Tag: crime
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“Listen! I’m going to harassed, wreck and ruin your sad, stupid low pathetic life if its not removed you mindless peasant.”
Veronica de Souza had her iPhone stolen. What happens next will make you laugh
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Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Something about this just didn’t work for me.
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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The first appearance of Philip Marlowe. This book set the template for authors like William Gibson and Elmore Leonard.
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Sacred by Dennis Lehane
Another just fine Lehane book about rich guy’s missing daughter, a stand-in for Scientology and a field trip to Florida. His mid-tier books make great comfort food.
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Killshot by Elmore Leonard
Second-tier (still great!) Elmore Leonard with a guest appearance by a dive I used to frequent.
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“This whole world we did not know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep…. Sometimes it really makes me hate London. It makes me want to leave.”
Patrick Radden Keefe writes about a mysterious death in London. At the door, Rachelle encountered a muscular chauffeur with a shaved head, dressed in a tailored blue overcoat and a purple tie. He had a phone to his ear. “Where’s Zac?” the chauffeur asked. “I don’t know. Who are you?” Rachelle said. “Who are you?” “I’m…
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Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane
Lehane is an instant-buy in a used bookshop for me. I’ve come to his books all out of sequence but it doesn’t matter. This is the fifth book in the series that includes Gone, Baby, Gone, and it’s decidedly second-tier Lehane. Still very readable, engaging and effective mystery thrillers, but not on the level of Mystic River or Small…
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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
It’s interesting to read this book so soon after The New Jim Crow. They’re products of a different era, but they have some surprising parallels. This is the book that made David Simon, and while it’s fun to hunt easter eggs and find the seeds of his work in this, it’s an incredible achievement on…
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
I get the significance of this, and I can see why it was a big deal. I am sure that if you’re a devotee of the genre, this would be fascinating. To unsophisticated me though, it was a decent way to kill a few hours. I’ll be more likely to pick up other Raymond Chandler…
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Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
Lehane is a storytelling genius. Elmore Leonard would have been proud to write this. It’s so real, and so vivid. Lehane can create fully formed characters with a couple of sentences: …something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t…