Here the most nominees for the Edgar Awards, the most prestigious awards for mystery and crime fiction in the country:
http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html
I can attest to the power of Gone Girl, but Julia thought Potboiler was a dud, a real joke of a book. Ace Atkins is supposed to be a good writer, and I want to read the Dennis Lehane book, of course. I have never heard of Al Lamanda or Lyndsay Faye.
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Here are some recent reviews:
The Tortilla Curtain
T.C. Boyle's most famous novel (1995), this is a still-timely novel about the relationship between rich whites and the illegal Mexican immigrants who dot their community. Candido and and his young teenage wife are two Mexicans who find their paths crossing time and time again with the white people who live in a hilltop gated community, particularly Delaney and Kyra, a nature writer (who suffers a series of misadventures ranging from the blackly comic to the slapstick to the eerily prescient) and his real estate agent wife, respectively.
Boyle has ample opportunities to belabor the points and over-hammer his themes in the course of a story that plays upon white fears and hatred of our southern neighbors, but the fact that he doesn't (only occasionally preaching), that he creates a panorama of well-defined characters, that he gets us to see modern life fairly from a panoply of angles, is a tribute to his powers as an author. The characters of Candido and America - and their poor lifestyle - are so sympathetically delineated, that once again Boyle leaves you awestruck at his abilities to conjure life so fully - with details and observation. It's a tragic-comedy and a social expose with a suitably explosive ending. I'm surprised Hollywood never attempted a movie out of this.
The Silver Swan
The second Quirke mystery by Benjamin Black (John Banville's pseudonym) shares the same setting (1950's Dublin) and mood (dark) as the magnificent first entry - the award-winning Christine Falls. But what really sets this 2008 novel apart - and the series as a whole - is Black's breathtaking ability to conjure imagery and character with the right word or turn of phrase or description every single of time. He is incapable of writing a stale sentence. The plots in these books are never any great shakes; it's noir stuff - blunt, intoxicating dames, rotten power players, thugs, soulful alcoholics - but they're pure pleasures to read. I can't stress this enough: every characterization, every movement, every neighborhood or building, is so perfectly evoked.
The BBC is adapting three of the Black novels into three 90-minute movies this year, with Gabriel Byrne in the role of Quirke. Perfect casting. Can't wait. The esteemed Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who gave us the creepy Eclipse a few years back (not the Twilight movie, but that effective little number with Ciaran Hinds as the widowed man haunted during the weekend of a literary festival), is behind the series.
The Paperboy
Pete Dexter's 1995 novel about the unscrupulous and often dangerous lengths some newsmen go to get a story is my first exposure to the writer (who grew up in Millidgeville, Georgia). I primarily wanted to read it because the movie adaptation - co-scripted by Dexter, along with director Lee Daniels - is out on Redbox next week.
I'm not really sure how I feel about the novel, honestly. It wasn't the mystery I thought it was going to be, that it lets on to be: A white trash man, Hillary Van Wetter (played in the movie by John Cusack) is on death row for the killing of a sheriff. A trio of newspapermen (two brothers, Ward and Jack, and a more ambitious, corners-cutting Yardley) team up with a salacious, oversexed, strangely-motivated blonde woman, to set about proving his innocence - and maybe winning a Pulitzer. Oddly, it's not much of a mystery - Dexter doesn't really seem to care whether Van Wetter is innocent or not and shows no concern with laying out pieces of a puzzle that we can put together.
So what he is interested in? Well, other than constructing a reasonably engaging portrait of the ethos, ruthlessness, and tunnelvision of a group of hard-bitten news writers, he seems to be interested in plowing through the gutter. For better of worse, this is a fairly trashy melodrama. Dexter creates a seamy north Florida milieu and really wallows in the horny and deviant: Characters are constantly getting erections; Jack, the youngest of the brothers (embodied by Zac Efron), gets bitten by a smack of jellyfish, forcing a group of college students to pee on him to alleviate the sting; Ward is nearly beaten to death by a pair of homophobic sailors. My favorite scene has a swamp family - Van Wetter's ilk - eating from tubs of ice cream.
Can't wait for the movie!
Images courtesy of:
http://storycarnivores.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/the-paperboy-poster-with-zac-efron-and-nicole-kidman.jpg?w=560
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn5-NoFgQ6rvPNhasw_8PEDAtFLy1FwbNnwwccqF8iT5kydQsmzENlH13sXAC0XpeRmyvgnwToi27Ir2uk_pAJmIuDq_FWmt4JtYI976EjxceoM1fNNEG1HLfIxiZP0PFSXlv6PE8hBI8/s1600/tortilla+curtain.jpg
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