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Antivehicular posted:holy poo poo, there are multiple threads in the Book Barn Rowling’s second Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm, is pretty much this, although it kind of comes across as being more than a little unhealthy by the end, to say nothing of some of the more screwy content in the book. Anyhow, here’s some stuff I enjoyed this year that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: - The Arkady Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith loving rule. Renko is the world-weary, cynical son of a Soviet war hero/criminal working in the Moscow police department who usually gets caught between the competing interests of the Party, the KGB, and/or the West. The books (at least from what I’ve read so far) keep pace with current events, so, for example, Red Square, the third book (and last one I finished) came out in 1992 and takes place in the days leading up to the August 91 coup attempt. My understanding is Cruz Smith hasn’t broken with this and the current novels take place in Putin-era Russia/now. - I’ve only read the first of Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy novels, but I quite liked it. Duffy is the token Catholic cop on a Protestant force during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Similar to the Renko novels, there’s a heavy dose of “how do you solve a mystery when everyone around you is probably a criminal of some kind”. - Richard Price is another guy I love. A really soulful (for lack of a better term) writer of modern, gritty, noirish stuff set in present-day New York/New Jersey. Clockers is the one everyone talks about but that left me kind of cold - I enjoyed Lush Life (which is probably the first mystery novel I can think of where gentrification is a key part of the plot), Freedomland, and Samaritan much more. I’d be interested to hear what people think of Tana French. She seems inescapable these days, and I really like her, although I couldn’t really tell you what it is that she does different from everyone else.
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Dec 6, 2019 22:35
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Yeah, jeez. I thought that she was like a big success. She's an Irish writer writing stories in this interesting kind of shared-universe scheme where a secondary character from the previous book is the protagonist of the next book. For example, the first book, In the Woods, is about a police officer and his partner investigating the murder of a child that mirrors an unsolved crime he was involved in as a child, then the second book follows the partner after the events of In the Woods. I mostly asked this as kind of a stealth question to see if anyone has watched the new TV adaptation (I think it's on Starz?) but I take it no one has. Maybe we're over the crest of the Tana French wave now? I feel like she was everywhere for a while. Her last novel, The Witch Elm, which I don't think has any connection to the Dublin Murder Squad series, hit a few best-of lists last year I think.
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Dec 7, 2019 16:36
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