The Hungry Detective

ON THE GRIND is the 8th book in the Shane Scully series and the first I have read. It was lean, mean, and pretty gritty. My slavish devotion to series fiction means that long running ones are never read because the amount of time it takes to get caught up to the current book is enough to dissuade me from reading it all. The obvious downside to this policy is that many a good book goes unread. ON THE GRIND has a hell of an opener. Scully is in disgrace. Fired and left to work as a cop in the most corrupt department in LA county. I don't think I am spoiling anything but just in case it is probably best to excuse yourself from the rest of this post. I bought this set up just long enough for the story to work on me. Having not read the previous books and having no attachments to any of these characters, it was all entirely possible. However, I quickly caught on to the ruse. I liked that Mr. Cannell was challenging my notions of the 'heroic' cop right off the bat. Secondarily, ...

Gasp... is that the sun. Sweet excelsior of life, here to wash the putrescence of winter off my skin. Okay, so the The Hungry Detective is very happy to welcome Spring. My diatribe aside I generally love the winter, but right around the second or third week of February Winter becomes a heavy burden crushing my soul. A plethora of Crime Fiction will appear in the coming months. Let's not waste a moment longer. The Long Fall - Walter Mosley (March 24) With the Easy Rawlins books in Mr. Mosley's rearview mirror... I give that 5 years... Mr Mosley switches his focus from LA to NYC. Mr. Mosley is one of the reasons I read crime fiction. However, my real concern is that most of Mr. Mosley's non Easy Rawlins work has left me cold. The Dark Volume - GW Dahlquist (March 24) Huh. Sometimes a book makes this list because of a jacket cover or interesting title. In this case the first book in the series was titled, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. It is even fun to type, The Glas...

The Foreign Desk at The Hungry Detective has alerted me that the massively acclaimed THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was recently been adapted for the screen in its home country of Sweden. In fact, the second in the series, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE is already in post-production with the third book in the trilogy filming for a a December 2009 release. Check out... the un-subtitled... trailer and cross your fingers that this gets a bigger US push than JAR CITY did a year ago. More information on all three films can be found at the Production company website .

So imagine... don't worry it's just an expression... my surprise when I sat down to read Lisa Lutz's second book, the Edgar nominated CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS . Surprised mainly because I found the first book to be okay, but nothing special. Certainly not special enough to pick up the second book so quickly. Unfortunately, I pushed through the first hundred pages having many of the same problems I did the first time around. If I had to distill it down to one comment it would have to be forced whimsy. Every character is an odd ball. Every situation provokes a contrived bit of comedy or melodrama. Every bit of dialogue is written as a one prolonged punchline to a joke that has worn out its welcome. Yikes! But then the whole book changed for me, and I loved almost every single page of it. It is the oddest reversal of fortune a book has had for me in quite sometime. One thing that helped to right the ship in this case was the more focused character study. THE SPELLMAN FILES su...

An Amazon purchase I made the other day was Sean Doolittle's latest SAFER . Mr. Doolittle is a guy who never fails to disappoint. His first book DIRT contains so much insight into human frailty... mainly my own set of human frailties... that I find the book to be a bit spooky. THE CLEAN UP is his fourth book and one that, like most things, I have been wanting to read for a good long while. Matt Worth is a cop, and a screw up. He comes from a long line cops, none of them screw ups. Matt is serving his time at a Grocery store for taking a poke at a Homicide Detective, who is sleeping with his ex-wife. But he finds it oddly fulfilling bagging groceries and chit-chatting with Gwen, the checker. Gwen has problems, like a boyfriend who beats her. Matt is protective, so when Gwen shows up at work, catatonic one night bruised head to toe, Matt knows its all gone Pete Tong. A cursory review of Gwen's apartment reveals Gwen's fella got a taste of his own medicine and is dead. Funny ...