Monday 26 September 2016

LOGGING THE LIBRARY - PART EIGHTY-FOUR

Tub 84 this week and on the home stretch I think - I might reach 90, I might not.


TUB 84!


Adam Hall, Carl Hiaasen, Edward Bunker, Rory Flynn, Simon Armitage, 
Edward Bunker - posthumously published
Ex-con. Author. Actor. Legend. Edward Bunker is one of the acknowledged masters of crime fiction. Written in the late 1960's and discovered after Bunker's death in 2005, Stark is his first and perhaps his most explosive novel ever.

1962. Oceanview, California. The girls are beautiful. The dope is cheap. The squares here are ripe for the plucking--easy money for a man with a plan. Ernie Stark is a hophead and a grifter out to make a big score. If he has to screw over everyone in town, he will. The problem is one more misstep will find him locked up for good.Violent, lightening paced and exotic, filed with the most wonderful cast of lowlifes you'll ever meet and dialogue that crackles, this is the lost novel for mystery lovers everywhere and the legion of fans of the legendary Edward Bunker.

Jake Arnott, Gar Anthony Haywood, Boris Starling, Christopher Wilson, Neil Cross, 

Crap photo - interesting book!
The Ballad of Lee Cotton (2005)
(Cotton)
A novel by Christopher Wilson

From his Icelandic father Lee Cotton gets his marble skin and blue eyes. From his mixed-race mother he gains his black identity. From his Mambo grandmother he inherits forebodings about his future. It's a combination that sets Lee apart from the other black kids growing up in Eureka, Mississippi. It marks Lee out as slightly odd. And very white. If childhood was confusing, adolescence proves life changing when Lee falls in love with the sublime Angelina. It's also life threatening: Angel's father is a freelance shooter for the Klan, who doesn't take kindly to his daughter's boyfriend. An act of appalling violence leaves Lee far from home with a new identity, a draft card, a memory that operates in flashback and a mental illness that makes him a sort of genius. He also has a reputation, back home, for being dead. Nobody (except possibly his grandmother) could envisage that Lee's rebirth is a headstart and not a handicap. His role in a quite remarkable journey through life will be to transform others as he has transformed himself...
Neil Cross, Chris Simms, Alan Furst, Andrew Vachss, Oonagh O'Hagan, 

Andrew Vachss - short stories!
A chilling collection of tales chronicles the stories of a stalker prowling an urban high-rise, a serial killer whose crimes reflect a childhood of abuse, and an inner-city gunman willing to destroy any number of victims to achieve a moment of acceptance.

Colin Bateman, Ian Sansom, Russell James, Ryan Gatiss, Neville Thompson (edited),

Stories from an Irish Prison!
Every day the population of Ireland wakes up to reports of another horror case of crime. The streets have become unsafe to walk upon and yet nothing seems to be done about it. Politicians make noises voicing their disgust while the police make arrests only to have the perpetrators walk free. Despite all the media hype, no one seems to be any nearer to solving the problem.Streetwise reveals what is really happening on the streets. The stories contained here are told by prisoners: those who have been involved in crime and are now paying their debt to society, allowing the reader to enter the minds of criminals and begin to understand the circumstances behind their actions. Meet Chang, who started joyriding at eight years old and was infamous among police and legendary among fellow law-breakers by the age of 12; Mucka, a once saintly schoolboy who was abandoned by both his family and society so took to robbing as a form of revenge; PJ, man of the house and breadwinner at 11, alcoholic by 12; and Tommy, the divorc who was refused social welfare so robbed the Co-op of a million Euros and soon found the local wing of the IRA knocking at his door. An exhilarating, emotional roller coaster, Street Wise contains frank accounts from those who have succumbed to crime through boredom, poverty or desperation. It shows how men from different backgrounds have fallen into similar crime traps and what has finally placed them on the path to redemption.

Russell James
When a young woman is gruesomely murdered, her friend and fellow reporter Kirsty Rice feels bound to investigate. Just as Kirsty enters the murky world of call-girls, porn and Internet sex, she discovers that she is pregnant. Despite his unconvincing denials, Kirsty is shocked to discover that the father of her unborn child is involved with the pornographers. Did he know about the killing? And how far was he mixed up with London's infamous Miller family? No One Gets Hurt is a tense and powerful thriller, hurtling from a truly shocking opening to an even more shattering climax.

Hans Fallada, Conrad Williams, Daniel Silva, Pall Thomas, Gavin Lyall, 

New Zealand Crime!
Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop, was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of a seventeen-year-old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father, Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the United States' confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.

Martina Cole, James McClure, Graham Hurley, Gavin Lyall, Walter Mosley, 

T. Jefferson Parker, Peter Robinson x 2, Val McDermid, John LeCarre, 

Debut novel from 1985 - T' Jefferson Parker!
Laguna...
Where every day the sun makes a promise the nighttime breaks, while the super-rich live out expensive fantasies in posh beach houses and drown their memories in Cuervo Gold margaritas...

Laguna...
Where trouble has swept in like a Santa Ana wind, blowing the cover off a world of torture, murder and blood-red secrets

Laguna...
Where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violance--with a fiery vengeance--and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery that reaches back across forty years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past, and sweats out a deadly truth in the sweltering..

Laguna Heat
S. J. Rozan, Marcus Sakey, Richard Stark, Ben Richards, Michael Symmons Roberts, 

Westlake AKA Stark - the last Parker - no.24!
 "[One] of the greatest writers of the twentieth century...Richard Stark, real name Donald Westlake...His Parker books form a genre all their own."
--John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea

Master criminal Parker takes another turn for the worse as he tries to recover loot from a heist gone terribly wrong. In Nobody Runs Forever, Parker and two cohorts stole the assets of a bank in transit, but the police heat was so great they could only escape if they left the money behind. In this follow-up novel, Parker and his associates plot to reclaim the loot, which they hid in the choir loft of an unused country church. As they implement the plan, people on both sides of the law use the forces at their command to stop Parker and grab the goods for themselves. Though Parker's new getaway van is an old Ford Econoline with "Holy Redeemer Choir" on its doors, his gang is anything but holy, and Parker will do whatever it takes to redeem his prize, no matter who gets hurt in the process.


Bill Pronzini x 2.5, Marcia Muller x 0.5, Dick Francis, Mike Ripley, 

Husband and wife - tag-team Nameless mystery - no. 13!
The "Nameless Detective" and Sharon McCone join forces at a San Diego private detective convention to investigate a case involving multiple murder, a crime ring dealing in smuggled fugitives, and bizarre, kinky lifestyles.
Cathi Unsworth, Tim Willocks, Howard Jacobson, Jesmyn Ward, Natsuo Kirino, 

Jesmyn Ward - non-fiction!
"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." -Harriet Tubman

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth-and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward's memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Tub 84 put to bed!


HIGHLIGHTS..... Edward Bunker, Colin Bateman, Richard Stark, Rory Flynn, Carl Hiaasen, Bill Pronzini, Andrew Vachss

LOWLIGHTS...... nothing too uninteresting, though the HANS FALLADA book isn't singing out to me.

FULL LIST OF 50 AS FOLLOWS:


AUTHOR TITLE YEAR SERIES
ARMITAGE SIMON LITTLE GREEN MAN 2001
ARNOTT JAKE JOHNNY COME HOME 2006
BATEMAN COLIN DIVORCING JACK 1995 DS1
BUNKER EDWARD STARK 2007
COLE MARTINA THE JUMP 1995
CROSS NEIL HOLLOWAY FALLS 2003
CROSS NEIL ALWAYS THE SUN 2004
FALLADA HANS ALONE IN BERLIN 1947
FLYNN RORY THIRD RAIL 2014 EH1
FRANCIS DICK UNDER ORDERS 2006 SH4
FURST ALAN THE POLISH OFFICER 1995 NS3
GATTIS RYAN ROO KICKKICK AND THE BID BAD BLIMP 2004
HALL ADAM QUILLER BARRACUDA 1990 Q14
HAYWOOD GAR ANTHONY IT'S NOT A PRETTY SIGHT 1996 AGM4
HIAASEN CARL STORMY WEATHER 1995 S3
HURLEY GRAHAM BLOOD AND HONEY 2006 F+W6
JACOBSON HOWARD IN THE LAND OF OZ 1987
JAMES RUSSELL NO ONE GETS HURT 2003
KIRINO NATSUO OUT 2003
LE CARRE JOHN THE NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER 1971
LYALL GAVIN THE SECRET SERVANT 1980 HM1
LYALL GAVIN THE CONDUCT OF MAJOR MAXIM 1982 HM2
McCLURE JAMES THE STEAM PIG 1971 K+Z1
McDERMID VAL THE GRAVE TATTOO 2006
MOSLEY WALTER BLUE LIGHT 1998
O'HAGAN OONAGH I LICK MY CHEESE 2007
PARKER T. JEFFERSON LAGUNA HEAT 1985
PRONZINI BILL QUARRY 1991 N19
PRONZINI BILL BREAKDOWN 1991 N18
PRONZINI/MULLER BILL/MARCIA DOUBLE 1984 N13
RICHARDS BEN THROWING THE HOUSE OUT OF THE WINDOW 1996
RIPLEY MIKE JUST ANOTHER ANGEL 1988 FMA1
ROBINSON PETER PAST REASON HATED 1991 IB5
ROBINSON PETER FRIEND OF THE DEVIL 2007 IB17
ROZAN S. J. BLOOD RITES 2001 BS+LC7
SAKEY MARCUS THE TWO DEATHS OF DANIEL HAYES 2011
SANSOM IAN RING ROAD 2004
SILVA DANIEL THE UNLIKELY SPY 1996
SIMMS CHRIS SHIFTING SKIN 2006 DIJS2
STARK RICHARD DIRTY MONEY 2008 P24
STARLING BORIS VISIBILITY 2006
SYMMONS ROBERTS MICHAEL PATRICK'S ALPHABET 2006
THOMAS PAUL FALLOUT 2015 TI5
THOMPSON NEVILLE STREETWISE (ed.) 2004
UNSWORTH CATHI THE NOT KNOWING 2005
VACHSS ANDREW BORN BAD 1986
WARD JESMYN MEN WE REAPED 2013
WILLIAMS CONRAD DUST AND DESIRE 2015 JS1
WILLOCKS TIM BLOODSTAINED KINGS 1995
WILSON CHRISTOPHER THE BALLAD OF LEE COTTON 2005

9 comments:

  1. Nice variety there, Col. Parker, Thompson, Pronzini, Rozan, Muller...yes, I think you have some good reads coming your way. Hope you'll enjoy them.

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  2. Margot, there's a few old favourites and a nice selection of newbies here to try.

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  3. Richard Stark? There's yet another reminder of Donald E. Westlake and his paperbacks in my collection which, incidentally, will fill a tub and half. Most other authors are new to me.

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    1. I'd favour his Stark books over his Westlake based on what I've read so far, but I've enjoyed both. Don't forget his Tucker Coe moniker either!

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  4. I see one I would like to find: Just Another Angel by Ripley. Have you read anything by Ripley?

    Lots of other good books here too.

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    Replies
    1. No I haven't read anything yet from Ripley....one day!

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  5. Jake Arnott is a writer I really liked in the past, don't think I know this one. Very male collection in this tub...

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    1. I've read one of Arnott's Long Firm trilogy, but haven't been attracted to his latest books. I think all the tubs bar one ( Kinsey and Sue Grafton) are male oriented

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  6. Just received a cheque for $500.

    Sometimes people don't believe me when I tell them about how much money you can earn filling out paid surveys online...

    So I took a video of myself actually getting paid over $500 for filling paid surveys.

    ReplyDelete