Novels of this genre walk a fine line: with every scene
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Novels of this genre walk a fine line: with every scene, there is the potential to either titillate or inspire cringing.  This novel falls on the cringing side every time.  The heroine is likable--she has wits and guts.  The hero is a parody--a narcissistic fop busy playing roles rather than being an actual person.  His back story does not make his posturing any more endearing.  The intimate scenes are just....awkward--you want to look away and leave them to whatever it is they are trying to do.  I heartily vote this a SKIP!
91553
I have read some critical reviews -- and they are just wrong - this is a wonderful book, a full blown novel and a classic noir novel, twenty first century style. The characters are there, as you expect and want them to be, and while their behavior to each other is predictable, their actions and the plot are not. I guessed the ending because I love the genre - and this did not diminish my enjoyment of the book one iota.  And Ms. Rawling's love of words and fabulous selection of names is undiminished - the book is rich with both. Read it, enjoy and hope she writes another one, and another one. And maybe one after that.
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Ted Taylors A STING IN THE TALE is aptly named. Fine, literary writing merges with stinging twist endings in this extremely well written collection of stories that are well plotted and highly visual.  Themes such as an unusual confession, business woes and duplicity, a fan with an emphasis on fanatic, shades of ventriloquism, marital murder most foul, sweet revenge on school bullies, and bus stop ghosts, to mention just a few, all make for a very memorable book. Recommended, indeed!
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Justin Cronin's deft prose and almost lyrical sense of the give and take of relationships really shine in this novel. The episodic convergence is crafted with precision, and the involving characters keep your attention. The story progresses to a shared redemption of sorts for its characters, and with their all too human frailty making that resolution less than predictable. A very satisfying read.
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HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN contains what may be the best opening and closing paragraphs Ive ever read in a work of fiction. As for what is found between these two worthy sections, the prose takes on a life of its own. The book features one of the most complex plots that author James Lee Burke has ever undertaken --- full of tragedy, romance, violence and mysticism --- and does so with sure-footedness and without a misstep. Reading it is like running down a flight of stairs with a basement full of gold in sight.

For those who love reading, recommending HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN is possibly a two-edged sword; nothing else may ever quite stand up to it. There is also the certain knowledge that whatever I write here will not do this fine book --- written in what may be considered the twilight of Burkes career, but for the fact that his sun is seemingly frozen at high noon --- the justice it deserves.

In recent years, Burke has found a wide and vibrant canvas in the form of the Holland family, particularly Hackberry Holland. The semi-defrocked Texas Ranger is the focus of HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN, which centers on two points in a quarter-century period. It begins in 1916, with a very bedraggled Hackberry in Mexico. His mission is to find Ishmael, his long-lost and estranged son who is a captain in the United States Army. Hackberry is at the point of death but for the mercy of an enigmatic woman named Beatrice DeMolay, the madam of a Mexican brothel whose intentions are not fully revealed right away. His stay there comes to an abrupt end, punctuated by his fateful decision to destroy an arms cache and plunder a hidden treasure that includes a stolen artifact rumored to be the Holy Grail. The arms and the treasure, including the artifact, belong to an Austrian arms dealer named Arnold Beckman, who may be much more than he appears to be.

How Hackberry has come to be in these straits is explained in a very lengthy flashback to 1891. While still married to one woman, he takes up with another. They conceive a child together, but their plans are ruined by a minor Machiavellian maneuver that changes Hackberrys life for the mid-term future. However, he is fully complicit in his slow, silent downfall. As is demonstrated time and again throughout the book, Hackberry is a haunted Johnny Appleseed, planting the seeds of his own potential destruction. His one chance at redemption --- and reconciliation with his son and the true love of his life --- seemingly occurs when what is believed to be the Grail comes into his life. The artifact soon becomes a pawn in a deadly game that holds Ishmaels life in the balance. The violence that has ruled Hackberrys life for so long may not be enough to win the most important of days, as he tries to save his son and preserve what is left of his own innate goodness.

HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN contains hints of topics touched upon and explored by Bierce and Melville (among others), but in the end, this is all Burke. Its a superlative way to end the year, strongly recommended to all who love and appreciate the acts of reading and writing. It doesnt get any better than this.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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Ian McEwan's bestselling novel Atonement is one that most readers will not soon forget. Part love story, part war story and part fairy tale, this novel earns its place among the classics.

Set in the years surrounding WWII and divided into four parts, the plot rises slowly at first, but in a way that enraptures the reader. McEwan's mastery of language and plotline has readers never wanting to put it down but culminates in an oddly satisfying ending.

The language of the novel is both soothingly simple and completely moving in a way that simply demands your full attention and leaves the readier feeling the emotions of the characters in a deeply connecting manner. McEwan is no stranger to this technique as he implores similar methods in his Enduring Love novel with also reflects his partialness to an easy foreshadowing.

This novel is one that I would easily recommend to any fan of literature and I look forward to reading many more of McEwan's novels.
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Picaresque is a resoundingly welcome reminder that fantasy is not dead. Every character in this well-developed novel feels animated, articulate, playful, and alive. I couldn't help smiling and laughing along with their moods and antics as they plot, plan and stumble from one episode to the next in this rollicking on-the-road tale. Strange characters come and go: a group of thieves pose as a performance group, a wizard turns himself into a bear, a female elf has unexpectedly dark powers, an odd little girl has a strange secret. As in the traditional style of the picaresque genre, Reginald Jest is the lovable rogue: an antihero who bounces in and out of prison while pining over his employer, the acerbically beautiful Nina Chakya. The plot is finely crafted and perfectly paced, with the fight scenes injecting action with a dose of realism. Overall the book is a fusion of mystery, action and adventure, a thoroughly enjoyable read in which it is easy to lose oneself. Highly recommended to any fantasy reader.
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If half stars were a possibility, this fine novel would merit a 4.5.
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This is probably one of the top classics of "golden age" detective fiction. Anyone who's read any mystery novels at all will be familiar with the tropes -- an English country house in the first half of the twentieth century, a locked room, a dead body, an amateur sleuth, a helpful sidekick, and all the rest.

It's a clever story, ingenious enough in its way, and an iconic example of Agatha Christie / Dorothy Sayers -type murder mysteries. If you've read more than a few of those kinds of books, you might find this one a little predictable, but it's fun despite that.

It's particularly of note, however, because Raymond Chandler wrote about it extensively in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder." After praising it as "an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks," he proceeds to take it sharply to task for its essential lack of realism. This book -- which Chandler admired to an extent -- was what he saw as the iconic example of what was wrong with the detective fiction of his day, and to which novels like "The Big Sleep" or "The Long Goodbye", with their hard-boiled, hard-hitting gumshoes and gritty realism, were a direct response.

So this book's worth reading not just because it's "an agreeable book, light, [and] amusing in the Punch style", but also because reading it will give a deepened appreciation for the later, more realistic detective fiction of writers like Hammett and Chandler.
4633601
Lynn Miller's Crossing the Line is an excellent novel, a searching and beautifully written exploration of the varieties of human sexuality.  The major characters are nicely developed--a reader comes to think of Owen Gilroy as a friend, and the dynamics of Owen's relationship with his grandson, Sam, move the story along in an often dramatic fashion.  Miller has set the novel in contemporary Philadelphia, but with a background of past family members whose lives intersect with those of their descendents in ways that Miller makes increasingly clear in his development of an intricate plot that certainly holds your attention. A good read, and very nicely written!
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Caleb Williams is a much overlooked novel these days, though when reading it, it's impossible not to see it's influence on modern crime drama--especially the "innocent acused" motif.  Aside from that obvious influence, the novel as well as the author went on to influence a wide range of writers, from classic Vitorian novelists to the modern thriller writer (even if some weren't aware of it).  But influence alone is not always a good reason to read something.
One word I've heard quite often to describe this story is "fierce."  It's a good term for not only the story, but the concept Godwin was trying to express.  Justice is a fierce thing, but no where near as fierce as injustice; and that's truly what this story is driven by: injustice.  Mr. Falkland evades justice and Caleb cannot seem to find it.  Caleb becomes a criminal, hunted for a crime he did not commit.
But Caleb Williams is a few things beyond the basic plot, which one can read directly from Amazon.  It is a psycological novel.  Throughout the story we are inside the mind of Caleb, and it is a stunning picture he paints of himself and of others.  But I for one couldn't help but question the honesty of that picture.  Even in the first Volume when he is recounting the early life of Mr. Falkland, we cannot be sure that there isn't something Caleb neglected to tell us or something he purposely changed.  For that, the novel is a perfect study for anyone looking for unreliable narrators.  Also, the novel is philosophical.  Thoroughout we are feed lines about justice, humanity, and other morals the author wants to convey.  This should be little of a problem for most people, considering the things Godwin is propogating are almost universaly considered proper today.
I do have one complaint about the book, which is this: Godwin is too wordy in his style.  I love novels from this period, so I'm used to their general style, but Godwin's style is more akin to a philosophical essay than a novel.  It can be disracting, and often I would go from completely enthralled to completely bored in the middle of a paragraph.  This is the most notable in the first volume, but the story picks up heavy pace in the second, with a few lulls.  By the time the third volume begins, it becomes very hard to put down until the end.
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Michael Thomas Ford has earned a loyal following for his excellent novels: he is fine storyteller, knows how to pace a tale to keep the reader involved, and creates characters with whom the reader can embrace as memorable people. His ability to remain in the top group of the writers who create successful gay-themed stories that stand solidly as excellent literature is well established, and while not all of his output is along these lines, his most popular books are (Last Summer, Looking for It, Full Circle, Changing Tides, Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me,  It's Not Mean If It's True, etc.) In WHAT WE REMEMBER Ford seems to be branching out into novels that will appeal to a larger audience in that he explores the arena of women's fantasies and private moments and the intrigues of heterosexual liaisons along with the tired and true dissection of dysfunctional families. He adds to this what is meant to be a puzzling murder mystery and the technique of writing that alternates contemporary time in alternating chapters with events eight years prior to explain the gradual unfolding of family secrets and realities. Some of this works, some doesn't.

Simply stated WHAT WE REMEMBER is a tale of two families in a small town whose lives are intertwined with love/hate relationships, suicide/murder, jealousy, misplaced and reconnected love and other diversions. The problem with this novel is that the characters are almost without exception not people about whom we care, making the strange developments less than convincing. Of note, the only character who does manage to maintain our interest is Billy, the youngest brother of the main family who just happens to be gay. But even Billy is a misfit and stretches the tolerance of the family as well as the patience of the reader until the last few chapters. Any reader who pays attention to the rather obvious hints stated from the beginning of this book will have figured out the mysteries that end the book. It may not be Michael Thomas Ford at his best, but it still is a good read and one that keeps the reader involved in spite of the weaknesses. Grady Harp, June 12
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Dominic Smith has accomplished one of the most difficult tasks a novelist can take on  He has maintained the continuity of a story that flashes back and forth in time over more than three hundred years, from New York of the 1970s to Holland of the 1630s, and then to Sydney at the turn of this century.
This outstanding novel tells the story of a painting and its creator, At the Edge of a Wood, painted by Sara de Vos in 1636 as a memorial to her daughter Kathrijn, who died at seven of the plague.
By the time you reach the last page, the painting will be an old friend, like one you visit often at the museum or, if you're Martijn de Groot, an insecure New York lawyer who is the lucky third-generation owner of a golden-age apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum. The painting hangs above the marital bed, to be regarded while he made slow, contemplative love to his melancholic wife.
You will know from the beginning that there is no such painting, that neither Sara de Vos nor Marty de Groot existed (although Sara de Vos is based on the first women allowed to become members of the Dutch painters guild, a clannish and tight-knit group with arcane rules and rituals. Both will seem as tangible as your neighbor.
The other main character is Eleanor Shipley, known as Ellie, who is equally real. We meet her as a student and struggling young art restorer who lives in an undesirable corner of Brooklyn. Her tiny apartment, Set above a Laundromat, has its own weather: a tropical monsoon during business hours and a cooler, drier climate at night. It is so unkempt that she has allowed no to stranger visit (Marty will be the first). She shops at the store where period conservators and forgers alike go for their materials, such as the odoriferous rabbit skin she cooks into glue on her own stove, wondering if the travelers on the Gowanus Expressway look through her window and think shes stirring porridge instead of melting animal hide.
The mention of forgers is the magic door to the entire story. In brief, impoverished Ellie is hired by a shady dealer to forge a copy of At the Edge of a Wood, which is then exchanged for Martys original.
The book imagines a turbulent life for Sara de Vos. Her daughter dies of plague; her husband first hides their financial distress then goes bankrupt and abandons her, rather than go to debtors prison. Dutch society of the seventeenth century is not kind to women in that situation. They inherit their husbands debt, although Sara is lucky. Her husbands main debtor wants her to work off the debt by painting, which raises the question: Was At the Edge of a Wood her last? You decide.
Theres a long section about the odd and manipulative relationship between Marty and Ellie after he learns shes the forger. An important part of the plot is the atonement both of them owe. Do they deliver?
In an oblique way, it reminded me of Ian McEwans Atonement, although I had a hard time figuring out which was the Briony figure.
Its been a long time since Ive enjoyed a novel so much, and longer since Ive learned so much from one. Dominic Smith, an Australian who now lives in Austin, must have done an immense amount of research in preparation, and it shows, but he escaped the pitfall of making the book sound academic and instead created his own art.
Highly recommended.

(This review first appeared on my blog, Part-Time Parisian. I learned of the book from an Amazon marketing email and purchased the Kindle edition.)
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This 2014 novel was named a best book of the year by many reviewers, and its full of richness on every page. A literary novel in every sense, its about an aging Manhattan author and notorious recluse, A.N.Dyer, whose failing faculties compel him to call his sons to him and in other ways try to straighten out the tangle hes made of his life.
His two older sons are estranged both from him and each other. Jamie is a filmmakers living on the East Coast whos just completed a dubious project documenting, perhaps too rigorously, lifes final decay. Richard is a struggling Los Angeles-based screenwriter, who has the prospect of long-awaited success dangled in front of him if only he can deliver the impossible-to-get film rights to his fathers first and most important novel, Ampersand.
The third, much younger son, is 17-year-old Andy. (Youll have noticed A.N.Dyer, Andy, Ampersand, and the books title). Andy is ostensibly the product of a liaison between Dyer and a Swedish nanny. The arrival in the household of baby Andy and the story of his conception ended Dyers marriage. But the real story of Andys origins are more significant than anyone but Dyer knows, and hes summoned Jamie and Richard to New York to tell it. And to enlist them in ensuring to Andys future welfare, should he die.
Throughout, as a sort of shambling Greek chorus is Philip Topping, son of Dyers oldest friend, Charlie, whose funeral opens the book. Philip is the same age as the two older sons, and theyve obviously never had much use for him and still dont, even though hes ensconced in Dyers East 70th Street apartment, the flotsam washed ashore from a foundering marriage. Topping is a Mr. Cellophane; they look right through him and never know hes there. Or, as Philip himself says, Im guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen. But the Dyers don't see him, even when its necessary they should.
Dyers clean-up of his affairs includes selling his papers to the Morgan Library, and they, like the Hollywood manipulators, are interested in Ampersand. They will sweeten their offer considerably if he includes a draft of it. Alas, he destroyed all the drafts years before, so is pushed into the insupportable position of having to retype the whole manuscript, inserting awkward phrases and misdirected text, which he crosses out to arrive at the version in the published book.
Its a very New York book, with apt references not just to places and events but to the way the city and its citizens go about their business. All this seems sly and perfectly grounded. Here are a few sentences from the Morgan Library reps pitch to Dyer:
"In my biased view, we are the intellectual heart of this city. A visitor from another planet would do well to visit here first in order to understand our human narrative. We also have a tremendous gift shop." [This last is true, IRL.]
Dyers agent then suggests theyve been approached by the University of Texass Harry Ransom Center with a much more generous offer, and receives this response, which manages to insult everyone:
"If moneys the bottom line, we cant possibly compete. Ransom and their ilk will always win. And they are a fine institution and Austin is a fine central Texas town. But if you want to maximize profits, may I suggest breaking up the archive and selling the pieces in lots. But if respect, sensitivity, geo . . ."
Philip Topping is everywhere and nowhere in the book, as its part-time narrator. It also includes excerpts (freshly typed!) from Ampersanda vicious tale indeedcorrespondence between Dyer and Topping, senior, from childhood on, and texts between Andy and a young woman hes hoping to seduce.
Full of humor, human foibles, and beautiful writingseductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak, as NPR reviewer Mary Pols saidits a book that flew under my radar, but which Im glad I finally found.
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This is a sprawling, ambitious, and delightfully old fashioned sort of novel the kind that's perfect to escape into during long autumn afternoons. With a style that toys with Joyce, Beckett, Chabon, Doctorow, Dickens, and more, Brendan Mathews still emerges with a sensibility that is very much his own. The story introduces us to a large cast of characters (the Irish Dempsey brothers, the women who love them, the men who would like to foil them, and several others, including the ghost of William Butler Yeats) and cleverly unfolds how all of their hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow have set them all on a collision course that none of them can anticipate and some may not survive.

Side note: To be honest, since getting my degree in literature a decade ago I've taken a long break from reading most literary fiction by white men. After indiscriminately tearing through the canon in high school and college, I felt like I'd earned a break from that sinking feeling of hitting the first description of a lady in a book and thinking "lord, here we go again." So probably the highest praise I can give The World of Tomorrow is that after you get through the very first section on the boat, most of the women in this book do feel like three dimensional, fully realized people with dreams and personalities of their own one way in which this gorgeous period piece is refreshingly up to date.
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Steven Erikson, The Healthy Dead: A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach (Night Shade Books, 2005)

If Steven Erikson did not exist, we would have to invent him. I've been immersed in a large number of fantasy series consisting of large numbers of doorstop-sized novels for years now. And while a number of them range from the good to the utterly fantastic, I don't believe I have ever come across one that has the gritty realism and emotional impact of Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. In a genre that is currently seeing some of the best writing in its history, Erikson is head and shoulders above the rest.

This is exactly why The Healthy Dead is such a pleasant surprise. While it takes place in the same world as the Malazan books, and its pair of protagonists are characters in that series, it throws the realism aspect to the wind. It's also a hundred twenty-eight pages, and small pages with a large font at that; you can finish The Healthy Dead in a single sitting (whereas a typical Malazan book, assuming you have a job, will take you weeks). It is a whimsical flight of fancy, a neat, tidy, gory, amusing little morality play that's surprisingly understated-- especially when put up against, for example, the past few books we've seen in Goodkind's Sword of Truth series.

The parallel goes beyond the fact of the moralizing itself. Both Goodkind and Erikson are on about the same set of morals, and approach their particular soapbox from the same basic direction. The difference is that where Goodkind fails in his attempt to get his point across (stopping the action to have one's characters moralize at the audience is, by definition, a failure), Erikson succeeds by taking the opposite tack; the moral of the story is in the actions and reactions of his characters to the setting.

The setting, in this case, is the remote town of Quaint, where the sorceror Bauchelain and his companion, the necromancer Korbal Broach, find themselves approached by two citizens who ask them to find a way to depose their tyrannical king. The king's tyranny is of a quite novel sort (at least, in a fantasy world); he is entirely convinced that the best way to make his citizens happy is to stop them from indulging in vice, and so had banned such things as brothels, alcohol, gambling, and red meat. The citizens, while healthier than they were (at least, when they're not dying of a particular complication of their new healthiness, which I'll leave it to the reader to snicker over), are dying of ennui. They want their old tyrannical despot back. The problem is, said tyrannical despot happens to be hanging on a pike outside the wall. Enter Korbal Broach.

The parallels with modern life couldn't be more obvious, and Erikson's characters react to them much as modern humans do. His solution to the problem is utterly unrealistic, and the stuff fantasies are made of. Good fantasies, though; no one wanders around preaching about the evils of tyranny and the importance of freedom of choice. Still, a straightforward narrative would be a good fantasy story, but not really on the same level of delight one gets from a full-fledged Malazan novel. What raises it to the heights we expect from Erikson are the little details he throws in, like the King's Rube Goldbergian exercise machine, the ex-harlot Knight of Purity, and most of all, the personified Seven Deadly Sins (well, four of them, anyway; one assumes the others starved at one point), who are wonderful characters in their own right.

This is a face of Erikson not seen in his larger works. It lacks the emotional punch of, say, Memories of Ice, but that's to be expected, shorter and not nearly as somber as it is. It's still wonderful. If you're a fan of the Malazan books, pick this up at your earliest convenience. If you're not, hie thee to the bookstore and pick up Gardens of the Moon. Now. ****
88697
I love Brian Morton's writing. I read him and other highly recommended literary novels not only to enjoy the stories, but also because I'm writing a novel and wanting to learn through reading the craft of superb novel writing. There are few better than Morton. Starting Out in the Evening is a classic; the Dylanist is an excellent read.

Breakable You is not his best - we witness too much the demise of some of the characters, one (Eleanor) is uninteresting and Adam is unsympathetic. Of the main characters two slide downhill, a third seems to be very slowly awakening, and the fourth rediscovers life only briefly. But Morton's portrayal of character and elucidation of their inner experience, in all its complexities, ambivalences and often horrors, is unparalleled.

This is a painful novel; Morton does not shrink from portraying desperation, or the ugliness of both inner and outer life. But he also writes beautiful graceful prose, capturing the subtleties of life in very precise and often vivid language, while injecting occasional insights which make the reader stop and pause to reflect. Both he, and most of his characters, come across as very intelligent, and often attuned to the intricacies of the psyche and personal relationships. The best part of Breakable You is Morton's portrayal of Maud and Samir, and the process of their non-relationship developing into true relationship; Morton's chapters about them are deeply engrossing, highly original and extremely perceptive.

This is not a happy novel, but it may touch you deeply, and penetrate parts of yourself that you may otherwise hesitate to acknowledge or reveal. I recommend it, but suggest that you first experience Morton at his best in Starting Out in the Evening.