Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews by John Grant
Authors: John Grant
Tags: Science-Fiction, Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Reference, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, History & Criticism, Criticism & Theory
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the blossoming of the first romance to come his way in years ...
The mortar in Billingham's thrillers is the joyous facility with which he creates vivid, interesting, complex secondary characters. Outstanding in Lazy Bones are Phil Hendricks (from previous cases), the gay, punk forensics expert who just happens to be the seemingly ultra-conservative copper Tom Thorne's best friend; and especially Carol Chamberlain, the police retiree who looks like someone's not-necessarily-very-nice, overweight granny but who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a mind like a laser to her duties at the Area Major Review Unit. Even if the main plot itself were not so powerfully gripping, we'd be kept reading compulsively by the urge to follow the fates of these and the other characters.
In the case of Lazy Bones , it's good that this is so, because the plotting makes it a bit thunderingly obvious to us, from about two-thirds of the way in, who it is who's committing the murders. Since Thorne has almost the full gamut of the same evidence in front of him as we do, it's somewhat implausible that his masterful detective mind doesn't at least share the same suspicions. In fact, the book otherwise has such a strength to it that the pages keep relentlessly turning anyway, but it means that one finishes Lazy Bones with a sense of slight disappointment that the denouement's anticipated reversal of expectations never happened.
If you've not encountered Tom Thorne yet, you most certainly should. He's a worthy counterpart to Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus. And that's high praise.
—Crescent Blues
Sarah's Landing 1
by Elena Dorothy Bowman
iUniverse, 310 pages, paperback, 2002
As I've remarked in these pages before [Yawn – Ed.] , the recent boom in vanity publishing through the technology of print-on-demand (PoD) has had both advantages and disadvantages.
The advantages centre on the fact that self-publishing writers don't have to consider the commercial preconceptions of editors and publishers. It matters not one whit to them if their novel fits snugly into any predefined marketing niche. This opens the door not just for a flood of the direst writing but also for a steady and sometimes quite strong flow of the very best, most exciting and most adventurous writing – certainly within the imaginative genres. To be sure, you might have to put up with some interesting spelling; but among these books you can find new ideas, new experiments ... and a lack of the formulaic approach that is killing stone dead so much of the supposedly speculative fiction being issued by the major commercial houses.*
[* 2011 note: Matters have improved a little in the years since this review was written ... or maybe they haven't altogether: a few months ago I looked idly at the YA section of the local big-box store and discovered the selection of books there consisted entirely of Twilight wannabes.]
The disadvantages centre on almost exactly the same fact.
Time after time, reading the output from such vanity presses as iUniverse and xLibris it is extremely obvious why no commercial house would touch one or other book with a bargepole. But let's leave such cases to the side. Instead let's think of the books where the primary disadvantage of self-publishing is most evident: those where, as you read them, you have the maddening sense that there's a pretty good book struggling to be set free, and that what it needed to set it free were the attentions of an editor and copy-editor.
Sarah's Landing 1 is such a book.
At the copy-editing level it contains untold examples of spelling errors, typographical errors, repetition and downright clumsiness, while the punctuation appears to have been applied with a clogged salt cellar – stingily in most places, with a sudden rush in a few others, but never with very much semblance of intention.
But it's at the editing level that it suffers most, as we shall see ...
In the year 2055 Joshua Morgan is the astronaut who was left
The mortar in Billingham's thrillers is the joyous facility with which he creates vivid, interesting, complex secondary characters. Outstanding in Lazy Bones are Phil Hendricks (from previous cases), the gay, punk forensics expert who just happens to be the seemingly ultra-conservative copper Tom Thorne's best friend; and especially Carol Chamberlain, the police retiree who looks like someone's not-necessarily-very-nice, overweight granny but who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a mind like a laser to her duties at the Area Major Review Unit. Even if the main plot itself were not so powerfully gripping, we'd be kept reading compulsively by the urge to follow the fates of these and the other characters.
In the case of Lazy Bones , it's good that this is so, because the plotting makes it a bit thunderingly obvious to us, from about two-thirds of the way in, who it is who's committing the murders. Since Thorne has almost the full gamut of the same evidence in front of him as we do, it's somewhat implausible that his masterful detective mind doesn't at least share the same suspicions. In fact, the book otherwise has such a strength to it that the pages keep relentlessly turning anyway, but it means that one finishes Lazy Bones with a sense of slight disappointment that the denouement's anticipated reversal of expectations never happened.
If you've not encountered Tom Thorne yet, you most certainly should. He's a worthy counterpart to Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus. And that's high praise.
—Crescent Blues
Sarah's Landing 1
by Elena Dorothy Bowman
iUniverse, 310 pages, paperback, 2002
As I've remarked in these pages before [Yawn – Ed.] , the recent boom in vanity publishing through the technology of print-on-demand (PoD) has had both advantages and disadvantages.
The advantages centre on the fact that self-publishing writers don't have to consider the commercial preconceptions of editors and publishers. It matters not one whit to them if their novel fits snugly into any predefined marketing niche. This opens the door not just for a flood of the direst writing but also for a steady and sometimes quite strong flow of the very best, most exciting and most adventurous writing – certainly within the imaginative genres. To be sure, you might have to put up with some interesting spelling; but among these books you can find new ideas, new experiments ... and a lack of the formulaic approach that is killing stone dead so much of the supposedly speculative fiction being issued by the major commercial houses.*
[* 2011 note: Matters have improved a little in the years since this review was written ... or maybe they haven't altogether: a few months ago I looked idly at the YA section of the local big-box store and discovered the selection of books there consisted entirely of Twilight wannabes.]
The disadvantages centre on almost exactly the same fact.
Time after time, reading the output from such vanity presses as iUniverse and xLibris it is extremely obvious why no commercial house would touch one or other book with a bargepole. But let's leave such cases to the side. Instead let's think of the books where the primary disadvantage of self-publishing is most evident: those where, as you read them, you have the maddening sense that there's a pretty good book struggling to be set free, and that what it needed to set it free were the attentions of an editor and copy-editor.
Sarah's Landing 1 is such a book.
At the copy-editing level it contains untold examples of spelling errors, typographical errors, repetition and downright clumsiness, while the punctuation appears to have been applied with a clogged salt cellar – stingily in most places, with a sudden rush in a few others, but never with very much semblance of intention.
But it's at the editing level that it suffers most, as we shall see ...
In the year 2055 Joshua Morgan is the astronaut who was left
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