General Fiction Books
The long running series is a dream for an author as it means that your characters and world are successful enough that people are buying them, and you can keep writing. John Sandford's Lucas Davenport books must be a success when you realise that Golden Prey is the 27th book...
One man’s truth is another man’s myth and whilst the Greek Gods may have once been worshipped as real, they are now considered by most as myths. This is great for a genre review site as the Greek Gods are as fantastical as they come. They turn themselves and others...
Murder, kidnapping, shootings, stabbings; not an amusing set of words, but in the hands of a great author, crime can be funny. In fact, crime can be hilarious. The crime comedy when done well is one of my favourite genres and Carl Hiaasen has being doing it well for years. He has combined wit...
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
Walk into my house and glance at my bookshelves and you will find an eclectic mix of books. My favourite genres are represented heavily in science fiction and fantasy, but I also have loads of crime, history, biographies and general fiction....
Fair warning, this isn't going to be a normal review, it's the first one I've written post-covid and is much more personal than usual.
Some years ago, my father started reading again. Previous to that he hadn't read much for the last few decades outside of Haynes manuals and instruction...
Punk was a short-lived musical genre and if you have listened to some of it you can probably tell why. It was raw, edgy and loud, but most of the songs were not that great and it was more about attitude than being able to sing. The songs that you may like from that genre may...
I have read a lot of crime fiction and even as a fan you can be critical of how similar they can be. The formats and storylines can bog down into only a few basic formulas. In a less accomplished author this can lead to a bland book that fades quickly in the memory, but this...
My partner and I went through a stage of watching only noir films. Many of them felt the same, but some stood out. The French films had an effortless style, Barbara Stanwyck was always amazing, and one film was just a little bit insane. That film...
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
The noir genre has an inherent problem, it has the feel of the 1940s and 1950s. You imagine black and white films, men in fedoras and women with cascading red locks. The lack of technology forced the central gumshoe to walk the streets and knock together heads to gather the...
Offer me a time machine and I would travel no further back than the 1980s. This would allow me to place loads of bets on sporting events I know the results to and invest in Apple Computers. You would not see me travelling hundreds of years into the future or the past, are you mad? The 1980s were...
The movie industry is seen as all glitz and glamour, but just beneath the surface Donald E. Westlake suggests that it is made up of lies and even murder. What type of person is drawn to an industry where you pretend to be fake – fake people. In Double Feature, two of Westlake’s...
When you think of a Sherlock Holmes do you imagine a novel or a short story? The reality is that many tales that we know from Arthur Conan Doyle are from his short stories and it is more the modern reimagining of the character that have taken the longer form. James Lovegrove is a leading modern...
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