Category: Thriller

Beneath a Scarlet Sky

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Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan is a remarkable book, it tells the story of Pino Lella’s teenage years at the end of the war, based upon a series of interviews that Sullivan had with Lella towards the end of his life.

Lella’s war starts with him acting as a mountain guide/courier helping jews to escape from occupied Italy into Switzerland. He is “conscripted” into the German army by his family as a way of keeping him out of the from line and works as a driver and translator for one of the commanders of the 3rd Reich in Italy, this privileged position allows him to spy for the partisans.

As the war draws to a close and German forces are retreating the story climaxes in the chaos of the lawless days of retribution.

If ever a novel illustrates that fact can be stranger and more exciting than fiction, this is it. From early on it is captivating, terrifying and thrilling.

4.5/5

To Kill the President

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To Kill the President by Sam Bourne (Jonathan Freedland) is an incredibly timely and prescient novel.

There is no mention of the current US President but his persona runs through this novel,  you will recognise the Bannon, Priebus and Ivanka characters as well. This is crazy, scary fiction made more so by the fact that it is so believable in current circumstances.

The plot starts with a late night panic as the President endeavours to launch a nuclear strike against North Korea, well that could never happen in real life or could it?

You can’t put this down, it’s perfect holiday reading. It’s even more delicious if you have been reading Freedland’s columns for the Guardian over the last year

4/5

The Susan Effect

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The Susan Effect by Peter Hoeg is a political/conspiracy thriller set in Denmark.

Susan has a unique ability to get people to tell her their innermost secrets which she shares with her husband and their two children. When the family becomes involved in a life changing scandal in India she agrees to use her ‘power’ to gather information on the Future Committee for a secretive and sinister government fixer in return for getting the charges against her family dropped. Things rapidly get out of control as she starts to unearth the final reports of the Future Committee and the conspiracy behind it.

This is a rather far-fetched but quite readable book if you like conspiracy, mayhem and a bit of near magical super powers.

2.5/5

Crimson Lake

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Crimson Lake by Candice Fox is set in a small town outside of Cairns in Northern Australia.

Ted Conkaffey is an ex police officer accused of abducting and assaulting a teenage girl, the prosecution was abandoned but he is never cleared of the crime that he denies. He moves to Crimson Lake in an attempt to restart his life. Amanda Pharrell runs a private investigations agency in Crimson Lake after her release from a 10 year sentence for the brutal murder of her friend. this unlikely pair of private detectives are trying to solve the mystery of a missing author while at the same time their personal back stories are unwinding.

This is a tense mystery thriller, right to the end you are uncertain of the guilt of the detectives or the fate of the author. Crimson Lake bowls along at a good pace, I liked the characters and the treatment of the alleged child abductor by the local vigilantes is thought provoking.

Well worth a read, there is a second novel planned with these characters which I will look out for.

4/5

Butterfly on the Storm

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Butterfly on the Storm is the first in the Heartland Trilogy by Dutch author Walter Lucius.

A young boy is found outside Amsterdam, the victim of a hit and run incident, he mutters a couple of words to journalist Farah Hafez who recognises a fellow Afghani refugee which starts a fast paced political crime thriller that spans the Afghan revolution, the Russian invasion, attitudes to refugees, people smuggling and child abuse at the higher levels of society. This is a cracker of a novel, inevitably it will be compared to Larrson’s Millennium Trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc) but I found it more grounded and less dependent on techno miracles. I’m looking forward to reading the next in the series.

4/5

The Punishments

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The Punishments by JB Winsor is a dystopian novel set in Washington a few years after the financial crash. Civil society is collapsing, people are starving to death, there is little or no employment as jobs are replaced by robots. A fundamentalist christian group has effectively taken over the government of the US and is in the process of implementing a christian version of sharia while running an almost total surveillance society. And on and on …

I guess this is readable but to be honest I thought it was claptrap. Even heavily discounted I would give it a miss.

1/5

The Madness of July

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The Madness of July by James Naughtie is a cracking spy novel set in London in the 70’s. Quite a lot of journalists seem to turn their hand to writing a novel, Naughtie has done a great job with this.

This is a complex cold war novel, you are never quite sure what is going on and the plot has plenty of apparent red herrings which all come together at the end. Not quite at the level of Le Carre’s Smiley but very very good and definitely worth a read.

4/5

The Thicket

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I’d forgotten how much I enjoy Joe R Lansdale, he is a witty writer who tells good hard boiled stories.

The Thicket is set in East Texas at the turn of the century, it’s a combination of a ‘coming of age’ story and a tough bounty hunting chase of a brutal gang of bank robbers and killers. The lead character, Jack Parker, is accompanied by Shorty, a crack shot midget, Eustace, a grave digger and a Jimmy Sue, kind hearted whore on his pursuit of his sister’s kidnappers.

This is a very good read, when you’ve finished you will want to meet more by Lansdale, a great find.

This is at least a 4/5

Floodgate

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I like Johnny Shaw’s stuff, I thought Big Maria was a great read, if you haven’t read it you should give it a try.

Floodgate is completely different to Shaw’s previous novels, it’s set in the fictional city of Auction City which is held together by an uneasy coalition of crime syndicates, an outrageously corrupt police force and the church. The story switches between two time periods 1929 when there was a catastrophic street battle between the police, organised crime gangs and the underclass of the city and 1986 when after over 50 years of peace the tense relationships are on the verge of fracturing.

Floodgate is pacy and witty, albeit a little predictable. 3.5/5