NY: HarperCollins, 2001.
I only recently discovered Walter’s Citizen Vince and immediately went back and hunted up his earlier couple of novels. This was his first, set in the author’s hometown of Spokane, Washington — a mostly conservative, mostly blue-collar, economically moribund town on the eastern edge of the state as unlike Seattle as it’s possible to be.
NY: Soho Press, 2012.
I kind of have a thing about contemporary Japanese fiction. I don’t know why, really, but books by people like Ryu Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Natsuo Kirino, and Mitsuo Kakuta, who are very different from each other in style and subject matter, nevertheless appeal to me on a number of levels.
NY: HarperCollins, 2005.
“Vince Camden” isn’t his real name but he’s gotten used to it, just like he’s come to enjoy the donut-baking job in Spokane that the federal witness protection people put him into in October 1980. His life could be much worse.
NY: St. Martin, 1992.
Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Borders and Lothian Police (i.e., Edinburgh) is as thorough a Scot as you can find, but in this quite mature third novel in the series he has to go and deal with those foreigners down in London, and it’s not a pleasant experience for him.
NY: Signet, 1982.
Early in his career, King, the modern master of suspense and horror fiction, felt the need for an alter ego through whom he could tell stories of a content and in a style he didn’t feel comfortable doing under his own name, and so he created “Richard Bachman.”
NY: HarperCollins, 2003.
Six years ago, when sort-of best friends Alice and Ronnie were eleven years old and were sent home from a birthday party in disgrace, they kidnapped an infant from someone’s front yard on the spur of the moment. The baby died and the girls went to juvenile prison until they were legal adults.
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1973.
Once upon a time, short-form science fiction nearly always made its first appearance in the pulp magazines, of which there were many. The best stories generally were republished in book form, often in thematic collections. The theme this time is just what it says: Deep space, far, far away from Earth and even from the solar system we know and love.
NY: Knopf, 2007.
The city is unnamed but let’s call it Tokyo. It’s a couple minutes to midnight in an entertainment district. Mari Asai sits in a crowded second-floor Denny’s restaurant, reading a thick book with great intensity and sipping a single cup of coffee.
NY: Baen, 2012.
As the many fans of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan know, Miles has reached the age of forty (in Cryoburn) and is about to enter upon a new and very different phase of his life. (No spoiler details for new readers, sorry.) His days as the Little Admiral are far behind him and probably even his work as Imperial Auditor is going to be affected. But, of course, Miles isn’t the only inhabitant of the dozen or more novels about him.
NY: Bantam, 2007.
Maybe it’s because Crombie isn’t a Brit herself, but she seems determined in this admittedly enjoyable mystery series to hunt up a new background theme and location for each book and to expound on it remorselessly. And it does get a little old.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
