Books Read in August 2025

As you can see, I am more than a bit behind with my monthly reading summaries. August's reading was a bit unusual for me. I only read five books, partly because one of them was a nonfiction book, and I usually read them more slowly. I only read two mysteries, but the nonfiction book focused on mystery plots and narration in both novels and film, so it was related to mysteries. 

Nonfiction

The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (2002) by Jim Defede

When the terrorist attacks in the US occurred on September 11. 2001, US airspace was shut down indefinitely. Airplanes that needed to land there were diverted to other airports outside the US.  Thirty eight commercial airplanes were instructed to land at the Gander International Airport in Newfoundland. This book describes the stories of the men, women, and families who were on the planes that had to land there and the logistics of getting the planes on the ground and finding places for all the passengers and flight crews to stay. Many of the people in Gander and surrounding towns donated their time to support the many people who were temporarily housed there. This book did a great job of covering that situation, at least from my perspective. The writing style was not perfect, and the organization of the various stories about the visitors and the townspeople was sometimes haphazard, but I was so interested in reading about it all that I did not really care.

Perplexing Plots (2023) by David Bordwell  

The subtitle of this book is "Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder." Bordwell was an influential film scholar; this book, the last one he published, focuses on crime fiction and films in the 1900s up to more recent times. He discusses the development of crime fiction plots and narratives and notes the same developments in plays and film of that time. See my review.

Fantasy / Time Travel

Before Your Memory Fades (2018) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This is the third in a series of five books about time travel that takes place in a café in Tokyo which has been serving a special coffee for more than one hundred years. When people sit at a particular table, drinking a cup of that coffee allows them to travel in time, but just for a short time. There are four connected stories in this book; each is novella length. The stories of the people who run the café are just as interesting as the time travel stories. In this book, some of the people who run the café in Tokyo visit a second time travel café in another city. You might think that the stories get to be repetitive, but I have found new approaches and ideas in each of the books I have read. The first book in the series is Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Crime Fiction

The Killing of the Tinkers (2002) Ken Bruen

This is a very noir, but also relatively short, crime fiction book, the 2nd book in a series featuring Jack Taylor, a sort of private investigator in Galway, Ireland. Ken Bruen writes beautifully, and the main character is constantly talking about the books he is reading or the music he is listening to, but it is a really dark book. I have the third book in the series and I will read that one for sure, and if I had time, I would read all of them. I have also read the first three books in Bruen's Inspector Brant series, which I prefer.

Pesticide (2023) by Kim Hays

This book is the first in the Linder and Donatelli series. It is a police procedural set in Bern, Switzerland. Detective Giuliana Linder is an experienced homicide detective; she has worked with Investigator Renzo Donatelli before but this time they start out on different cases in very different locations. The author has dual Swiss/American citizenship, and has lived in Bern with her husband for 37 years. See my review.

Recently finished

At the Table of Wolves by Kay Kenyon is an alternate history with elements of espionage and fantasy; some characters have paranormal powers. It is set in 1936 in England and Germany; I thought the depiction of the time period was very well done and convincing.  

Currently reading

Actually I will start reading this nonfiction book tonight. Eight Days in May is about the eight days following Hitler's death on April 30, 1945. The author, Volker Ullrich, is a German historian; the book was translated from German by Jefferson Chase. 

And, more cat pictures...

London has now been with us three months. Per some pet behavior specialists, this is an important milestone in a new pet's adjustment. We are still adjusting to London and he to us. He is fun and so big compared to our previous cats. He is beginning to show more affection and easily accept it from us. All of the photos were taken by my husband. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Prophet Song to Rachel's Holiday

  

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I have not read that book, but from what I gather it is a dystopian novel set in Ireland and written by an Irish author. That novel follows one woman trying to keep her family together as the country moves towards totalitarianism. This sounds like a very good book and I may want to read it some day. 

The books that I have linked to for my Six Degrees chain are all set primarily in Ireland, and are written by Irish authors. 

1st degree:

My first link is to an Irish crime fiction book on my TBR pile – Winterland by Alan Glynn. From the book dust jacket: "The worlds of business, politics and crime collide in contemporary Dublin when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night - one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That's the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels."

2nd degree:

Winterland can be described as dark and gritty, and that leads me to The Guards, the first of the Jack Taylor novels written by Ken Bruen. The series is set in Galway, Ireland. Jack Taylor was in the Garda Síochána (the police force of the Republic of Ireland), and thrown out because of serious problems with alcohol. He becomes, almost accidentally, a finder, a sort of private detective. One element of the writing is frequent mentions of books, especially mystery novels, and quotes interspersed here and there, often with no apparent connection to the story.  The mystery portion of the plot is slight. The emphasis is more on Jack, his relationships, his life, his battle with alcohol. It isn't a happy book, but it isn't depressing either.

3rd degree:

Like The Guards, the The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black is more of a character study than a mystery. And beautifully written. Set in Ireland in the 1950s, it is the 2nd book about Quirke, a pathologist working in a hospital in Dublin. Deirdre Hunt died and the assumption is that it was suicide; Quirke suspects that this is not correct, so he spends some time looking into her death. Dierdre also went by the name Laura Swan and ran a beauty salon, The Silver Swan. In looking into Deirdre's death, Quirke discovers that his daughter Phoebe has some connections to that salon also, and he becomes more interested. After reading this book, I was hooked on the series.

4th degree:

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym used by John Banville for some of his crime fiction books. In 2020, John Banville published Snow, set in Ireland in 1957. The Catholic Church is powerful in Ireland at that time. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been sent to County Wexford to investigate the death of a priest, found dead in the home of a well-known Protestant family. DI Strafford is also Protestant, an unusual occurrence in the Garda. He finds himself in an uncomfortable position, isolated in the small community by the accumulating snow and getting little cooperation from the family or the townspeople. 

 

5th degree:

My next link also involves Garda detectives. The Secret Place is the 5th book in the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French. It is set in a girl's boarding school and the investigation takes place in one day. Holly Mackey, daughter of a policeman and student at St. Kilda's, brings a new piece of evidence related to the death of a teenage boy to Stephen Moran, a detective in the Cold Cases division who would really rather be in the Murder Squad. Stephen takes the information to Detective Antoinette Conway in the Murder Squad. They pursue the investigation. Tana French's mysteries are very good, but none end happily, and they usually leave me a bit down.

6th degree:

To be honest, most of the books in my chain are dark and bleak. For my last link, I am switching to the opposite. Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes is from my TBR pile. One Goodreads review described it as "dark, depressive, and sad" which is strange for a book categorized mainly as chick lit. Although the story is about a woman who returns to her home town of Dublin and goes into rehab for drug addiction, I believe this is handled with humor and wit. It is the 2nd book in the Walsh Family series; I read Watermelon and liked it, so I am expecting to like this one too, although it is close to 600 pages long.

In my Six Degrees I stayed in Ireland, although two of the books do go back to the 1950s.  If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

Have you read any of these books or authors?

The next Six Degrees will be on April 5, 2025, and the starting book will be Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.

Short Story Wednesday: Anthologies and Collections from the Book Sale

Today, for Short Story Wednesday, I am sharing a few short story anthologies or collections that I purchased at a book sale this weekend. This year Planned Parenthood is having their annual book sale, after having to call it off in 2020. The sale started on Friday, September 17 and will continue through Sunday, September 26. We went to the book sale on both Friday and Saturday, and on the first day I picked up several short story books. I have not sampled any of them yet. So, here they are.

Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories by Andrea Camilleri, Stephen Sartorelli, translator

The late Andrea Camilleri is the author of a long-running police procedural series featuring Inspector Montalbano. The series is set in Italy. For this volume, Camilleri selected twenty-one short stories that follow Italy’s famous detective through cases throughout his career.  The introduction by the author is interesting.

Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon, Jean Stewart (translator)

From the back of the book:

It's Christmastime in Paris, and the great detective Maigret is investigating holiday mayhem in nine delightful short stories. The mysteries abound: an otherwise sensible little girl insists that she has seen Father Christmas, a statement alarming to her neighbors, Monsieur and Madame Maigret. Then, a choirboy helps the inspector solve a crime while he lies in bed with a cold; and another boy, pursued by a criminal, ingeniously leaves a trail to help Maigret track him.

Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble

I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I did not even know that this book existed; it was published fairly recently, in 2020. I don't believe that the cover photo is identified, but it is the perfect representation of what I remember about Alabama. Lush green landscapes, trees reflected in a body of water. I am very excited to read the stories in this book.

Hard-Boiled, edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian

I was also very excited to find a copy of this book. It had been on my want list for a couple of years, and when I looked for it initially, it was hard to find a copy at a price I was willing to pay. The subtitle of this book is "An Anthology of American Crime Stories." It contains over 500 pages of stories published from the 1920s through the 1990s. 

See a very good review by Bill Crider at his Pop Culture Magazine blog. The review also lists the Table of Contents.

Dublin Noir edited by Ken Bruen

The subtitle of this book is "The Celtic Tiger vs. the Ugly American." I don't know exactly what that means, but there is this explanation in the introduction by Ken Bruen:

At first it was straightforward -- Dublin authors to write on their city... Then we turned the concept on its head, as you do in noir. The Irish are fascinated by how we appear to the world, so let's have a look, we thought, at how this city appears from the outside. In addition to a couple of us locals, let's take a cross section of the very best of today's crime writers from America, as well as Britain, Europe, and Canada.

Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times No. 7

I am participating in the Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times meme, hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness. This time I am looking at an actual bookshelf. All of the books on this shelf are unread, and this is just a small portion of it.

The Robert Amiss Series by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Since there are two books on the shelf for Ruth Dudley Edwards, I will start there. I have read and reviewed two books in the Robert Amiss series: Corridors of Death and The St Valentine's Day Murders. I loved the first one; my reaction to the second one was tepid. But I still desire to continue the series, so I will be reading the books on this shelf eventually. The English School of Murder is the third book in the series. Amiss has left the Civil Service and finds a job at a language school teaching English to newcomers. Ten Lords A-Leaping is #6 in the series and I will probably read the intervening books before I move on to that one.

There is a good post about the series at Mystery Fanfare (written by the author).


The Jack Taylor Series by Ken Bruen

On the right end of this set of books are two by Ken Bruen, The Killing of the Tinkers (2002) and The Magdalen Martyrs (2003). These are books 2 and 3 in the Jack Taylor series and I read the first in the series, The Guards, back in May 2012. I liked that book a lot and have more in the series but never continued it. Jack Taylor, a member of the Garda Síochána (the police force of the Republic of Ireland), was thrown out because of serious problems with alcohol. He becomes a sort of private detective.This series is much more bleak and dark than the series by Ruth Dudley Edwards, which leans toward the cozy.

I actually liked Bruen's other series better, the Inspector Brant series. I read the first three books in that series (A White Arrest (1998), Taming the Alien (1999), and The McDead (2000) in 2013. That series is set in London and Brant is part of the Metropolitan police force. He is not the type of cop I usually prefer; he is amoral and does what he has to do, legal or not, to get things done. Still, I loved those books.

Both series include frequent mentions of books, especially mystery novels. Inspector Brant is a big Ed McBain fan.

I think I have gone on enough here. I might return to this portion of the shelf sometime, because there are other interesting books on it.

Top Ten Reads in 2013

I cheated somewhat here because one of my ten is a trilogy, and I could not pick just one from the three novels. Another pick is a reread, but I included it because I was just so impressed when I read it again. All of these books are by authors that I want to continue reading and catch up on their series.

• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch 
• The Last Policeman by Ben Winters 
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
• Crooked House by Agatha Christie  
• The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer
• A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell
• Plots and Errors by Jill McGown
• The White Trilogy by Ken Bruen
• Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

The first book in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series, set in 1948, post WWII, a black neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a black man who moves to Los Angeles, California from Houston, Texas to look for a better life after serving in the military during World War II. I liked this for the characterization and the look at racism and prejudice in that time period.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler:

I loved this one because the writing is beautiful. It was his first novel and many readers say it is not his best book, but I was mesmerized by the writing. I don't know how much my opinion was influenced by my love of the movie (the Humphrey Bogart version).

The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza.

This is the first of a police procedural series that stars Inspector Espinosa of the First Precinct in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This detective is a book lover and a philosopher. His apartment is stacked with books. But mainly what I liked was the unusual format. The first section, which makes up about half of the book, is told in third person and sets up the basic story. The middle section is written in first person from the point of view of the detective, so at that point we are just getting what he knows about the event. The smallest section, at the end, returns to third person to tie up all the events, in a sense. I found this to be a compelling read and am eager to continue the series.

A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell

The story is told in first person, by Hannah Vogel, formerly a journalist, now on the run from the authorities in Germany. This book takes place in 1934, in the cities of Munich and Berlin. I like the strong, independent female protagonist. In addition, Hannah's story shows us Germany at a time when many are forced to join the Nazi party in order to keep their jobs, where parents are afraid to speak their mind because their children may inform on them. 

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch:

A cross-genre novel, blending fantasy and crime fiction. Most often I have seen it categorized as Urban Fantasy. The main character is a policeman and is actively investigating crimes so it also fits the definition of a police procedural. It is humorous and fun.

 
Crooked House by Agatha Christie
I have read eight Agatha Christie books this year. This one is not in a series, but stands alone. I liked everything about this book. I particularly appreciated:

• The story is told in first person, by Charles Hayward, who wants to marry Sophia Leonides. I generally enjoy books told in the first person, because you get closer to the character.
• It is a love story, but the love story does not dominate. As the reader, I wanted the love story to end well, but as with all the mysteries by Christie that I have read, I was never sure what was coming.
• The story features a strong woman as a central character, and I always appreciate that. Especially in a vintage mystery.

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters:

The story of a policeman, Detective Hank Palace, pursuing a homicide case in a pre-apocalyptic world. In a world where many people are abandoning their jobs or changing their entire lives, Hank is stubbornly investigating an incident that every one else thinks is suicide. This book was compelling and thought-provoking.

The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

Milo Weaver works for the CIA, in the Department of Tourism. "Tourists" are described as undercover agents with no identity and no home. Milo is not the James Bond type, although there are plenty of thrilling escapades and violence. But we see the other side of this spy's life, the family he wishes he could spend more time with.

A White Arrest / Taming the Alien / The McDead by Ken Bruen

These three books make up The White Trilogy, a book that includes the first three Sergeant Brant mysteries. A White Arrest introduces Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant. They are working on two cases, one involving murders of dope dealers, the other a killer aiming at members of the England cricket team. In Taming the Alien, Brant visits Ireland and New York. The McDead is a story of revenge, with Roberts seeking to get back at the man who killed his brother, who seems to be protected by the higher ranks in the police department.

Ken Bruen's writing is poetic. He draws me into the story and I don't care that the protagonists are hard and violent and willing to bend the law. 

Plots and Errors by Jill McGown.

This book is the tenth in a series of thirteen books set primarily in a fictional town in the UK called Stansfield. These police procedurals star Chief Inspector Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill. The books do not follow a formula. Lloyd and Hill, and their ongoing relationship, are the mainstays of the series, but each book takes a different approach to telling the story. The unique aspect to Plots and Errors is that the structure is like a play and it is interspersed with quotes from Hamlet. There is a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue. There is even a list of the Dramatis Personae.

The character development is superb, from the main policemen to the subsidiary members of the team to the various family members whose lives have been affected by the crime.

Mysteries in September and Pick of the Month

I read eight mysteries in September, and I finished reading two mystery reference books that I had been reading off and on for a couple of months.

Below is my list of mysteries read in September. Three of the books were part of a trilogy so for the purposes of this list, I count them as one book.

1. The White Trilogy by Ken Bruen
2. The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
3. The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino
4. The Infernal Detective by Kirsten Weiss
5. The Yard by Alex Grecian
6. Vendetta by Michael Dibdin

The two mystery reference books I read are Mystery Muses: 100 Classics That Inspire Today's Mystery Writers (2006), edited by Jim Huang, and The Mystery Lover's Companion (1986) by Art Bourgeau. Both were fun reads, and I have read Mystery Muses more than once.

I have no problem this month picking a favorite mystery (or three): The White Trilogy. This trilogy consists of the first three books in Ken Bruen's Inspector Brant series. The books are: The White Arrest, Taming the Alien, and The McDead. I loved each book, but together the three books form a perfect whole.

A White Arrest introduces Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant. Brant is an immoral cop who does what he thinks he has to do to deal with criminals and stay alive. And what he does may not be strictly legal. Roberts is sixty-two and feeling his age. He has a wife and a teenage daughter, but police work (among other things) has strained their relationships. He has dreams of a real family life. WPC Falls is a young black woman trying to fit into a male-dominated profession. The story of Falls in this trilogy is heart breaking but also very affirming. She is a strong female character with a lot of facets to her character.


The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise. Bloggers link to summary posts for the month, and identify a crime fiction best read of the month. Check out the link here to see the other bloggers picks.

The White Trilogy: Ken Bruen

My plan was to read The White Arrest by Ken Bruen. But I was reading that book in The White Trilogy, and when I got to the end, I could not stop. I kept on reading until I had finished all three books in the trilogy in three days. Only about 150 pages each, that sounds easy, but for me it was an accomplishment. Having read only one Ken Bruen book previously (The Guards), I was already a fan. Now I am not sure which series I like better.

In the Introduction to The White Trilogy, Ken Bruen tells us...

                         We will not now
Or ever
Help you in any form fashion or method
In research
Regarding the Metropolitan Police.

So said Scotland Yard when I asked them for assistance regarding:

Pay scales
Ranks
Jargon
For a planned series on London coppers.

So Ken Bruen proceeds to write

A White Arrest.

Inventing that term to mean a stunning arrest that would whitewash all previous screw-ups.
I wanted a bad-ass bigoted blunt violent sergeant as the focus, with a surrounding cast of dysfunctional cops in an imagined South East London station, close to where I had lived for ten years.

A White Arrest introduces Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant. They are working on two cases, one involving murders of dope dealers, the other a killer aiming at members of the England cricket team. In Taming the Alien, Brant visits Ireland and New York. The McDead is a story of revenge, with Roberts seeking to get back at the man who killed his brother, who seems to be protected by the higher ranks in the police department.

I have said on this blog that I have a preference for series where the policeman is not damaged or flawed. Nice family men just trying to do a good job every day. Detective Sergeant Tom Brant does not fit that description at all, but he is now on my list of favorite fictional policemen. The best description I read was amoral. Brant does what he thinks he has to do to deal with criminals and stay alive. And what he does may not be strictly legal.

Yet I love these books. Having already read The Guards, I knew what to expect, roughly. I knew it would not be an easy read, a comfort read.

Ken Bruen's writing is poetic. He draws me into the story and I don't care that the protagonists are hard and violent and willing to bend the law.

I like so many characters in this series.
Brant
Roberts
WPC Falls

The story of Falls in this trilogy is heart breaking but also very affirming. She is a strong female character with a lot of facets to her character

Roberts is sixty-two and feeling his age. He has a wife and a teenage daughter, but police work (among other things) has strained their relationships. He has dreams of a real family life.

I especially liked that Brant is a big McBain fan and has all of his books, the 87th Precinct books, the Matthew Hope books, and even all the books written as Evan Hunter. Brant sees the cops in the 87th Precinct series as the ideal, yet he is very far from that ideal (keeping in mind that I have only read the first three in the McBain series).

I could go on and on with praise for these books.

I had been looking for the first books in this series for a while, but Keishon at Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog was the one who alerted me to the reprints of the Brant series at MysteriousPress.com and the eBooks from Open Road Integrated Media. I opted to get the trade paperback version of the trilogy, and it was well worth the price. I have purchased the next book in the series.

Please see Keishon's reviews of A White Arrest, Taming the Alien, and The McDead.

Submitted for the Alphabet in Crime Fiction for the letter W. This community meme is hosted by Mysteries In Paradise.

New-to-me Authors

Today I am joining in on the meme on best new-to-me crime fiction authors 2012 at Mysteries in Paradise. The goal is to share authors that are new-to-us this year, especially the ones we liked. This meme runs at the end of each quarter. Check out other posts for this quarter.



This quarter I have read books by five authors that I have never read before. None of them are new authors. Several of them have established continuing series.

1. The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo
2. Cop Hater by Ed McBain
3. In the Woods by Tana French
4. The Guards by Ken Bruen
5. The Information Officer by Mark Mills

I enjoyed all of these books. The first four books are in series and I plan to seek out the next book or two in the series to read.

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo is a complex police procedural, following the story of a Norwegian detective investigating neo-Nazi activities in Oslo, with flashbacks to events during World War II on the Eastern Front. There is a large cast of characters and they are convincingly portrayed. I cared about what was happening to them. I liked the short chapters and the headings for each chapter noting time and place. Nesbo has written nine Harry Hole novels, and this is the third in the series. As yet, the first two in the series have not been published in English. I did not find it difficult to start the series with this book, although there were references to earlier exploits.

The Guards by Ken Bruen is another police procedural. However, the style of writing in that book is very different. It is a dark and bleak book. But it was one of my favorite reads of this year. Jack Taylor was in the Garda Síochána (the police force of the Republic of Ireland), and thrown out because of serious problems with alcohol. He becomes, almost accidentally, a finder, a sort of private detective. One element of the writing is frequent mentions of books, especially mystery novels, and quotes interspersed here and there, often with no apparent connection to the story.  The mystery portion of the plot is slight. The emphasis in more on Jack, his relationships, his life, his battle with alcohol. It isn't a happy book, but it isn't depressing either.



Yes, I read my first book from 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain in May of this year. I anticipated liking the series, and I was not disappointed. The first chapter pulled me into the book immediately.  Although parts of the book were heavy on descriptive sequences, I did find the story compelling and I liked the portrayal of the policemen. They were not perfect, but generally they seemed believable.

It seems that most of the books by new authors I have read recently are police procedurals. That is a sub-genre that appeals to me. As McBain says in his introduction to the book: "In fiction, there is always a quantum jump to be made when anyone but a police detective is investigating a murder."

The only book that was not a police procedural was a historical mystery set on the island of Malta during World War II: The Information Officer by Mark Mills. I just finished that book and enjoyed both the setting and the story.

The main character in this book is in charge of reporting on the events of the war on Malta and controlling and influencing the morale of the islanders. This book successfully weaves a story about the war as it affected Malta with a hunt for a serial killer.

The Guards: Ken Bruen

Jack Taylor was in the Garda Síochána (the police force of the Republic of Ireland), and thrown out because of serious problems with alcohol. He becomes, almost accidentally, a finder, a sort of private detective. The Guards is the first of the Jack Taylor novels written by Ken Bruen.

I thought I would not like this book. I resisted reading it because the subject matter was bleak and I thought it would be too dark for me. It was my husband's encouragement and recommendation that finally got me to read the book; he had heard of the book, read my copy, and liked it a lot.

I liked it too, a lot. I would venture to say it is one of my favorite reads of the year, so far.

The writing style is unique and that was another thing I thought I would not like. As my husband said in his Goodreads review: "A fast read but pay close attention as the writing style takes a bit of getting used to."

One element of the writing is frequent mentions of books, especially mystery novels, and quotes interspersed here and there, often with no apparent connection to the story. 

The mystery portion of the plot is slight. The emphasis in more on Jack, his relationships, his life, his battle with alcohol. It isn't a happy book, but it isn't depressing either.

This is what Charlie Stella said in his long and detailed review at Noir Zine (warning: lots of detail about the plot there):

What a read, what a writer! Great stuff!

I cannot say it any better.

This counts as one of my books for the following challenges:
Mt. TBR Challenge
Read Your Own Books Challenge
New Author Challenge
1st in a Series Challenge
European Reading Challenge
Mystery & Suspense Reading Challenge

Book Beginnings: The Guards

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a meme with this theme: Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Visit the post at Rose City Reader and view the other links and get a glimpse of books you may not be familiar with.



The first few sentences in the book I am currently reading are:

It's almost impossible to be thrown out of the Garda Siochana. You have to really put your mind to it. Unless you become a public disgrace, they'll tolerate most anything.

The book is The Guards by Ken Bruen.

I am a little over half way through the book. For years I did not read it (while it waited patiently in a box) because my impression was that it was too gritty, too violent, too depressing. Well, it is some of those things but it is also poetic and mesmerizing. I don't want to put it down.