Drs. Trajan Jones and Mike Li were feted advisors to the NYPD, until they exposed some serious failings at the forensics lab and got run out of town as a result. Now they spend their days in the farm town of Surrender; teaching online courses in forensic science and profiling from the cabin of a restored airplane. Jones is a criminal psychologist, following the methods of Dr. Lazlo Kreizler and Li is a whiz at collecting and interpreting trace evidence. Li still pines for his ex-colleague, Gracie Chang and Trajan (LT to his friends) spends his free time caring for a rather unusual pet.
LT and Mike are brought in by the local police after the latest in a series of murders around Surrender. The victims, throwaway children, so called because their parents simply abandoned them to start a new child free life. Unable to go to school and unable to legally work these are the kids who end up on the street selling themselves or drugs.
LT determines that the murders are something else entirely; a case which points right to the rotten core of the Big Apple and puts him, Li and the local police in the crosshairs of some very powerful people. In a bid to understand the nature of the throwaways LT brings one of them onto his team which could prove to be his undoing.
I read a lot of books as I review books for an indie bookstore in SLC, Utah. I'm also a writer. The Mary Mac trilogy is out now.
The Nikki Doyle trilogy (Rollover, Thunderball and Ms. Scarlett) can also be found at your local indie. Excalibur - the Nikki/Mary crossover was just published.
N.B My blurbs give you just a taste of the plot. Reviews are a pretty subjective matter but the books you'll find here are books I have read and loved.
Aug 23, 2016
Aug 15, 2016
The Night Bell, Inger Ash Wolfe
The sins of the past revisit the present in this the fourth
of the Hazel Micallef series.
1959 Hazel is among the last people to see classmate Carol
Lim, alive in Port Dundas, Ontario. Carol’s parents report her missing and
Hazel’s adopted brother is questioned in connection with her disappearance, but
never charged.
Present day, the town is in thrall to developers, the police
service too. Hazel and her colleagues are being downsized and shoehorned into a
new shopping mall on a site locals call the lion’s paw and she isn’t happy
about it. Her mother, the former mayor of Port Dundas is ill and Hazel is
wrestling with a new case. The project
manager of a ‘luxury’ subdivision being built on the outskirts of town has been
covering up a grisly discovery; human bones found on land where the county
foster home once stood.
Amid reports of corruption and broken promises Hazel and her
colleagues investigate. They find more bones but a colleague disappears during
the search and that night a series of brutal murders begins. Determined to find her colleague, Hazel
begins to see links to her long deceased brother, her actions to clear his name
once and for all, propel her into the sights of an angry killer.
Seven days in the book world with Mark Pryor
Mark is the author of the Hugo Marston series and grew up in Hertfordshire, England. He had a number of jobs in the UK that stood him in good stead for his current career including ski instructor and print journalist. Moving to the US in the mid nineties he studied journalism and law at Chapel Hill and Duke respectively passing with as he puts it 'honours, a lot of debt and one helluva wife.'
Mark's day job is Assistant District Attorney with the Travis County DA's office. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and children.
Here is Mark's week in his own words.
It’s funny that I’m writing this post this week. You see, normally I don’t get to read as much as I’d like, what with a full-time job, three kids, and writing two books a year! But this week is an exception, for some reason, so I actually have something to share.
First, we’ll ignore the police reports that I read every day as part of my job as a prosecutor here in Austin. They tend to be a litany of stolen cars, home burglaries, and other unsavory (and not so interesting) stories!
So we can begin with a novel that I’m literally launching into it tonight while my son has soccer practice: What Remains Of Me, by Alison Gaylin. I’ve heard such good things about it, and I’ve gotten to know her at several book events. She’s a lovely person and I’m excited to get started, I know I won’t be disappointed.
I’m also finishing up a biography called Gift Of Darkness, Growing Up In Occupied Amsterdam, by Craig Comstock. It’s a fascinating look at a terrible period in our history, and is proving to be valuable research material. You see, I’m slowly plotting a book set in Amsterdam in 1942, but before I get to work I need to educate myself. To that end, we just got back from a trip there, actually, where we saw the Resistance Museum and the Anne Frank House.
But that’s not all! I also have a .pdf copy of an upcoming novel in my bag. It’s called No Way To Run, by a first-time author named Holly Crichton. It’s her memoir, and her publisher has asked me to read it with an eye to providing a blurb. I’m about 80 pages in and it’s riveting—short version: she’s a former race jockey, paralyzed in an accident, and living with an abusive husband who…. Well, I won’t give too much away, but like I said, it’s riveting.
Last of all this week… I have a copy of Asterix and Cleopatra on the go. I will never stop loving, and reading, these wonderful books!
Mark's day job is Assistant District Attorney with the Travis County DA's office. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and children.
Here is Mark's week in his own words.
It’s funny that I’m writing this post this week. You see, normally I don’t get to read as much as I’d like, what with a full-time job, three kids, and writing two books a year! But this week is an exception, for some reason, so I actually have something to share.
First, we’ll ignore the police reports that I read every day as part of my job as a prosecutor here in Austin. They tend to be a litany of stolen cars, home burglaries, and other unsavory (and not so interesting) stories!
So we can begin with a novel that I’m literally launching into it tonight while my son has soccer practice: What Remains Of Me, by Alison Gaylin. I’ve heard such good things about it, and I’ve gotten to know her at several book events. She’s a lovely person and I’m excited to get started, I know I won’t be disappointed.
I’m also finishing up a biography called Gift Of Darkness, Growing Up In Occupied Amsterdam, by Craig Comstock. It’s a fascinating look at a terrible period in our history, and is proving to be valuable research material. You see, I’m slowly plotting a book set in Amsterdam in 1942, but before I get to work I need to educate myself. To that end, we just got back from a trip there, actually, where we saw the Resistance Museum and the Anne Frank House.
But that’s not all! I also have a .pdf copy of an upcoming novel in my bag. It’s called No Way To Run, by a first-time author named Holly Crichton. It’s her memoir, and her publisher has asked me to read it with an eye to providing a blurb. I’m about 80 pages in and it’s riveting—short version: she’s a former race jockey, paralyzed in an accident, and living with an abusive husband who…. Well, I won’t give too much away, but like I said, it’s riveting.
Last of all this week… I have a copy of Asterix and Cleopatra on the go. I will never stop loving, and reading, these wonderful books!
Mark's week in a nutshell
What Remains Of Me (2016)
Gift of Darkness, Growing Up In Occupied Amsterdam (2015)
No Way To Run (Nov 2016)
Asterix and Cleopatra (1969)
Paris Librarian is out now 9781633881778
More at Mark Pryor.com
Sorrow Road, Julia Keller
1938: Three boys cause a fatal accident in Caneytown, they are never charged.
2017: Thornapple Terrace, Muth County seems like a nice place to dump senile old people; problem is people attached to the place keep dying.
Acker’s Gap in winter is a brutal
place and this winter is the worst on record. County prosecutor Bell Elkins has
been summoned to a bar by an old colleague from her law school days. Darleen
Strayer wants Bell to look into Thornapple Terrace, the care home, where Darleen
placed her father, Harmon, when his mind started to go. Harm died recently and
Darleen noticed something or someone was upsetting her father during their last
few visits.
Carla Elkins swore she’d never
return to Acker’s Gap but she’s home and Bell knows she’s hiding something. On
the plus side Carla’s got herself a job, a job which may unwittingly crack
several of Bell’s cases wide open, including the Strayer case.
The Wages of Desire, Stephen Kelly
1941, the second world war rages
and in England the conscription act has been expanded to include women.
Detective Thomas Lamb is using his daughter, Vera, as his driver mainly because
he’s badly sprained his ankle and partly to keep her out of the conscription
dragnet.
They are on their way to the tiny
Hampshire village of Winstead where a woman has been found, shot to death, in
the graveyard. Finding out that the woman Ruth Asquith was a former conscientious
objector Lamb and his team turn their attention to the work camp where she and
other conscripts are building a prisoner-of-war camp.
The villagers are proving to be suspicious too, the charismatic vicar seems to have lost his gun, local busybody
Flora Wheatley is going around strangling baby sparrows and young Lily watches
the nocturnal comings and goings of the villagers whilst her mother works the
night shift at a factory in Southampton. Yes, Winstead is a village full of
secrets, some long buried, some about to be unearthed.
Aug 9, 2016
Paris Librarian, Mark Pryor
Paul Rogers is in charge of the recently donated Severin collection at the American Library in Paris.
When he dies, seemingly of natural causes, Hugo Marston, who found his body starts an off the books investigation. Paul was Hugo's friend and it seems that the Severin collection or someone connected to it may have caused his death.
Rumors swirl about a dagger that Isabelle Severin used to kill an SS officer in 1944 and Hugo has a surprise visitor, Merlyn (Button Man) and her journalist friend Miki Harrison, who is writing a book on Severin. Hugo digs deeper into Paul's background, unearthing a devious killer and their fading accomplice and by revisiting the scene of a decades old unsolved crime, Hugo places himself and girlfriend Claudia in grave danger.
Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood
Playing Dead is darkly
charmingly bizarre.
Greenwood, who
graduated with a six figure yoke of debt on her shoulders tells her teacher
colleague at dinner one night that she’s going to make a quick buck by a) doing
a TED talk that will go viral or b) she’ll run away to Belize. Her colleague
suggests an option c) fake your own death and claim on the insurance.
Intrigued, Greenwood
googles ‘fake your own death’ and enters a world just below the surface of the
everyday. She meets people who will help you disappear and investigators who
will stop at nothing to resurrect you.
Pseudocide for most
people is a fantasy, cutting all ties with the rat race and running away to
laze on a sundrenched beach. The reality Greenwood finds is a lot harder. She
interviews fraudsters who attempted to use a faked death to escape prison, sees
the collateral damage caused to those left behind and travels to the
Philippines where pseudocide is more like a cottage industry. She receives
phone calls from beyond the grave from pop royalty and spends time with a man
who having successfully paddled into oblivion made some changes to his
appearance and moved into the house next door to his wife as her handyman!
Aug 2, 2016
Sixth Idea, P.J. Tracy
Sixty years ago during a friendly
golf game two scientists working on the Manhattan project came up with the Sixth Idea and weeks later one of
them was dead.
In present day Minneapolis the
Christmas season is dampened by a series of murders that at first glance seem
to have nothing in common. Detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth take their
baffling case to Monkeewrench’s door. Grace MacBride and her team of
unconventional geniuses uncover not only a link but opposing sides one determined
to wipe out all sixth idea descendants, the other determined to protect them.
Can
Monkeewrench find the answer and could it make them targets too?
Aug 1, 2016
Seven days in the book world an interview with Blake Crouch
Something a little different this week as Dark Matter is out now 9781101904220 here is a Q&A with Blake.
A Conversation
with
Blake Crouch
Author of
DARK MATTER
Crown; July 26, 2016
Q. In your own
words, can you introduce readers to the premise of Dark Matter?
A. A brilliant physicist named
Jason Dessen is living in Chicago with his wife, Daniela, and son, Charlie. He
is a true genius, and while there was a point in his late twenties when his
research could have made him a star in his field, he instead chose a
family-focused life. One night, while walking home, he’s abducted by a
mysterious masked man and injected with a drug. When he next awakes, his world
has completely changed. He’s no longer married, doesn’t have a son, and has
achieved professional success beyond his wildest dreams. This sets him on a
thrilling, mysterious, and at times terrifying journey to learn what has happened
to him, and to find his way home to the people and the life he loves.
Q. Where did the idea for the novel
originate?
A. For the last decade, I’ve
wanted to write a story that hinges on quantum mechanics. I tried several times
to write a version of Dark Matter . . . getting
into SPOILER TERRITORY HERE. Three different story lines had been teasing me,
and I’d tried and failed to write them all separately. One story line involved
the box. Another involved the idea of meeting yourself. And the last was about
a man being hopelessly lost in time. The novelist Marcus Sakey is one of my
good friends, and we always meet up at the inception stage of a new book to
pressure-check each other on our ideas. While we were in Chicago two years ago,
I was pitching each of these ideas to him separately when it occurred to me
they were actually all part of the same story. They suddenly clicked together,
like puzzle pieces, and I was off and running. I find the writing process endlessly
mysterious and wonderful.
Q. Millions of
readers will recognize you as the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy and for your suspense novels
and short stories. Dark Matter is a
new direction for you. Can you tell us a bit about what sparked the change?
A. In a way, Dark Matter is very much
like the Wayward Pines trilogy in that it’s a thriller with a backbone of
speculative science. But with this book, I wanted to push myself to do
something bigger and better than I’d ever written before. The story opens up much
faster than Wayward Pines and is larger in scope—about as large as it’s
possible to get, really, given that it takes place (SPOILERS AHEAD!) in the
multiverse. And the quantum-mechanics underpinning for the premise was a huge
challenge to tackle. Trying to understand that science, even on a basic level—let
alone incorporate it into a story without dragging the narrative down into
incomprehensibility—seemed so daunting. But I knew that if I pulled it off, it
would let me play with some really big ideas about our day-to-day existence and
the choices we make that haunt us. It allowed me to build a really cool,
far-out thriller plot around themes that felt very grounded and meaningful to
me.
Q. Dark Matter is grounded in very real
scientific theory and principles—quantum mechanics, superposition, etc. How did
you go about weaving the science so seamlessly into the narrative and making it
understandable to a lay audience?
A. I hope it’s seamless, thank
you! I am definitely not a physicist. In fact, I took as few science and math
courses as I possibly could on my way to my English degree at the University of
North Carolina. If the science is understandable to a lay audience, it’s because
I’m a lay audience. To prepare, I read a ton of books on the subject and pulled
out the elements of quantum mechanics that intrigued me—and that I could
actually comprehend. One of the most fascinating things I stumbled across was a
Ted Talk by Aaron O’Connell entitled “Making Sense of a Visible Quantum Object.”
Unlike most material on quantum mechanics, which focuses on subatomic matter
and can feel very abstract, O’Connell’s talk is about how quantum mechanics
might actually be at work at the macro level. At our level. And what that might imply about the world around us. His
presentation (which is short and easily findable on YouTube) is worth viewing.
When the book was done, I hired a brilliant professor
from USC named Clifford Johnson to read the manuscript and make sure I hadn’t
gone too far off the rails. This is speculative fiction, and there’s still a
certain leap the reader has to be willing to make, but I wanted to present the
concepts behind the story with as much accuracy as I could.
Q. Do you
yourself believe there could be other Blakes out there living in alternate
realities?
A. According to the Many-Worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics, every choice we make and every event that affects
us really does cause reality to branch
into alternate timelines. So, as crazy as the concept sounds—sure, it’s
absolutely possible. The idea of different versions of myself living different
lives, with different careers, spouses, children, etc., was actually my main inspiration
for writing this book.
Q. If you had
the chance to enter “the box” and explore parallel universes, would you?
A. Never! I can’t imagine a more
dangerous place to be. The chances of finding another world like ours are
unimaginably slim. The odds of stepping into a world of ruin and fear and
destruction are massive.
Q. While Dark Matter certainly has elements of
science fiction and is a vivid suspense thriller, themes of love and family
also seem to be at the heart of the story. Would you say that’s a fair
assessment?
A. Absolutely. Dark Matter is a thriller, of course,
but it’s also the first love story I’ve ever written, and I worked hard to
strike a balance among thrills, science fiction, and genuine emotion. To me,
it’s the love and family elements that make up the beating heart of Dark Matter.
Q. Daniela’s character is also essential to not only
the plot of the novel but to the tone and emotional feel. What was the
inspiration behind her character?
A. With Daniela, I wanted to
explore the flip side of Jason’s experience. What would it be like to meet another version of your spouse? What
if they were married to someone else or worked a different job or you two had
never met? Would there still be a flicker of electricity? Would there be some
recognition? Would the intensity of your relationship in your world bleed over, on some small level, into others?
Q. Do you see
any of yourself in your characters?
A. Very much so. It never really
occurs to me until I’ve finished a book, but all of my novels are ultimately
therapy and reflective of what I’m dealing with personally during the writing. The
last few years have been insanely busy for me on the professional front, and I often
feel the tension between me the writer and me the father and husband. The pull
of both worlds. It’s not as simple as either/or, but every day we make choices
about the person we want to be, the life we want to have. So Jason’s story hits
close to home, because I feel like I’ve been wrestling lately with the same
push and pull between family and career, and trying to find that balance.
Q. Speaking of
being busy, in addition to being a novelist, you’re currently adapting the
screenplay of Dark Matter for Sony, producing
for the Wayward Pines TV series on
FOX, and writing/producing Good Behavior,
a new TV series (based on another of your novels), for TNT. How are you able to
move so fluently across mediums? And how do you find the time?
A. I view myself primarily as a
novelist, but I love the process of taking a book and turning it into film and
television. The mediums are quite different, but it’s all about story structure
at the end of the day. The film/TV business lights up the extroverted part of
my personality, while the novel writing very much speaks to my introverted self.
Time is becoming an issue, because I never imagined I
would be lucky enough to have two TV shows going into production simultaneously
and this script adaptation of Dark Matter
to contend with. As much as I’m enjoying it, I also find myself getting more
and more excited about that moment when I get to go back to the basics of being
a novelist and figure out my next book. The brainstorming process of a new novel
is my favorite part of writing. All potential and possibility.
Q. You’re
originally from North Carolina and spend a great deal of time in New York and
Los Angeles for your film and TV work, but you live in Durango, Colorado. What
drew you there?
A. I moved to Durango out of college,
sight unseen, because I love everything about
the West. The wide-open space. The history. The mentality. Rain curtains over
the desert. How much deeper and more rattling thunder sounds as opposed to everywhere
else. Sage brush. Mountains. Desert. Snow. But most important, a serene,
contemplative place to write.
Thanks to Dyana at Random House for her assistance.
More at blakecrouch.com
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