Category: Thriller

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

steven Leave a comment

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

steven Leave a comment

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