Sunday 9 April 2017

JANUARY 2017 - ADDITIONS TO THE LIBRARY - 6 OF THE BEST!

Despite my good intentions to limit the number of books I add to my collection the year started with a bang and a bit of gluttony, especially over on Net Galley.......

Canadian crime from Net Galley
The hunter becomes the hunted: Carl Burns pursues the ruthless gang who targeted him in this fast-paced, suspenseful thriller.

Happily ensconced at River Road Farm and planning to start their own maple syrup business, life is good for Carl Burns and his partner Frances, who also stars in her own TV show. But, unwittingly, Frances's TV exposure has attracted unwelcome attention.

Targeted by a gang of small-time criminals who need to get their hands on a large amount of cash - fast, Carl and Frances's perfect lives are shattered in an instant. With clues as to the gang's identity thin on the ground, the cops' hands are tied. It's up to Carl to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice - in whatever way he can.

4th in the Raymond Donne series - Net Galley
Danger gets a little too close to home for ex-cop Raymond Donne . . .

When his father's former law partner, Harry Stover, is murdered while being celebrated as Williamsburg, Brooklyn's 'Man of the Year' ex-cop turned schoolteacher Raymond Donne fights his old police instincts and vows to stay out of the investigation. That is until his childhood home is broken into and one of his students is threatened.

Has a decades old case of his father's come back to haunt the Donne family? Could the murder have something to do with the victim's charitable work connecting low-income kids with business leaders in Williamsburg? Raymond never has liked unanswered questions, and when the answers come a little too close to his home and school, he decides he's not above giving the cops a little unwanted help.
Net Galley again - striking cover interesting premise!
When U.S. Marshal Helen Morrissey is tasked with collecting a fugitive bank robber from a remote town in the Sierra Nevadas, she braces for a rough trip. After all, with a name like Kill Devil Falls, her destination must be a real hellhole.

Turns out that it’s worse than she imagined. Much worse. After barely surviving a white-knuckle drive in what she suspects is a sabotaged car, she’s stuck in a virtual ghost town populated by a handful of oddballs and outcasts. But it’s not until her prisoner turns up dead that Helen realizes she’s in real trouble. There are secrets buried below the surface of Kill Devil Falls. Secrets worth killing for.
FREE on Amazon - I like a bit of  intrigue.
It is just after WW II and the Schirmer estate has a long history, a battery of lawyers, and millions to disperse. It also has a problem: no heir.

It takes a young American attorney to locate one. He succeeds by going back to records of the Napoleonic wars and finds there clues that lead him to Europe. His improbable quarry: a German sergeant in the occupation forces during the war, living as a bandit in the hills of Greece.

"A wonderfully ingenious tangle of slow dissolving mystification which has the persuasive nag of truth." (New York Herald Tribune)

Courtesy of PDB himself!

Too Many Crooks is a blackly comic Brit Grit romp from the author of Guns Of Brixton and Kill Me Quick!

When high-class fence Leslie Hawkins meets Peter Rhatigan in a sleazy London pub, he offers her the chance to get her hands on the Totenkopfring, a legendary piece of World War Two memorabilia. However, after a violent encounter with a member of a biker gang, things soon spiral wildly and dangerously out of control. Meanwhile in Poland, Dr Anna Nowak finds an amnesiac Englishman half-dead in the snow...

Too Many Crooks by Paul D. Brazill is a fast-moving and action-packed cocktail of bodies, bullets and death-black comedy.
Another Net Galley attraction!
In 1952, after a year on the run, disgraced Chicago Police Officer Elliot Caprice wakes up in a jailhouse in St. Louis. His friends from his hometown secure his release and he returns to find the family farm in foreclosure and the man who raised him dying in a flophouse. Desperate for money, he accepts a straight job as a process server and eventually crosses paths with a powerful family from Chicago’s North Shore. A captain of industry is dead, the key to his estate disappeared with the chauffeur, and soon Elliot is in up to his neck. The mixed-race son of Illinois farm country must return to the Windy City with the Chicago Police on his heels and the Syndicate at his throat. 

Good thing he’s had a lifetime of playing both sides to the middle.

Praise for A Negro and an Ofay…

“Fans of Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos are going to devour Danny Gardner’s brilliant new book. A Negro and an Ofay breathes exciting new life into noir fiction.” —Jonathan Maberry, The New York Times bestselling author.

“Elliot Caprice is a terrific character with his own Midwestern territory and Danny Gardner tells his stories with style and cunning.” —Peter Blauner, The New York Times bestselling author and co-Executive Producer of CBS’s Blue Bloods.


12 comments:

  1. An Ambler and a PDB - you've got some good reading ahead of you, Col. The O'Mara got my attention, too. I'll be interested in what you think of that when you've read it. I hope they're all good 'uns!

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    1. Margot, I've enjoyed the PDB already. Looking forward to the rest, all are new-to-me authors.

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  2. Damn! The Ambler isn't FREEEEE on Amazon on this side of the pond.

    A good lookin' set of books, all in all.

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    1. John, at the risk of irritating you further - it's still FREEEE on Amazon UK (I got mine on January 2nd - over 3 months ago) - quite bizarre really because the FREEBIES generally crossover all the various regional sites in my experience.

      Covers and blurbs look good on all of them. I wouldn't fancy a weekend away in that caravan though!

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    2. John, at the risk of irritating you further - it's still FREEEE on Amazon UK

      Oh, REEEEEEDACTED!

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  3. I have read about Brad Smith online though I have never read any of his books. Eric Ambler is another name I'm familiar with, only more so but without reading his work.

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    1. I like the look of Smith's books, my kind of crime fiction I think. Ambler has written a lot of highly regarded fiction, espionage mainly if you want to pigeon-hole him.

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  4. Six isn't too bad, and they look like your kind of books....

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    1. I think so - six is what I'm owning up to anyway!

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  5. Kill Devil Falls sounds like an interesting setting, but I can tell that it would be much to scary for me to enjoy. I just bought Too Many Crooks a couple of days ago.

    I have been buying way to many books since the beginning of the year but I think I am slowing down a bit now.

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    1. I like the look of Kill Devil Falls especially. I'll read that one soon, I reckon. I've read but not yet reviewed Too Many Crooks. He's just had another one out - Big City Blues, he needs to slow down! I don't think I'll ever be able to stop with the books, but I ought to go a bit slower myself.

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