fumihiro’s life gets worse. He begins to wonder if he has become the cancer his father wanted him to be, and he believes that he is coming to look physically like his father. This, in turn, distances himself from Kaori.

Eventually, he is so unnerved by his resemblance that he undergoes plastic surgery and takes on a new identity. But even this drastic of a move does not prevent him from feeling that he is evil — evil behind a mask.

The book is filled with the same hand-wringing philosophy that somewhat marred the author’s earlier work, and because this novel is even longer, it gets more annoying. Nakamura definitely has things to say, but I wish he would refine his philosophical arguments, make them more germane to events in the plot, and truly explore the consequences.

As it is, EVIL AND THE MASK is not a terrible book, but it is second-rate compared to THE THIEF. Still, he remains an author to watch. —Mark Rose

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Laura Lippman fans first met suburban madam Heloise Lewis in the story “Scratch a Woman,” included in Lippman’s 2008 collection of short fiction, HARDLY KNEW HER. She obviously felt Heloise’s full story was worth telling, and has made her the central character of the stand-alone novel AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, new to paperback. Along the way, Lippman experiments with different structure and narrative styles. The results are surprising, yet completely satisfying.

Over the years, Heloise has worked hard to make certain her suburban escort service business is safe, secure and, above everything else, secret. Lately, however, all this is slowly unraveling. It starts with the breaking news of the death of a suburban madam in a nearby county — ruled an apparent suicide, but Heloise has her doubts.

Then she learns that Val, the low-level pimp she once worked for, might be released from his prison sentence on a trial technicality. That’s especially worrying since Heloise helped put Val in jail several years ago.

But it’s only the beginning of Heloise’s problems. The vice cop who for years turned a blind eye to her business, and was her inside source to the local police, is about to retire. Her longtime accountant is asking disturbing questions. One of her employees breaks an honored and contracted trust, and another threatens to expose Heloise if she refuses to make good on a worker’s compensation claim.
 
Heloise decides the only solution is to make a clean break and get out of the escort business. But before starts dismantling her firm she discovers frightening links to the death of that nearby madam and her own business, and suddenly fears for her life.
 
Lippman alternates the narrative between the present day events and Heloise’s former life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the latter chapters, we witness the abuse and frustrations that lead Heloise to life as a prostitute and later, under Val’s tutelage, the establishment of her own business. The former, present-day chapters are where we see how Heloise has kept her escort service functioning, even with her limited education and business knowledge, until things begin to unwind.
 
At first, the novel feels like a combined protracted character study and “Making of a Suburban Madam” documentary. Then, as the chapters of Heloise’s early life approach the current day, the various threats solidify and transform the novel into a suspenseful story of misplaced trust, murder and headstrong survival.
 
Lippman has devoted most of her excellent stand-alone novels to more subtle, character-driven crimes. This, however, is the first time she has kept readers waiting this long before learning the central and motivating conflict of her character and story.
 
Yet, thanks to her superb subtle, but straight-ahead prose style and her probing character insights, Lippman makes the wait more than worth while. Along the way, we almost forget that Heloise’s business is, in fact, against the law. Indeed, throughout the entire novel, our notions about sex, gender roles and especially the concept of sex-for-hire are challenged.
 
It’s not every author who can take a slightly out-of-the-ordinary character portrayal and slowly transform it into a suspenseful, murder-laced page-turner — and challenge many long-held personal attitudes at the same time.
 
Lippman, however, is not just any author, as she has proven time and time again. In works like AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, she stretches the boundaries and definition of crime fiction while keeping traditional fans of the genre content and thoroughly entertained. —Alan Cranis

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Harris M. Lentz III’s OBITUARIES IN THE PERFORMING ARTS, 2012 is kind of like having the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” segment in book form, but without the varying bursts of applause to let you know that, even in death, it’s all a popularity contest.

As if there were any question, the 328-page (sadly enough) paperback pays tribute to those actors, actresses, authors, musicians and other artists who left this earth in the last calendar year, from KAMEN RIDER producer Seiji Abe to Argentine actress Olga Zubarry — more than 1,000 in all. Even famous pets make the cut, including the “World’s Ugliest Chihuahua.”

It seems macabre, but such things should be preserved for future generations. That’s what reference books are for.

The nice thing is that, in Lentz’s world, death is an equalizer. By that, I mean that the dearly departed get more or less the same treatment here: a bio and write-up no matter how successful (or un) he or she was. Edith Oss, Hans Jurgen Diedrich and James Polster are as important as Whitney Houston, Vidal Sassoon and Andy Griffith.

Photos are used as often as possible, which is to say for almost every entry. —Rod Lott

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I think most people who have been reading this site for a while know the score: When you see another book from Stark House Press, you know you are going to get your money’s worth. Stark House releases are packed with two reissues and an accompanying essay or two.

KILL THE BOSS GOOD-BY / MISSION FOR VENGEANCE from Peter Rabe is no different. These two novels share the theme of men losing something and wanting it back. The requisite bibliography kicks things off, followed by Rick Ollerman’s fascinating essay about Rabe’s work and style. It’s quite informative and I loved the Charles Willeford comparisons. My suggestion is to not read it until afterwards, because it contains minor spoilers for these two (and other) Rabe classics.

KILL THE BOSS GOOD-BY can be summed up by the adage, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. And play they do in this 1956 novel, which is definitely a different type of book in the noir canon.

Tom Fell was the local boss who left town for personal reasons (revealed to be that he is a manic depressive), so while he’s away, up-and-comer Pander sees an opportunity. As the story opens, Fell arrives back in town to see a lot of changes, like his bookie operations having gone silent due to raids, and Pander having grown his operation by embracing the technology of the time: two-way radios in cars, so that bets and odds can be updated rather quickly.

All Fell sees in all this is his once-proud empire crumbling before his eyes. He is trying to open his own track, but with construction going at a snail’s pace, it just adds to his mountain of issues.

Rabe paces the outcome very deliberately, so the reader can see things are not going to work out right for one of these two. And more than likely, it’s not going to be the one who spent time in a sanatorium. This is a story of a once-powerful man losing it all in front of his eyes. Even with all his bluster and threats, things just don’t go his way.

Onto 1958′s MISSION OF VENGEANCE. His name is Farret and he has a few scores to settle. You would, too, if you just left a South American prison after what you thought was a set-up. But who set him up and double-crossed him and his gun-running days?

The bulk of this novel is told through the eyes of a man named Miner. As you can surmise, Miner is one of the people on Farret’s hit parade, so to speak. So is a woman named Lena, a man named Metz and finally, Getterman, who also happens to be Miner’s future father-in-law. Each of these three is a top-priority target.

At the outset, MISSION OF VENGEANCE is your basic revenge story. But Rabe adds his own style to the proceedings, meaning it’s going to get bloody and brutal, and rather quickly. Throughout the tale, Miner is one step behind Farret, who comes off as an unstoppable force with revenge being the driver.

Rabe then pulls a great reveal in the final pages. I didn’t see it coming until it was all spelled out. For me, that’s the greatest type of thriller to enjoy.

Crime fans, if you have not picked up any of the many Stark House Press reissues thus far, you are truly doing yourself a disservice. For me, they have delivered big with each and every release. That’s the highest compliment I can hand out to a terrific indie publisher. —Bruce Grossman

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I love a good oral history. Not only for the different viewpoints and opinions of events that happened, but all the tidbits we otherwise would never have heard about. I’m thinking of books like PLEASE KILL ME and WE”VE GOT THE NEUTRON BOMB, both of which covered the punk scenes in New York and Los Angeles, respectively.

Now, Steve Miller (not the singer) has gone one step above with DETROIT ROCK CITY by condensing five decades of the Motor City’s rock scene. Let me stress the rock aspect; there is no Motown to be found. There already are plenty of fine books about that subject.

One thing DETROIT ROCK CITY readers will notice is that it seems that everyone who was ever involved in the scene in some function is interviewed. Not all interviews are new; notably, the Bob Seger portions are reprints from two 1970s interviews, while The Stooges’ Ron and Scott Asheton are also from a previously published interview. But you would have no clue, since their stories fit in perfectly.

Of course, the book starts off with tales of the development of old rock ballrooms and the bands that would play there, including MC5 and The Stooges. But they were not the only bands around; stories of Alice Cooper and Mitch Ryder are included, plus the development of what would become the influential CREEM magazine.

There is nothing really groundbreaking or new here, as many of these stories have been told before. Still, it’s a blast to relive these times through these passages. What you will learn mainly is that everyone — and I do mean everyone — agreesupon one thing: Ted Nugent is and has always been a giant asshole.

The second section of Miller’s book focuses on the 1970s to the early 1980s, when CREEM would flourish while also losing one of its more opinionated writers, Lester Bangs, to a drug overdose. People would say the magazine lost a step once he was gone.

This is also where we get nothing — and I do mean nothing — but nice things said about Seger. Everyone who ever played with him at this time has respect for him, saying that he went well above what was required. For example, including band members in the royalties of albums they barely had any involvement in. Seger comes off as just a hard-working musician who busted his ass. Even if you’re not a fan of his music, you will respect his ethics.

This section of the book is also where it delves into passages that could have been edited tighter or just cut, because when it moves into discussions about clubs coming and going, some readers’ eyes will glaze over. Same about tales of musicians’ drug habits. To say heroin was prominent in the Detroit music scene is like saying a lot of beer is consumed on St. Patrick’s Day.

Miller provides interviews that lay it all out there, with no sugar coating. Everyone is called out on his or her actions. This is also where we find some of the 1960s’ heroes falling upon hard times, be it jail time or drugs, but also just trying to scrape by. At this time, Iggy Pop constantly dangled a Stooges reunion in front of his former bandmates (but this would not take until the 2000s).

The final section takes readers from the ’80s to the present, with whole sections dedicated to the development of punk clubs, hardcore shows and Touch and Go Records, which would be responsible for a variety of acts to reach a wider audience. We get an inside look at The Gories, a promising band that imploded. Fans of Mick Collins will find this of great interest.

And where would a book about Detroit be without The White Stripes’ Jack White? We learn that from the start, he was a only looking out for himself. In his first band, he didn’t want to sign away his material to a label like Sub Pop. No one goes into the gossipy bits that have circled White, like his marriage to his former bandmate, but we get full details of what was nothing more than a bar fight with a former friend. No one’s opinion of White will change. You are either a fan or you think of him as very opportunistic. And you can’t blame him for abandoning his hometown.

As I stated earlier, every Detroit band is given space in this tome, even Insane Clown Posse and Kid Rock. Here we are told stories of two very hard-working outfits who found their niches and went with it. Fans of those acts expecting detailed histories should know these pages total about 10. But I did get a great laugh about ICP working with Alice Cooper, who by that point, was more concerned with his golf game than anything else. It’s pretty priceless reading.

On the whole, DETROIT ROCK CITY cuts itself a huge swatch to make accessible. A bit more trimming here and there would have streamlined it even more so certain points wouldn’t feel so hit-or-miss. But then, those who remember these times will find it fun to relive. —Bruce Grossman

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Time for another round of the 1970s Marvel Comics novels featuring a cavalcade of superheroes. I’d like to thank the owner of these books for letting me have the chance to finally read some of them. They definitely are a mixed bag. This time. we have the first family of Marvel, the Fantastic Four; your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man; and the big, green goliath known as the Incredible Hulk, who stomps right into action.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK: CRY OF THE BEAST by Richard S. Meyers — Why does Meyers’ name seem so familiar? Oh, I know: Because all the other books I’ve read by him were under his pen name, Wade Barker. Longtime BBB&B readers may be groaning, since Barker’s books are from the NINJA MASTER series, which truly scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

This 1979 paperback should have been called THE INCREDIBLE HULK: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES. Let me ask you, dear readers: If you were going to set a story in Africa and have the Hulk there, don’t you think at some point, the Black Panther should make an appearance? There’s not one mention of him here, although he would have been a great addition to this poorly conceived mess.

The story starts out with Bruce Banner witnessing what he thinks is a mugging, but actually is a kidnapping that causes him to turn into the jolly green giant. Hulk is confronted by an African man known only as The General who does not fear him, but wants to hire him. The plot moves along as Banner is actually in New York to meet a radiation specialist who turns to be the kidnapping victim.

As one thing leads to another, Banner finds himself on the way to Africa with a man and woman connected to the specialist. From this part on, the book is a low-rent men’s adventure with Hulk as the hero. We get pages and pages of Banner not being the Hulk and explaining his problem to the woman.

At the big climax, it’s revealed The General was nothing more than a puppet for the true villain. Don’t get excited, folks: There are no Marvel villains in this book, which seems more in tone with the HULK TV series than the actual comic. It’s so lackadaisical, you shouldn’t even bother.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: DOOMSDAY by Marv Wolfman — An open letter (actually a plea) to 20th Century Fox: Since you are rebooting the Fantastic Four for a new movie, how about this time, you have someone who knows the material write the script? Better yet, use this 1979 book as a framework.

It hits on all aspects. That might be because Wolfman wrote it. The longtimw Marvel Comics scribe is responsible for one of the greatest runs of comics ever: THE TOMB OF DRACULA. Wolfman does a great job with this story. At no point does he dumb it down. The origin of the Fantastic Four is recapped in a quick paragraph, courtesy of Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin’ Thing.

The character who we get a full history for is none other than the greatest enemy of our foursome: Victor Von Doom aka Dr. Doom. Wolfman retells the story from Doom’s birth to his time at college with one Reed Richards. The story deals with a class reunion of sorts at Reed and Ben’s college, when an unexpected and uninvited guest arrives: that monarch from Latveria, Dr. Doom. He is there to invite the Fantastic Four to his country as a goodwill gesture.

Anyone who have ever read a Fantastic Four comic knows full well that Doom is up to no good. As soon as the FF lands, the trouble starts. The group is split up and attacked, all while Doom works on his master plan to harness the power of the Negative Zone. All of this is perfect FF material, and each member of the team is featured prominently.

Wolfman keeps the story going, never heading off to a tiresome tangent. This is the one book to really search out for. If only Marvel could use plots like this once again in the comic, instead of doing yet another stupid, “we are killing off a member of the team, only to bring him/her back a few months later” trick.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: CRIME CAMPAIGN by Paul Kupperberg — Finally, Spidey swings into the column. I need to point out that Paul Kupperberg has written for this very site in the past and actually covered a few of these books himself. Thankfully, this 1979 one does not fall into the dud category.

This entry has a variety of subplots, but the main one deals with the upcoming election of the New York City mayor and candidate Ian Forester, a former newscaster. For all the good he wants to do, someone is pulling his strings. It’s pretty simple to figure out since the string puller is right there on the cover: Wilson Fisk, aka The Kingpin, who has Forester’s daughter under lock and key for insurance.

Kupperberg throws a few monkey wrenches into this story with his subplots. First is that of a second Spider-Man who is going around town threatening Forester at press conferences. Then there is the new love of Peter Parker’s life: a girl named Cindy, the niece of his boss, J. Jonah Jameson. I won’t spoil any of these threads, but anyone who knows his Spidey history will figure out one of them with ease.

CRIME CAMPAIGN is solid and fun and could have easily been used as a plot for the comic. There are plenty of those moments of Spidey’s humor breaking through, while also allowing the pathos of Kingpin trying to curtail his criminal ways. This one should be added to the collection of any fan of Spider-Man, especially if you come across a reasonable priced copy. It takes less than two hours to read. —Bruce Grossman

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So unique and creative is the concept behind Jeff Zwirek’s BURNING BUILDING COMIX that I’ll forgive the book’s unwieldiness. On purpose, it really can’t be read easily anywhere other than a flat surface.

The comic is unlike any other. The book unfolds into a vertical depiction of the outside of a 10-story apartment building. Open either half and you’ll see each story of the complex gets its own, well, story. You’re instructed to read starting at the ground floor and work your way up, level by level.

On that ground floor is where a miserable man attempting suicide by hanging starts a fire when he accidentally knocks over a candle. On each floor above, the blaze spreads and we watch how the various residents deal with it — or don’t.

Zwirek has given each one a different personality, from a vengeful ex-boyfriend to an old lady with her dog, to a man too obese to make a simple escape. All are funny.

Two things astonished me here:
1. how Zwirek was able to tell one overall tale while also telling 10 separate ones, and
2. that he was able to do all this without dialogue. His cartoon art conveys everything.

From my understanding, this hardback collects the run of self-published mini-comics, but I can’t imagine this working as well in an issue-to-issue format. Simply put, BURNING BUILDING COMIX is utterly ingenious. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Top Shelf Productions.

With the Belmont Stakes coming up June 9, animal advocate and best-selling author Rory Freedman begs readers to love all creatures great and small in “a radical new way,” in her new book, BEG, published by Running Press. The excerpt below is from the section fittingly titled “Cruelty You Can Bet On.”

When I was in college at the University of Maryland, everyone would get all jazzed up over Preakness, an annual horserace in Baltimore. No one actually cared about the race itself, they just wanted to have an opportunity to go somewhere and get drunk. When people would ask me why I wasn’’t going, I’’d explain that I didn’’t think horses were put on this earth so I could be entertained by them or make money off of them— and that Preakness, the Kentucky Derby, and all the other awful races were all the same.

I’’d then have to listen to a lot of misinformed, smug frat boys in annoying, know-it-all sounding voices say things like, “Race horses are treated better than most people treat their kids.” Really? ’Cause I don’’t know any parents who allow people to beat their kids with crops, or who force their children to race around tracks at top speeds on hard-packed clay on their teeny, tiny ankles, way before their skeletal structure is finished developing, causing them fractures, strained tendons, and terrifying tumbles. I also don’’t know any parents who inject their kids with illegal drugs, or who ship them off to slaughter for dog food, glue, or meat for humans (Asia, South American, and Europe) when they can no longer race and make money for them. 

Just because women want an occasion to wear fancy hats and men want an excuse to wear seersucker suits and smoke cigars does not justify the exploitation and ultimate murder of these beautiful and innocent animals. Either people just don’’t know any better or it’s the epitome of selfishness, shallowness, and senselessness. Surely we can find or invent other occasions to get drunk, smoke cigars, and wear big hats and seersucker. —Rory Freedman

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From Beg:  A Radical New Way of Regarding Animals (pages 83-84) by Rory Freedman, just published by Running Press.

With six thrillers to his credit, Andrew Gross no longer need identify himself as one of James Patterson’s co-authors. While his voice is not yet distinctive, he can be trusted to provide imaginative plots, credible characters and enough mounting tension to merit any thriller fan’s time.
 
NO WAY BACK, Gross’ latest, is another example of this. It’s a contemporary thriller with a relevant plot and believable central characters, marred only slightly by an occasionally faulty structure.

Wendy Gould, an attractive urban mom, is on a night out in the city, waiting for a friend to join her in a hotel bar, when she unexpectedly witnesses a murder. Before she knows it, she is on the run from rogue federal agents determined to keep her silent.

Wendy is convinced that knowing who the murdered man was and why he was killed will help put her life back to normal. But she must first keep one step ahead of those crooked agents who will stop at nothing to catch her.
 
At the same time, Lauritzia Velez, a devoted nanny, is at a local mall with the two children she looks after when a man with a gun suddenly opens fire. Lauitzia’s immediate response is to protect the children, but when she recognizes a distinguishing mark on the gunman, she realizes that she was the actual target. She is then forced to reveal her secret past to the family that has supported and loved her as one of their own, while fearing that there will be more attempts made on her life.
 
Through the course of events, we see how the fates of these two different women share a common connection with the ruthless head of a Mexican drug cartel. How their seemingly unrelated lives are eventually joined is one of the notable merits of Gross’ plot. Unfortunate coincidences are, of course, at the root of this eventual connection, but the author expands the story with enough supporting details to keep us from focusing on random events. Along the way, Gross tosses in plenty of unanticipated twists to keep us from assuming how the narrative will play out.
 
Following a brief prologue, chapters are collected under sections named after one of the two central female characters. Then Gross seems to shift the focus with sections named after one of the several secondary characters recruited to assist Wendy or Lauritzia. But after only a single chapter, the focus readjusts back to one of the two main women.

The temporary change in perspective is needed to carry the narrative forward, but the sudden and brief shift in section headings confuses the overall structure and makes the story feel weak and desperate. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long for Gross to bring us back into the main thrust of the story and its surprising conclusion.
 
Gross’ style is unpretentious and inviting. He easily takes us into the thoughts and emotions of his two main characters while effectively portraying the action and events that moves everything forward. By the novel’s end, we are more than willing to forgive the few speed bumps of the structure.
 
If you’ve never read this novelist before, NO WAY BACK is a great place to begin. He may not yet be “coming up on the rails behind Harlan Corben and Lee Child,” as the cover blurbs claim, but it won’t be long before he can stand securely on his own in the ever-expanding field of skilled and reliable thriller authors. —Alan Cranis

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Guy Peellaert’s THE ADVENTURES OF JODELLE is a dazzling publication. Whether you like it or not, and there are reasons for both takes, there’s no denying it’s a gorgeous and significant book that any comics fan should probably own and certainly read. 

Peellaert was a Belgian pop artist who is best known for his work on album covers (e.g. David Bowie’s DIAMOND DOGS and the Rolling Stones’ IT’S ONLY ROCK ‘N ROLL) and movie posters for directors like Martin Scorsese, Robert Bresson, Robert Altman and Wim Wenders. But before all that, he did two long-form underground comics, THE ADVENTURES OF JODELLE and PRAVDA.  

What this Fantagraphics book does is collect Peellaert’s first comic and place it into its proper cultural context via a comprehensive set of “special features.” The story for the strip, written by Pierre Bartier, is a satirical spy romp set in a swingin’-’60s style of space-age Roman Empire bachelor/ette pad. The exuberant plot is clearly not the focal point, but it’s there to let the fleshy neon visuals explode into your eyeballs. Psychedelic in the best sense of the word, ideologically countercultural, and a literal definition for “sequential art.” 

At the time of publication (1966), Jodelle was a groundbreaking plunge into the possibilities of comics as art, hailed with superlatives by the likes of Fellini and Godard (who planned to film PRAVDA), yet equally accessible to those who just wanted some good times with a comic strip. It won’t have the same impact today, as many of its visual ideas have been appropriated and subverted into the mainstream culture, but as both a time capsule of its era and as a visually stunning romp, it remains a unique experience that should certainly be at least sampled by any adventurous modern reader of comics.

Playfully provocative, funny and smart, THE ADVENTURES OF JODELLE pops with a soft-lined splash of lurid color. 

On the opposite end of the color spectrum comes SelfMadeHero’s SANDCASTLE from Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy. Drawn in starkly organic black and white, this has a fairly straightforward science-fiction setup wherein a group of people are trapped on a secluded beach, where they mysteriously and dramatically begin to age at a rapid pace. 

Reminiscent of Charles Burns’ work, though less idiosyncratic, this is a deeply human tale that works on many levels. It also brings to mind many fine sci-fi stories and films of the 1970s: SANDCASTLE uses such ideas to touch and probe concepts of mortality, relationships, environment and the fleeting presence of humanity in our universe.

So far so good, but what makes this stand out is that all of this comes through the characters and the visuals without anyone spelling things out. Every reader will bring their own background into the experience, and be able to get different ideas out of it. You can even read it as a fairly straightforward TWILIGHT ZONE tale or a B movie up until the final pages. 

SANDCASTLE is another winner from Peeters after KOMA. It’s wonderfully mysterious, gorgeously drawn and intelligently conceived, and it manages to pack the full sweep of both the individual and the whole of humanity organically within a compact narrative. SelfMadeHero is publishing yet another volume of Peeters’ work later this year.

On the tails of the good (if not great) DREDD movie, the U.S. market has been bombarded with choice Judge Dredd material. Case in point, this origin story, scripted by A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE‘s John Wagner. 

Dealing with the whole of humanity in a far more bastardized form, DREDD: ORIGINS tells the story of the formation of Mega-Cities and the modern judge system. Told in flashbacks as Dredd ventures deep into Cursed Earth to retrieve the body of Judge Fargo, the father of that system and the clone-father of Dredd himself, this was obviously a long-overdue attempt to wrap up many of the loose ends drizzled over decades worth of stories. 

Illustrated by series co-creator Carlos Ezquerra (except for a quick lead-in story), and featuring cover art by Brian Bolland, ORIGINS clearly harkens back to the early era of the comic. Well, except for the modern, gradient-soaked, “realistic” Photoshop coloring, which I continue to dislike, but then again, I’m not the key demographic. 

Ezquerra has never been my favorite DREDD artist, but there is a primal rawness to his style that befits the character. It does still come across as crude in a way very few modern comics are, which (I think) is a good thing.

Yet what really makes ORIGINS work is the story. I’m not saying this is a brilliant origin tale superbly told. It’s not. But, warts and asides included, it fits. Moving in jerks and sputters, providing info-dump flashbacks amid usual mutant-attack carnage and instant justice delivered with explosive accuracy, this is a good story with some great moments, wrapped up in a strong, emotional coda. 

Cinebook Ltd.’s third volume of DARWIN’S DIARIES: DUAL NATURE brings out more mutants and is a marked improvement on the first volume. I skipped the second book after being disappointed in both the art and the story of THE EYE OF THE CELTS, but casually dipping into the third book, I found myself backpedaling my thoughts. 

Those of you who haven’t followed the series, the concept is great fun: Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist turned not-so-mild-mannered monster hunter (preceding the publication of ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, mind you). Darwin is more interested in Sasquatch, Almas and other clawed cryptids, rather than vampires.

My problem with the first volume was that the book posited itself in a difficult middle ground between outrageous entertainment and serious historical drama, thus managing to be neither as exuberant nor as literary as it should. It was also visually too sensationalistic to capture the era, yet illustrated in naturalistic tones which suggests that it is to be taken semi-seriously.

But somehow, all that bothered me in the first book now clicks. The art is evocative; the storyline is sharp and consistently engaging. DUAL NATURE is not a great book, but if the art and the idea appeal, it delivers on its promises. It’s fairly dark and gory, it goes to places you don’t necessarily expect and wraps things up neatly in the end, while clearly making a promise of more to come. It’s not really a book aimed for me, but at age 12, I would have adored it. 

And finally, I’ll also briefly mention a new Alexandro Jodorowsky comic out from Humanoids, PIETROLINO. It tells the story of a mime turned boxing clown deep in Nazi-occupied France. This is a superb piece of heartfelt magic realism. Beautifully illustrated by Olivier Boiscommun, the work is a deeply moving and unusual work that, for the most part, remains gentle and romantic.

Of course, the writer being Jodorowsky, it also provides contrasting moments of despair, cruelty and hilarity. I’m happy that this saw light in English, but I doubt it’ll remain in print for long, so grab a copy quickly if this is of interest. —JT Lindroos

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CLOSE TO THE BONE is the eighth novel in Scottish author MacBride’s series featuring Aberdeen Detective Inspector Logan McRae. It follows nearly a week in the life of McRae and his fellow officers as they attempt to solve a shocking murder and a whole slew of seemingly unrelated crimes. It’s impressively structured and mostly engaging, but not without its own challenges.
 
Logan McRae is woken one Saturday morning and called to the scene of a murder. The victim was found chained to a stake, stabbed and then set on fire with a tire around his neck. There had been some violent incidents recently between rival Aberdeen drug gangs, so McRae suspects the murder is a gangland execution.

McRae’s plate is already overflowing; along with the warring gangs, a young teenage couple has gone missing, someone is crippling Asian immigrants and, most baffling of all, someone is leaving mysterious (and increasingly irritating) packets of chicken bones outside of McRae’s home. On top of all this, the pile of paperwork on his desk is growing bigger and his supervisor, Detective Chief Inspector Steel, is screaming for results while constantly shifting her priorities between the various cases.
 
Things get more ominous as another body is found and the executions begin to resemble the plot of a popular occult novel. Then McRae discovers that those bones found around his home are not from chickens.
 
The opening chapter where McRae first appears at the murder scene wonderfully conveys the endless bombardment of disconnected details and chaos that define his professional life. It’s impossible for him to concentrate for 10 seconds on one item before he’s interrupted by the other investigators on the scene, all competing for his approval, and the calls on his cell phone from DCI Steel demanding to know what’s happening and why he isn’t attending to work at the station.
 
Unfortunately, MacBride tries to maintain this endless stream of madness for more than 500 pages. With the seemingly countless series of characters drifting in and out, their dialogue often overlapping, and the inevitable shift of perspective needed to include the various pieces of the narrative, it quickly becomes exhausting and difficult to follow. This sadly overshadows the imaginative and surprisingly convincing way MacBride ties all of the disconnected pieces of the various cases together. By the concluding chapters we are almost too tired to admire the technique.
 
Adding to this difficulty, the author’s characters are so unapologetically Scottish that American readers might wonder if the speech cadences, local slang and professional acronyms are actually English. It’s only after several chapters, for example, that we Yanks are comfortable knowing that someone saying something like, “Aye, I no be having it,” means, “Not on my watch!”
 
In spite of this, the characters are mostly credible and display behavior traits easily relatable regardless of their origin. The exception, however, is DCI Steel. She’s delightfully frustrating with her self-contradictory edicts to McRae and his follow officers. But when MacBride let’s Steel’s libido get the better of her, she suddenly acts like some dim-witted sidekick in an over-the-top comedy movie.
 
CLOSE TO THE BONE might have been a masterpiece if MacBride had resisted the temptation to include so many diverse subplots and allowed McRae to be the sole focus of everything going on. As is, it’s another revealing and often grueling look at how the Scots go about the business of solving crimes. —Alan Cranis

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David Mark’s second novel, ORIGINAL SKIN, fulfills the promise I predicted for his debut, THE DARK WINTER, and continues the tale of Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy and his intriguing boss, Trish Pharaoh, as they attempt to combat crime in the northern England town of Hull. This time around, there are two crimes to solve.

The trade in cannabis has been run by the Vietnamese drug cartel for many years, but lately, new muscle has come in and they don’t play nice. Two men are found barely conscious with their hands nailgunned to their knees, and they’re not talking about who did it.

On another note, McAvoy finds a discarded cell phone that belonged to a young, sexually promiscuous man who seems to have committed suicide. But as McAvoy continues to investigate, he comes to believe that the man was murdered. And the murderer is not only loose, but is somehow tied to members of the local council. This is going to get politically ugly.

Interestingly, the two stories do not really connect, and somewhat strangely, only one of them is actually solved. Guess that’s for verisimilitude in a police procedural. But all of the high points of Mark’s writing are still here, with a plot line that is much improved over his debut effort.

His characters are fully drawn, usually likable and all have this believability about them, even the one asshole racist detective, which really allows the reader to engross themselves in the story. This is a strong and straightforward series, with ORIGINAL SKIN touching on traveler culture (Romany), drug operations, fetish sex and just good ol’ detective work.

The one flaw is that McAvoy seems a bit too sensitive, capable of blushing beet red at some innocuous remark of his boss, and suffering from hurt feelings that you would think a cop could ignore. But the book, and series, is still very promising and worth a read. —Mark Rose

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Samhain Publishing is one of the smaller presses nurturing the authors and the readers in love with genre fiction. Its output has a consistent aesthetic sensibility: a love for core conventions of horror film complemented by an attention to, you know, actual words. Its catalog is populated by promising writers testing, shaping and refining their style, but not at the expense of story — and vice versa.

When I’m grading papers, a nod to the form of an essay (“I appreciate your careful attention to the proper format for headings”) is often the sign of a teacher casting about for something — anything — positive to say, right before lamentations (or rage) about the lack of substance. And I’ll admit that what follows is a modest thumbs-down for the two novellas collected in Greg F. Gifune’s INTO THE SHADOWS.

Yet Gifune’s work here is seriously smart about craft in all the ways I’ve come to expect from Samhain. There is an attention to style — in the first novella, a sophisticated (and seamlessly achieved) structure and (the real heart of the matter) storytelling that at times evokes a palpable dread. This is a writer to invest in, and for many readers each (or either) of the novellas will be well worth the effort.

In fact, Bookgasm previous gave A VIEW FROM THE LAKE the first novella, a modest thumbs-up in its prior, stand-alone published form. So, reader, different tastes, grains of salt, etc.: The following defines my slight disappointment in the context of a broader appreciation that ought to encourage many of you to give this work (and this author, and certainly this publisher) your attention.

A VIEW FROM THE LAKE shifts slyly back and forth between the present and past, building dread out of the mystery of what happened as well as what will happen. Katherine and James manage a small set of cabins along a secluded lake, but a mysterious drowning — James discovers the body of a young Japanese boy who’d wandered away from his parents — provokes an obsessive madness. James becomes unhinged, warning Katherine away, and then disappearing. Now, mid-winter, Katherine is haunted by visitors that suggest … what? Ghosts, a “contagious insanity,” some darker eldritch Otherness?

What works best in A VIEW is Gifune’s use of form as a tool for furthering the horror at the heart of the story. Its descriptive passages and the baroque architecture of flashbacks and visions which crowd into Katherine’s present-day experiences keep the readers discomforted, slide us smoothly into the protagonist’s shoes, uncertain of what’s going on.

Yet, too often, the author turns to dialogue which spells out, seems flat and stiff in contrast to the ripe imagery. A quasi-romance — Katherine turns to childhood friend Carlo for conversation and comfort — seems a misfire, distracting us from the lake, and diffusing the impact of the horror in chatter that is quasi-screwball and too often tediously expository. Katherine is a hero out of Henry James, and whenever, like her, we lose sight of what’s real, the story swallows us.

Dialogue also bogs down CATCHING HELL, the weaker of the two pieces collected here. A pack of young actors on a road trip ends up where all young people on road trips in horror end up: in a town full of homicidal nutcases. Gifune’s got a very neat concept at the heart of this, which I won’t give away — although he does, alas, in a few big, info-dump paragraphs.

Worse yet, the info-dumps come with quotation marks around them; someone will stop and, in a brief spoken essay, tell one of the hapless youths the full history of what’s going on. This novella doesn’t rely on mood and misdirection, so unlike the (noun) heart of LAKE, this one’s all verb, a quick set-up for a rush of action as the kids try to escape. Whenever they stop and talk, things crash to a halt, but — again — there’s real pleasure to be had even in the familiar tracks of the country-folk-killing-city-folk plot.

INTO THE SHADOWS almost worked for me. But others have (with good reason) praised the first novella, and I would return to my own appreciation for Gifune’s clear skills. Many horror fans will find find much to affirm here, and I note more a caution than merely dismissive critique. —Mike Reynolds

Buy it at Samhain Publishing.

A point made quite clear in the introduction is that FEAR AND LEARNING is not concerned with selling the reader on whether horror is “important” enough for serious study. The book already assumes it is and, therefore, presents a dozen examples that prove it.

Edited by Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland, the paperback is celebration of the smarts to be found in genre and those who take it seriously — not seriously as in, “Dude, I love horror so much I wear nothing but black T-shirts,” but seriously as in … well, the kind of person who would write and/or read an essay titled “Acts of Re-Possession: Bollywood’s Re-Inventions of the Occult Possession Film.”

In other words, FEAR AND LEARNING is not for the casual fan or the casual reader. It demands attention and critical thinking. Highlights include studies on how:
• Sam Raimi achieves meta madness in the original EVIL DEAD;
• Dario Argento leans upon themes of voyeurism and Peeping Toms;
• Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN is so influential, today’s generations can’t separate the true text from its many adaptations; and
• a direct line can be drawn from Jekyll and Hyde to the Incredible Hulk. —Rod Lott

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It’s been seven years since Mickey Spillane passed away, but even death has not stopped the once-prolific author. COMPLEX 90 is the latest Mike Hammer novel to be finished by Spillane’s good friend Max Allan Collins, but the first that just did not feel like an old-school, hard-hitting Hammer novel.

To me, it felt more like a testing ground of sorts for what would be the Tiger Mann books, Spillane’s foray into superspy fiction. Maybe that’s why the book was never completed until Collins was given the notes and unfinished manuscript.

The story is basically Mike Hammer vs. the Russians, in what has to be one of the more way-out-there plots. While escorting a senator in Russia, Hammer is taken into custody by the KGB. He escapes and reappears two months later back in the USA. Again, this smells a bit more Bond than Hammer.

The novel moves into Hammer being his defiant self throughout, to the point of his one-man-army mentality causing havoc. It turns out the Russians are none too pleased that he escaped their clutches, so that sets into motion the bulk of the book. Russian agents are on the hunt for Hammer, while Hammer tries to figure out why he was even singled out in the first place.

The story moves rather quickly and there are a few moments of that old Spillane magic coming through. We get some of the classic Spillane-like reveals, but nothing truly jaw-dropping like in the previous novels. I wonder if Spillane knew that while these ideas would make great reading, that Hammer was just the wrong lead for them.

Still, Collins does another fine job of finishing the job. As always, how much he contributed to what was originally written is hard to tell, since has the Spillane style down pat. For people who need a Hammer fix, know that while COMPLEX 90 is worth reading, it is not one of the stronger outings. —Bruce Grossman

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RAPSCALLION is author James McGee’s sixth novel featuring Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood. A Bow Street Runner is a type of elite enforcement officer, and Hawkwood is one of the best. Set during the Regency period when Britain is at war with France, Hawkwood and his men are at war with all the British ne’er-do-wells who populate the London underground. That’s why it’s strange for Hawkwood to be recruited by the Navy for quite a different job.

French prisoners of war are being held on rundown ships in the waters off Medway. These are the infamous “hulks,” ships far past their prime, overcrowded with desperate men, subject to brutal discipline and a remarkable lack of hygiene. Hell on water.

Lately, a number of the prisoners have managed to escape. The Navy sent one man to investigate but he died, presumably of natural causes. But now, a second investigator has failed to respond or make contact in six days. Is he dead as well? What is going on? Hawkwood is dragooned onto the case to act as a prisoner to investigate the hulks and get to the bottom of the incident.

Readers familiar with McGee and Hawkwood will get more of the thrilling same here. McGee is excellent at description, able to paint a historical scene without going overboard with too much irrelevant detail. Unlike other authors, he is equally adept at action scenes, recounting the numerous fights that Hawkwood gets into with suspense and excitement.

This tale is a rip-roaring adventure as Hawkwood befriends a French prisoner and the two manage to escape the hulk. As Hawkwood begins to understand just how vast the scheme is to help French prisoners, he is constantly put in harm’s way of both losing his cover and his life. This is a fascinating historical detective series, with RAPSCALLION having a significant nautical aspect to the story. The whole of James McGee’s work is recommended to the reader. —Mark Rose

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The first half of Sean Ferrell’s MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT plays like a twisted-up version of a Raymond Chandler novel: a murder mystery in which the victim, every suspect, every colorful side character and the protagonist himself are all the same person.

Our main character is a time traveler who celebrates each birthday with a party in 2071 (the hundredth year since his birth) that is only attended by other versions of himself, and “this” year there’s a murder. Stranger still, all versions of our main character who are older than the victim still exist.

It’s a concept with a lot of potential (obviously), and Ferrell isn’t shy about exploiting all the inherent mystery, psychological damage and temporal paradoxes that it suggests. Our time traveler’s investigation of his own murder continues to play out in an upside-down Chandler-esque way, with a lot of running, being captured and beaten, and hanging around disreputable guys who are hiding something (and are also older versions of himself). There’s even a mysterious and beautiful woman who shows up at the party — she is particularly mysterious because there’s never been anyone else at this party “before.”

For a while, I wondered if MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT would be set entirely on this one night at this bizarre birthday party. Instead, at the halfway mark, the story takes a sharp turn away from frantic, mind-bending thriller and toward a slow, nuanced look at a rundown future New York City.

At first, I found this straightforward setting disappointing when compared to the bizarre, time-travel birthday party, but that didn’t last. The second half of MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT presents the reader with a scarily plausible future, the kind where infrastructure still technically exists, but in a terribly eroded form. It’s all crumbled buildings and scarcity, dotted with the strange touches like feral parrots and people who are paid to act out the memories of others — not a full-on dystopia so much as just a kinda shitty time to live in.

But a shitty time filled with interesting people and captivating details. After spending half the book surrounded by our main character’s many dickish iterations, the warmth and variety of those inhabiting this broken New York is kind of a relief. But the calm, steady pace of this section of the book never gets plodding or tiresome because MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT is always ready to remind a reader that the bizarre time travel birthday party is right around the next corner. Again.

It’s when the birthday party gets closer, though, that MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT starts to run into problems. It’s clear that, for the climax of the story to work, certain characters have to get into position, so to speak. Up to that point, Ferrell does such a good job letting his characters move and breathe as independent human beings, that suddenly contorting them into the places the plot needs them to be ends up impossible without some very out-of-character moments. It’s uncomfortable, but the book quickly passes such moments by to get to a much more satisfying denouement.

All in all, MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT is a novel very willing to tease out all the uncomfortable and untidy implications of its premise, and to answer enough of its own questions without overexplaining. The book does one of the best things that science fiction can do: Effortlessly use its big concept to get at the strange and fucked-up ways that humans interact with each other and themselves.

In this, it’s not dissimilar from Charles Yu’s HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE from 2010, but Ferrell takes the implications of his concept in a very different direction, which leaves MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT feeling anything but derivative. —Elijah Kinch Spector

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Of the three collaborative volumes between Michael S. Price and John Wooley in the ongoing FORGOTTEN HORRORS series I’ve read thus far, FORGOTTEN HORRORS TO THE NTH DEGREE: DISPATCHES FROM A COLLAPSING GENRE is the best.

It speaks directly to the film geek in me, saying, “Hey, read me, film geek.” It also is different from the others — VOLUME 6 just came out last month — in that instead of being a collection of reviews, it is a collection of columns that operate as both reviews and interviews. The contents are culled largely from the authors’ long-running, now-defunct, eponymous column in FANGORIA magazine.

Roughly 40 films are examined in depth in such a manner, with Price-Wooley incorporating their opinions with the insights of at least one direct participant from the flick in question, no matter which side of the camera. The names include — but are by no means limited to — Donald Pleasence (RAW MEAT), Rudy Ray Moore (PETEY WHEATSTRAW), Ivan Reitman (CANNIBAL GIRLS), Chuck Connors (TOURIST TRAP), Marilyn Chambers (RABID) and Jamie Lee Curtis (TERROR TRAIN).

Just about everyone seems thrilled to discuss the particular, peculiar CV entry in question, save for two examples: THE ENTITY‘s Barbara Hershey and BARN OF THE NAKED DEAD director Alan Rudolph, who refuses to admit association with it, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Purposely, the pieces fall within the horror genre’s heyday, said by the authors to begin with H.G. Lewis’ invention of the gore picture with 1963′s BLOOD FEAST and end with the shot-on-video BLOOD CULT, which changed everything in 1985 by being the first feature film expressly made for the home-video market.

Emblematic of its name, NTH DEGREE, the 304-page trade paperback ventures off its own beaten path to include plenty of extras, in the form of extended pieces on David F. Friedman, Larry Buchanan, Leo Fong and others. Comics great Stephen R. Bissette provides an “afterword” of capsule reviews of Vermont-set horror films, and hell, there’s even a multipage comic-book story that opens the volume.

My only complaints with the book are minor: an overuse of antiquated phrases such as “et. seq.” and an egregious use of some godawful Adobe Photoshop filter that noticeably mars so many of the photographs (thankfully, poster art escapes this mistreatment). Otherwise, NTH DEGREE is an infectious trip for the psychotronic-inclined; seat belts optional. —Rod Lott

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SILENT VOICES is Ann Cleeves’ fourth novel featuring Inspector Vera Stanhope. She is a wonderful protagonist, overweight and cranky about it, overbearing and unapologetic about it. She barges through an investigation, bullying her overworked colleagues and intimidating witnesses until she tumbles to the crime’s solution.

Stanhope kicks off this novel by finding the corpse on her own. As she takes a post-swim sauna, she notices another woman in the room, not moving. It takes her a while, but eventually it dawns on her that the other woman isn’t just very still.

The woman was strangled in the middle of a busy health club. The social machinations around the club members gets very murky very quickly, and Stanhope gets mired in an investigation that develops plenty of unusual leads but doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

The dead woman was a social worker supervisor. Strangely enough, she lived quite close to one of her former employees, a woman whose actions led to the death of a small child years ago and her eventual firing. This, in turn, leads to the discovery of a man who was stealing items at the health club. Convinced he may be her prime suspect, Stanhope’s wishes are dashed when that man is also found murdered. And the disgraced social worker has now gone missing.

There are a number of elements in this novel that should please readers. Stanhope’s self-deprecation and self-awareness make her into a much more likable character. She understands the human costs associated with police work. I also appreciated the scene where the health club manager explains all the security measures they have, then proceeds to pick them apart one by one, highlighting all the ways they could be compromised.

This is a quick read, smoothly written, with a fascinating lead character. Fans should note that the novels have been adapted for British television as the show VERA, with Brenda Blethyn in the title role. —Mark Rose

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For many readers of crime fiction, Andrew Vachss is known primarily for his novels — in particular, his long-running series featuring the shadowy, urban knight errant named Burke. Die-hard Vachss fans, however, know that he’s also written several stand-alone novels (like TWO TRAINS RUNNING and THAT’S HOW I ROLL) and two collections of short stories.
 
MORTAL LOCK is the third and latest collection of such short fiction, including stories first published as long as 15 years ago. They vary in length (from two or three pages to much longer), subject, perspective and, unfortunately, quality.

When they work well, the effect is immediate, hard-hitting and impressive. A good example is “Ghostwriter,” the book’s opener. It follows the career of a man with the born desire and talent to be a writer, and the devious way he discovers how to be a successful, published author. One can’t help but think the story is based on Vachss’ observation of today’s publishing industry.
 
Another noteworthy standout is “Veil’s Visit,” co-authored with close friend Joe R. Lansdale. It unites Lansdale’s hilarious, Texas-based, crime-fighting duo of Hap and Leonard with a maverick New York lawyer hired to defend Leonard after he is arrested for burning down a nearby crack house. The lawyer’s defense plan is, to say the least, unorthodox.
 
“Profile” is another story in the series featuring Cross, Vachss’ amoral hit man. Here, Cross traces an online predator stalking the daughter of a client, in a story with chilling contemporary relevance.
 
Several tales offer glimpses into the hidden lives of contemporary criminals, with all their brutality and sometimes unexpected humanity. “Pig” is a first-person recalling of a violent day in the life of an urban gang member. “Passage to Paradise” reveals the inner thoughts of a human trafficker and his struggles to keep his cargo safe from kidnappers as he makes his way across the border to deliver his passengers to a new and — with luck and a prayer — a better life.
 
The weaker entries are often so full of esoteric details that they lose track of conflict and resolution. “Bloodlines” is one such instance, seemingly more preoccupied with how race horses are bred than with its characters and plot.
 
The collection ends with “Underground: A Screenplay.” Screenplays often make difficult reading, due to their format and often short-hand descriptions of setting and action. Vachss is obviously familiar with the technique, and presents an often compelling depiction of a dystopian future where young people live underground and form gangs for survival, and where graffiti is seen as the last vestige of truth.
 
The style in most of these works is the blunt, unsparing, hard-boiled voice the author has perfected over the years. While it’s always convincing, it’s sadly not enough to save those stories awash in background research.
 
An introduction or afterword reflection on the stories and their inspirations would have helped make the collection a bit more personal, but this apparently is not Vachss’ forte. Thus, he prefers simply to let the stories speak for themselves.
 
For those who have enjoyed his novels, MORTAL LOCK is a suitable initiation into the other forms of Vachss’ fictional universe. His fans will no doubt rejoice at this opportunity to catch up on these stories that have appeared in various magazines and solicited anthologies over the past decade. —Alan Cranis

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As completely expected, the films of Ted V. Mikels are much more fun to read about than they are to watch. Unlike a chosen few directors, let’s just say the guy had his work end up featured on an episode of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 for damned good reason.

Christopher Wayne Curry, author of FILM ALCHEMY: THE INDEPENDENT CINEMA OF TED V. MIKELS, doesn’t quite see it that way; he worships the works, but he also considers Mikels a friend and heaps “love, respect and admiration” on the filmmaker. Also in his introduction, Curry calls Mikels the single most interesting figure in exploitation cinema, deserving of mention alongside Russ Meyer. I realize such things are subjective, but he’s obviously approached the book with a blinded bias. It’s enough to make you want to cry, “Get a room!”

That is its biggest downfall, but guess what? I still recommend it, because even with the absence of impartiality, the book remains a blast to read.

A much more affordable paperback reprint of McFarland original 2008 hardback release, the slim FILM ALCHEMY takes readers on a detailed, chronological journey through Mikels’ complete CV as director (well, complete as of 2008), starting with the 1963 thriller STRIKE ME DEADLY to the 2006 family drama (!) HEART OF A BOY. Most cult cinephiles, however, know Mikels best for a few that land in between — namely, 1968′s THE ASTRO-ZOMBIES (to which he’s still cranking out unwanted sequels), 1971′s THE CORPSE GRINDERS and 1973′s THE DOLL SQUAD (ripped off by Aaron Spelling for the TV series CHARLIE’S ANGELS, if Ted is to be believed).

Ted’s quite a character (polygamists tend to be) and he has great stories to share about the making of these no-budget epics. But his story prowess does not extend to the screen; Ed Wood looks masterful by comparison. The four flicks of his I’ve seen have all been really tough sits, and Lord knows I’m more forgiving than most when it comes to B and Z cinema.

Yet Mikels seems unaware of all his limitations, to the point of delusion, and Curry is right along with him. Only when the book approaches the VHS age of Mikels’ career does Curry cede to admitting shortcomings. And as the movies get less interesting, so does the book; after all, MISSION: KILLFAST, although a terrific title, has yet to resonate with any degree of pop-culture impact and likely never will.

FILM ALCHEMY is highly recommend to Mikels’ fan base and just plain recommended to those with a love of bad movies. The book pops with a wealth of photos and poster art. One can see how easy it would have been at the time to get suckered in by such much-to-promise visuals. —Rod Lott

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ANTIQUES CHOP is Barbara Allan’s seventh comic mystery novel featuring part-time antiques dealer Brandy Borne and her hilariously overbearing mother (more on that later), Vivian. Barbara Allan is the nom de plume of a collaboration between Barbara Collins and her extremely prolific husband, Max Allan Collins, and together they work on what is known as the “Trash ‘n’ Treasure” series.

In this installment, the Bornes are surprised to find that they are in demand as hosts of a new reality television show. The show’s producer pitches them the idea of ANTIQUES SLEUTHS, a series that mimics the PBS’ ANTIQUES ROADSHOW, but would also include mini-documentaries about the various crimes the Borne family had solved in the past. This all sounds very promising.

In fact, Vivian even knows the perfect location for the antiques shop where the show will be set. There is an old house that used to contain a mystery bookstore and is now vacant. Fifty years earlier, a horrific ax murder occurred in the house, and Vivian testified for the defense of the man accused of the crime. Well, okay then. Only problem is that before the show can begin production, the producer is found dead, dismembered with an ax, in the very same home. Now the Bornes must solve both mysteries, the contemporary one and the decades-old crime.

As series readers will expect, the Bornes do this while stepping on various toes, and with the Borne women occasionally bickering with each other. It’s all done in such a light and charming tone, with real chuckles and laughs throughout, that you almost don’t care about the brutal murders; you just want to know what crazy scheme Vivian Borne is up to next.

As for the “mother” bit alluded to above, apparently Brandy is not Vivian’s biological child, but is actually the child of her own elder sister. Ew. This revelation took place in an earlier novel. Can’t fault the series for not being dynamic enough, I guess.

This is a quick and enjoyable read with strong and likable characters, an adequate plot and — dang it all — it’s just fun. There’s even a meta-narrative gimmick where we see Brandy and Vivian commenting on the editing of the actual story that we’re reading which isn’t overdone and provides a laugh or two. I would have liked a bit more of the antiques trade but overall, ANTIQUES CHOP is quite fulfilling. —Mark Rose

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Back in 2010, writer Brian Winkeler and artist Robert Wilson IV did something completely audacious: They pooled together a little money to self-publish KNUCKLEHEADS SPECIAL EDITION #1, a 22-page, black-and-white comic book that introduced the characters and basic plot they developed. They spread the word through the online cognoscenti — this site included promoting the debut issue — and took copies of the book with them to every comic con they could get attend.
 
Finally, Winkeler and Wilson were introduced to the head honchos at Monkeybrain Comics, who committed to making their brainchild a reality, as a digital edition. So that initial SPECIAL EDITION issue has been transformed into KNUCKLEHEADS #1, the start of the “Fist Contact” story arc.

Like the song says, “It’s long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.” Or be a comic book creator, for that matter.
 
Issue #1 introduces us to Trevor K. Trevinski, your classic slacker who spends most of his days parked on the coach playing video games and wearing nothing but his underwear, a bathrobe and a few-days-old beard.

Look closer, however, and you can’t help but notice the crystals attached to the knuckles of his right hand. Trevor got the crystal fist from an alien, and it obviously contains untold powers, but so far, he’s only used it to cheat at video games and get Netflix for free.
 
One evening, Trevor is interrupted from his gaming concentration by Lance, his roommate, who tells him that a huge monster is terrorizing the downtown area — just like CLOVERFIELD. Trevor ignores the news — who remembers CLOVERFIELD, anyway? — until the monster knocks out the electricity in his apartment building. Then it’s game on! And fueled by a few slices of the just-delivered pizza, Trevor heads downtown to be a hero.
 
That is, until he sees the size of that city-stomping monster. Trevor suddenly takes off to find a place to hide — until Lance points out the hot girl that is now in the monster’s claw — even better, it’s a hot drunk English chick!
 
Winkeler’s pop-culture sense is wonderfully accurate with just the right touch of the esoteric. The attitude and what little action of gamers/slackers can easily be pushed into caricature, but Winkeler knows exactly when to pour it on and, more importantly, when to hold back. So Trevor, Lance and the rest are instantly recognizable and completely credible.
 
All of which is wonderfully matched by Wilson’s spot-on artwork with its cinematic but slightly exaggerated realism and eye for detail — right down to the owl-shaped lamp on the end table next to the coach. Wilson used the time intervening from the self-published book to hone his drawing skills, and redesigned the monster (as pointed out in the essays that follow the story in this online edition).
 
Those who missed out on the DIY edition are easily forgiven (while the rest of us carefully bag and board it in the hopes that it value as a collector’s item goes through the roof). But now there’s no excuse. Log on and treat yourself to the premiere issue (only 99 cents!), and become part of what will no doubt be among the most popular and argued-about digital comic series ever to hit cyberspace.
 
Remember to tell them that you heard about it here. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at comiXology.
 

STEPPING STONE / LOVE MACHINE is the third (and presumably final) flipbook paring of two short novels in Walter Mosley’s “Crosstown to Oblivion” series, wherein the author uses elements of urban fantasy and science fiction to probe subjects broader and more cosmic than crime. Like the two previous duos (THE GIFT OF FIRE / ON THE HEAD OF A PIN and MERGE / DISCIPLE), it contains some imaginative events and several moments of expansive prose.
 
STEPPING STONE is the story of Truman Pope, a gentle, unassuming and altogether unremarkable man who has worked most of his adult life in the mailroom of a large corporation. One day, during his daily mail route, he sees a mysterious woman dressed in yellow. He tries to follow her, but she immediately disappears, and nobody around Truman ever saw her.

Truman’s life changes from that moment on. An old lover suddenly returns; his longtime job is threatened; and he experiences strange visions both while sleeping and during waking hours. Truman fears he is losing his mind. But the lady in yellow, who has all this time drifted in and out of sight, reveals to him that he has been chosen to personally experience and then lead humanity to new and unimagined levels of existence.
 
In LOVE MACHINE, Lois Kim, the manager of a innovative technology company, participates in the demonstration of the Datascriber, a device designed to allow individuals to share sensory experiences through a neurological link. But Lois soon discovers that the deranged scientist who invented the Datascriber is using it to merge the psyches and memories of individuals into a collective “Co-Mind.” Lois fights to free herself from the machine’s effects, but finds herself part of the scheme to lead humanity to a new era — despite objections from both human and unearthly forces.
 
Readers who have followed the series since its beginning will soon recognize familiar patterns in these two works. There is the normal, nearly invisible, urban-based individual whose life is changed due to the intervention of a mysterious stranger, only to discover that their life has been destined for a future that is anything but normal. Then there is the futuristic devise or machine whose real purpose is eventually revealed and pulls those involved into new realms of existence. The distinguishing details differ, but the outlines are consistent.
 
Then there are the moments, both fleeting and lasting for several paragraphs, where the buried memories, impressions, fears and far-flung aspirations of the characters are expressed in dazzling poetic prose.
 
Taken together, these patterns suggest that it is probably an appropriate time for Mosley to retire this series before he more blatantly repeats himself.
 
Of course, these short novels were never intended to be read together in one sitting. Taken individually, and with a little time between each, these stories can’t help but impress with their convincing characters, settings and other details that help us willing suspend our disbelief and allow the author to work his magic.
 
High praise is also due to Greg Ruth, whose black-and-white illustrations wonderfully enhance the pair.
 
All three duos in the series are essential reading for those who have enjoyed Mosley’s impressive and expansive mysteries featuring Easy Rawlings and Leonid McGill. They demonstrate that Mosley is a writer unrestricted by genre boundaries and more than willing to venture into unfamiliar territories. —Alan Cranis

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Humility is hardly an attribute that comes to mind when considering director William Friedkin, by all accounts a talented man who let success go to his head in the worst way. Refreshingly, he’s the first to admit it — and all his other faults — in THE FRIEDKIN CONNECTION, a dumb title for a smart memoir.

Having been born the year of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and all of 2 when he followed up that Oscar win with THE EXORCIST, I was oblivious to how meteoric his rise was. He had made only four films prior to FRENCH, beginning with the Sonny & Cher vehicle GOOD TIMES, none of them hits.

In this book, Friedkin fills in all those blanks. It is more an autobiography of Friedkin the moviemaker vs. Friedkin the man. Personal details from childhood on up are kept to a minimum, relayed to the reader seemingly only when they directly influenced his work. As someone who tires of celeb bios that assume the reader wants to know every flipping twig on the family tree, I welcomed the brevity.

After all, I came to THE FRIEDKIN CONNECTION wanting to learn about the movies he’s made, not the sordid details of failed relationships, and that’s why it’s a winner. He ticks through them all with candor and regret, from his big-budget, post-EXORCIST failures of SORCERER and the controversial CRUISING to his underseen creative comeback of 1985′s TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. and up to last year’s wonderfully crazed KILLER JOE.

But it ignores — as in, never even mentions — 1983′s DEAL OF THE CENTURY or 1990′s THE GUARDIAN. I refuse to believe he didn’t have good stories to share with those projects, especially since the former starred legendary asshole Chevy Chase. It’s weird that his one episode of the mid-’80s TWILIGHT ZONE revival merits discussion, but these two films have been erased. —Rod Lott

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Somewhere in the weird mess that is HEMLOCK GROVE is a germ of a good idea: Two teenagers — one a werewolf, the other a vampire — team up to catch the savage monster preying on the teenage girls in their town.

How anyone could screw up such a simple, yet fun idea as that is beyond me. But debuting author Brian McGreevy, in his effort to reinvent the Gothic horror novel as a tale of modern teen angst (think THE CATCHER IN THE RYE if it were written by Anne Rice — on second thought, don’t), serves up an overwritten and overstuffed novel that ultimately goes nowhere, with a cast of characters that are, well, characters.

Peter Rumancek is the high school outcast, descended from a family of gypsies and trying to keep out of trouble. For some reason, Peter has no problem telling people he’s a werewolf.

Roman Godfrey is the heir to the Godfrey fortune and local teen aristocrat who dabbles in drugs and casual sex. Roman is also an upir (a Russian term for a vampire who can travel about during daylight).

Shelley Godfrey is Roman’s mute 7.5-feet-tall sister, who walks around with her feet encased in blocks of potting soil. She also glows. (And yes, the author nearly hits us over the head with the comparison by naming her Shelley.)

Essentially, McGreevy is updating the werewolf, vampire and Frankenstein’s monster mythos for a modern audience, but along the way, he loses sight of the clever idea he had at the beginning: two monsters teaming to stop another monster. Instead, he throws just about every Gothic horror staple he can at the reader: witches and witchcraft, second sight, horrible deaths, the rich family ruling over a small town, sinister mad scientists, etc.

Eventually, the reader becomes lost in the morass of plotlines:
• What exactly is Shelley Godfrey, and is she truly alive?
• What is going on at the biotech facility that appears to have carte blanche to do whatever they wish?
• Is Roman’s mother behind any of the grisly deaths, and what exactly is her agenda?

Along the way, we’re struck with several underlying questions:
• Will all of the plotlines be resolved by the novel’s end?
• Or at least, will most of them be resolved?
• Does the burgeoning friendship between Peter and Roman seem believable?
• Will any of the characters achieve a semblance of likability?
• Does it make sense that Roman — a rich and handsome young man with the upir ability to make people do whatever he wants — pays women for sex?
• Is it really that much of a mystery who the killer is, especially since the author practically holds up a flashing neon sign when the character is introduced?
• Do we, the reading public, care who makes it to the end?

Sadly, the answer to these and many other questions raised by HEMLOCK GROVE is “no.”

What could have been a fun and clever horror novel is lost in unresolved plotlines, out-of-character moments orchestrated for either a quick laugh or forced suspense, and near-impenetrable prose:

“The green-eyed boy sat alone in the food court and fingered the needle in his pocket. The syringe was empty and unused, he had no use of the syringe. He had use of the needle. The green-eyed boy, he was called Roman, but what you will have seen first was the eyes, wore a tailored Milanese blazer, one hand in pocket, and blue jeans. He was pale and lean and as handsome as a hatchet, and in egregious style and snobbery a hopeless contrast from the suburban mall food court where he sat and looked in the middle distance and fidgeted the needle in his pocket. And then he saw the girl. The blonde girl at the Twist in pumps and a mini-skirt, leaning in that skirt as though daring her not to, or some taunting mystic withholding revelation. Also, he saw, alone.”

Yes, where McGreevy could have used one sentence to get his point across, he uses five. Also, as you can see, he plays fast and loose with sentence construction and punctuation. If the entire novel was written in that style — a hybrid of Victorian flowery prose and the halting gait of someone who is not native to the English language — then perhaps I could have become accustomed to it.

But McGreevy shifts back and forth between that strange prose-as-verse style and modern usage, so much so that it continues to jar the reader every time he jump-cuts between the two. After a while, I learned to skim along to keep the story moving.

How this book got a publisher — not to mention an Eli Roth-produced TV series deal out of Netflix, which debuted last week and prompted this new paperback tie-in edition — is the greatest mystery. The only thing I can think is that McGreevy sold it based on the premise, and once the TV deal was made, the editor in charge of the project took an extended holiday. That’s a shame, really, because an editor could have done something with this: chopped out the superfluous bits, rearranged the Chinese puzzle-box sentences, and forced the author to either resolve his superfluous plotlines or cut them completely.  

I enjoy a good hamburger. This could have been a good hamburger. Instead, it’s a fast-food hamburger buried under a pile of garnish so that it’s unrecognizable … yet the publisher is swearing it’s a steak.

It’s not. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.

Carter Ross, the New Jersey-based investigative reporter returns in THE GOOD COP, this fourth series title by Brad Parks. While it follows the same format as its predecessors, it nonetheless is an entertaining and, at times, engrossing mystery novel.

Ross is awakened at 8:30 a.m. — a particularly ungodly hour for a seasoned investigative reporter — by his boss at the Newark Eagle-Examiner. A local policeman has been found murdered; Ross’ editor wants him to get the story. He does, but just as he is about to file his story, his editor updates him that an internal police investigation reveales that the cop committed suicide. So the murder investigation, and Ross’ story, is canceled.

Ross, however, has trouble accepting the suicide explanation. The dead cop apparently loved his job, was a dedicated family man with a new baby on the way, and had every reason to live. So Ross decides to dig deeper into the cop to find the truth.
 
Yet the deeper he digs, the more resistance Ross faces. The police department’s public information office, the cop’s beautiful wife, his close friends on the force and even those local publicity hounds who earlier were so vocal about the investigation are now reluctant to talk. Ross suspects something clandestine is going on, but has no idea how dangerous it is until it nearly costs him his life.
 
Ross’ first-person narration is again the main attraction of the novel. His cynical, hard-boiled and self-depreciating voice drives the narrative forward with frequent observations about the Newark setting and its varied, oft-quirky citizens. There are also the amusing complications of Ross’ private life, especially since he can’t resist fishing in the office pool and so continues his on-again/off-again relationship with his attractive editor while courting the cute newspaper librarian whose after-hours life is anything but prim and proper.
 
Another continuing feature of Parks’ series is Ross’ inside commentary of the changing world of newspaper reporting and, in particular, its uneasy relationship with the Internet. Ross’ paper, like most still surviving these days, publishes an online version that most readers go to for breaking news. Still, the reporting old guard, often including Ross himself, sees it as something less than real reporting.
 
The one real drawback to THE GOOD COP is the author’s reliance upon italicized introductions to every chapter. Each offers third-person information that becomes more closely related to the truth behind the cop’s death as the novel progresses. The occasional crime-fiction reader might find this procedure alluring, but more experienced readers will immediately recognize the technique and find it tired and distracting.
 
This aside, Parks continues to prove why newspaper reporters often make the best detectives. Like the most effective private investigators, they are amazingly resourceful while maintaining a love-hate relationship with local law enforcement. What drives reporters, bottom line, are the story and its deadline.
 
It may be familiar, but in the right hands its still great fun — and the reason why Parks Carter Ross novels are well worth a look. —Alan Cranis

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Cara Black’s 13th novel featuring Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc provides yet another chapter in the story of Leduc’s search for her mother, who abandoned Aimée at the tender age of 8. Fueled by her deceased father, a policeman who was betrayed by men on the force, and her grandfather, another investigator, Aimée has built her private investigation business along with her colorful compadres: Saj, an incense-burning dreadlocked hippie, and René, a 4-foot-tall hacker dwarf.

In MURDER BELOW MONTPARNASSE, René has left France for the golden promises of Silicon Valley and his tale, which is almost more interesting than the main storyline, is told in concert with the adventures of Aimée.

She and Saj start the evening with a visit to a mysterious old man who has hired the team sight unseen. He has provided a healthy retainer, requested that Aimée protect his painting, and intimates that he once knew Aimée’s mother.

Intrigued, the two travel to the old man but hit a young Serbian man and kill him just outside the old man’s house. But Aimée senses things are wrong. The victim should have been barely injured and he shows no signs of trauma. Was he dead before their cart knocked him down?

More intriguing, the old man, one Yuri Volodya, has hired Aimée to protect a true painting masterpiece, what might be an authentic heretofore undescribed Modigliani. But when the man looks for the painting and proclaims it to be stolen, he refuses to file a robbery report. Strange indeed, which quickly turns out tragic, when the old man is eventually found tortured to death in his own home.

Black’s new novel is certainly thrilling, with Serbian mafia, the sleazy world of art theft, the menace of threats promised and violence fulfilled. But it also continues the faults of the author’s previous works: somewhat wild plotting and unlikely coincidental occurrences, and the stubborn and paranoid personality of Aimée Leduc herself.

She doesn’t trust the police (with some fair reason since they stabbed her father in the back), but there are still good people on the force who could actually, you know, provide some help for when she is in need. Pfft. She’s cagey with information with all the wrong people and too forthcoming with others. At one point, she even passes out from low blood sugar during a getaway.

Some of this could be worthwhile if it were played for laughs or if she were less insecure about her looks or her own competence. Mostly, it’s frustrating. The surrounding characters, such as her enigmatic godfather and her assistants help buttress the story, and when the plot is boiled down to its most essential elements, the discovery of a missing Modigliani and the deaths that surround that discovery, MURDER BELOW is fast-paced, exciting and interesting.

Fans will know this for what it is: an addition to the long-running series where Aimée gets a bit of closure on one of her most pressing needs, and a dynamic change to her whole world which is only revealed at the end. Newcomers may wish to start with one of the earlier works, to see if the amply described Parisian countryside, the fashion notations and the personality of the heroine suit their style. —Mark Rose

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The Overlook Press continues their reissue of the works of British thriller author R.J. Ellory, this time reaching back to his first published novel, 2003′s CANDLEMOTH.
 
Daniel Ford is on death row for the murder of Nathan Verney, and having exhausted all possible appeals, Daniel soon faces the electric chair. Yet more than 30 years ago, Daniel and Nathan were inseparable friends from Lake Marion, S.C., even though Nathan was black and Daniel white.

The penitentiary has assigned Father John Rousseau to meet with Daniel in the month before his death. Their discussions include such topics as faith, belief and the meaning of both guilt and innocence. In between, Daniel subjects himself to the endless rants of his fellow prisoners and the emotional abuse of the warden.
 
But most of all, Daniel reflects over his life during the turbulent 1960s, when America’s attitudes on race and traditional morals were being challenged in the midst of the distant, but ever-threatening war in Vietnam.
 
Daniel knows he did not kill Nathan, a belief shared by Nathan’s parents as well. Yet over the intervening years, Daniel has given up on his innocence — almost to the point where he believes that there must have been something in his life responsible for the violent death of his best friend.
 
Ellory displays many impressive techniques in this debut. His intricate structure, which constantly shifts back and forth in time; his keen eye for location and period details; and especially the deep psychological insights into his main characters are elements usually found in more seasoned authors.
 
Unfortunately, all these are overshadowed by the novel’s protracted narrative. We are pulled into the story wanting to know the truth about Nathan’s murder and the circumstances of Daniel’s fragile innocence. Some background is necessary and expected. But Ellory puts off the revelation of the truth far too long.
 
Instead, he makes us wait while almost the entire history of the 1960s — including most of the decade’s political and cultural milestones — is recalled in Daniel’s mind. There are also long passages of personal reminiscences, such as Daniel’s youthful recollections of a neighborhood widow once thought to be a witch. Add to this the present-day exchanges in prison, like the complex, conspiracy-based ramblings of a prison mate with whom Daniel often shares meals. 
 
While never less than fascinating, these passages sadly conclude with insights nowhere worth the effort.
 
Overlook Press is to be commended for their efforts to bring Ellory’s work to the attention of a wider audience, especially in such handsome and study hardcover editions. CANDLEMOTH, however, is of interest mainly for the newly initiated Ellory fans who want to read everything he has produced.
 
Others would do better going directly to such later works as A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS, where the author has mastered the balance of narrative and interior exposition. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.