Happy New Year!
We made it through the holiday season and into 2014 unscathed, but I can't say I'm too happy with it so far. It's been nothing but heavy snow storms and sub-zero temperatures. Still, it is winter - just a worse one then we've had for a while. Let me tell you about a couple of books you might want to hunker down with until Spring.
Series
Drown All The Dogs - Thomas Adcock ( $5.50/$.25, copyright 1994, 342 pages, Paperback)
This is part of a series that I recently came across. The main character is Neil Hockaday - Hock - an Irish-American detective with the NYPD. In this volume, Hock and his girlfriend Ruby - an African-American actress - fly to Ireland to visit his dying uncle, Liam. Hock is hoping to find out more about his father who died when he was very young. While he's dealing with this, there are a series of murders, suicides, and assaults that take place on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, as in all books involving The Irish, there's a lot of drinking and a lot of politics. The payoff is interesting but the characters are such stereo-types that I couldn't bring myself to invest in any of them. It was OK.
Dark of The Moon - John Sanford ($9.99/$.50, copyright 2007, 418 pages, Paperback)
Sanford is more popularly known for his Lucas Davenport series of "Prey" novels involving the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Here, he's spun off a subordinate character in those novels - Lucas Flowers - and taken the action out of the city and into the country. Flowers is a laid-back kind of guy given to wearing rock T-shirts and liking women. He's sent to the small town of Bluestem to investigate the murder of a retired doctor and his wife and comes across several other murders. It's interesting to see how Flowers works his way into the lives of the locals while building up a whole list of suspects and Sanford throws in some misdirection to keep things moving along. There's not much action until the very end, but it's all tied up neatly. I enjoyed it.
Miscellaneous
Mr. Arkadin - Orson Welles ($3.50/$2.10, copyright 1956, 256 pages, Paperback)
Yes. That Orson Welles. As I understand it, Mr. Arkadin was the last movie that Welles produced and directed and this was his own novel on which he based the screenplay. The main character, Guy van Stratten, is a small-time smuggler in Europe and Mr. Arkadin is one of the richest men in the world. But, Arkadin claims to have amnesia and doesn't remember a large chunk of his past so he hires van Stratten to look into it. It's an easy 10 Grand until the people that he's interviewed
start dying and Van Stratten starts to get suspicious. It's a pretty good noir novel, but I did some checking and there seems to be some doubt as to Welles' authorship. There's also speculation that it's adapted from several episodes of a radio series "The Lives of Harry Lime" (which Welles wrote and performed in) and that Arkadin is based on the Harry Lime character (Lime being Welles' role in "The Third Man"). Still, I enjoyed it.
That's it for now. I better get started on the next book since February is a short month.
It's cold out there so stay inside, stay warm, and...
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