Thriller

Green River Rising by Tim Willocks

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PREMISE: After three years’ hard time, minding no-one’s business but his own, Ray Klein wins his parole and chances his hand at a romance with prison psychiatrist Juliette Devlin. That same day, tribal war erupts and the prison – and its infirmary – falls into the hands of its inmates. Klein must choose either to claim his freedom and leave the ones he cares for to die, or risk everything and fight.

I’m not entirely sure when I read this so I’m going to assume it was the year it came out, 1994. Man, 1994…the year of the first Playstation and the year Kurt Cobain died. The first U.K. National Lottery was this year too, and having wasted more money only last night on trying to bag the £200m Euromillions, my lottery luck hasn’t changed at all since 1994. I swear it’s rigged.

On the book front, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom was published along with – more significantly, for me anyway – Volume 1 of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. An utter classic. Other books published that year: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before The War, which I actually read last year and loved. If you ask Goodreads to show you the top 200 books of 1994, Green River Rising isn’t on the list. And this is a list that has (albeit scraping in at number 196) a book entitled “When God Writes Your Love Story: The Ultimate Approach to Guy/Girl Relationships”. A book that I ought never read for fear of breaking my promise to keep this blog negative-free.

My point (if I even have one) is that Green River Rising, for me, was one of the best things of 1994 and although I haven’t read it since (I’m hoping to very soon) I’d imagine it will still be one of the best things of any year. A great book.

Psalms For The End Of The World by Cole Haddon

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PREMISE: It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer. 

Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. 

Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.

Yeah, I know…what a premise. That’s exactly what I thought. Man, when I stumble across books like this on Goodreads or Amazon I swear a little bit of ‘man wee’ leaks out. This is my reading sweet spot, my narrative nirvana. I love stories with multiple strands, narrators, viewpoints etc that all come together (and sometimes don’t) at the end. And this one is an absolute beauty. His first novel, I believe (I should really research and confirm that but that sounds like something a more professional blogger would do) and hopefully the first of many. It’s such a fantastic book.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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PREMISE: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.

You ever read a book and think “Shit, I wish I’d written that”, only to realise that you don’t have the talent, imagination or intelligence to do it? That’s me with this book. The 2nd-best book I read in 2023…

The Trees by Percival Everett

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PREMISE: When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of brutal murders, they find at each crime scene an unexpected second body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. After meeting resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist white townsfolk, the MBI detectives suspect these are killings of retribution. Then they discover eerily similar murders taking place in rapid succession all over the country. 

Man, this was one funny, entertaining book. Dark and funny as hell and Percival Everett is clearly as mad as a box of frogs. And have I mentioned it’s funny? If I had Everett’s sense of humour I reckon I would have been better-liked at school. Brilliant, brilliant book.