“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 31, 2011)

Haruki Murakami doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. Though his prose is spare, almost styleless, it’s more supple than muscular, and though his stories are often occupied with mundane domesticities, they’re also often founded in the surreal. It’s no surprise, then, that Murakami’s long-awaited latest, 1Q84, isn’t easy to shelf –it’s at home among either fantasy, thriller or hard-boiled noir – but one thing’s for sure: this book is grotesquely Murakami. That is, quiet domesticity punctuates adventures tenuously connected to reality, and yet for all its faults – and some have argued there are many – this is a book that haunts you long after you’re done, a book that, like a jealous lover, won’t let you move on.

For all its parallel worlds and magical creatures, for all its anonymous sex and ruthless violence, this is a book about love. The lovers in question, Tengo and Aomame, haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. In fact, they may have never spoken at all. Their shared history is limited to a 5th grade incident during which a ten-year-old Aomame reached for Tengo’s hand – and stilled his soul. But for Tengo, a popular athlete and academic star, to befriend Aomame, a religious freak who stands up and shouts a version of the Lord’s Prayer before she eats lunch, would’ve been social suicide. Aomame transfers schools before Tengo acknowledges to himself what she means to him.

Twenty years pass – it’s 1984 – and Tengo, considered a math prodigy, has frittered away his promise: he teaches math at a Tokyo cram school while moonlighting as a novelist. Though he has weekly sex with a married girlfriend, he still wonders about Aomame.

Disowned by her family for breaking with their church, the Society of Witnesses, Aomame is a lone-wolf. She works as a fitness instructor at a swanky Tokyo gym and although she trolls for wild one-night stands, her heart, after all these years, still belongs to Tengo. As it turns out, she moonlights too –as an assassin. Under the auspices of a wealthy and mysterious dowager, Aomame, with a method of her own invention, kills wife-beaters and rapists.

The Tengo-Aomame attachment – their love itself – is absurd, and this absurdity calls into existence a strange alternative world – 1Q84, the world with a question mark – with a second, “moss-green” moon. Ostensibly, Aomame enters this alternate world, like Alice down the rabbit hole, when she escapes a gridlocked Metropolitan expressway by climbing down an emergency stairwell. But it’s Tengo, in ghost-writing the best-seller, Air Chryaslis, or perhaps in writing a novel of his own, that opens that portal. What has brought Tengo into 1Q84 isn’t entirely clear – although his skill as a storyteller is a factor – but, unbeknownst to the other, both are trapped in 1Q84, a world that becomes increasingly perilous.

When Komatsu, Tengo’s editor, suggests Tengo rewrite a manuscript submission, a fantastical, but compelling story, told in substandard prose, Tengo is hesitant. The author, a strange and beautiful 17-year old girl, who goes by the name of Fuka-Eri, insists that her story, a tale about Little People who emerge from the mouth of a goat and weave wombs out of strands of reality, is true. The Little People use these wombs, or air chrysalises, to gestate doubles, or dohtas. The dohtas act like antennas of sorts, receivers for the perceivers of “the voice.” Fuka-Eri has no literary ambitions and gives Tengo permission to rewrite her work.

But when Air Chrysalis is a runaway hit, a powerful and mysterious cult, Sakigake, is angered. Although most people read the book as fantasy, Sakigake maintains that Fuka-Eri, the estranged daughter of their mysterious Leader, has revealed sacred truths not meant for outsiders. It seems they’ll stop at nothing to halt publication, but when their Leader is found dead, Sakigake must devote itself to finding his murderer.

As it turns out, the Leader is suspected of raping pre-pubescent girls, Fuka-Eri, his daughter, among them. The dowager charges Aomame with dispatching the Leader to “the other side,” but when he demonstrates his supernatural powers, Aomame becomes conflicted and confused. A telepath, the Leader knows Aomame’s intention, but the cost of his great gift is excruciating pain. The Leader welcomes death, and when Aomame hesitates, he bargains with her: his death for Tengo’s life. Unfortunately, killing the Leader will likely mean Aomame’s death too. But, in sacrificing her life for Tengo’s, their connection inexplicably tightens, and the danger Aomame flees inadvertently flings them together.

1Q84 is possible because of faith. It is the belief in love, in something beyond reason, something magical, that creates the metaphysical space for impossibilities to actualize themselves. Born from air chrysalises, dohtas are affectless shadows, without desires or dreams of their own. But we only need look around us, at the “hunched over people carried by force of habit into the new day” to see that it’s all too easy to lose your dreams and desires to the monotony of everyday life, individual passions and secret hopes lost to the roles we play – father, mother, teacher, banker – unaware that if you stop and look up, you might just see two moons. Of course, the real problem, as Tengo and Aomame figure out, is not the revelation of the magical, but how to steal a bit of that wonder up the rabbit hole, to the mundane world of day jobs and traffic jams.

Murakami shirks conventional expectations, refusing to answer the questions he poses and tie his loose ends into pretty little bows. He breaks from craft wisdom – stick to the essentials – with gratuitous descriptions and his characters repeatedly mull over the same plot points. He even challenges Chekov’s famous maxim by introducing a gun that never goes off. But I can’t help but feel that’s the point; life isn’t pared down to essentials, and insofar as our lives have meaning, they’re necessarily narratives, stories just as mundane – and hopefully just as magical, if not as fantastical – as this one.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 514 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition edition (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman After the Quake

Bibliography:

• Hear the Wind Sing (1979; translated 1987)
• Pinball 1973 (1980; translated 1985)
• The Wild Sheep Chase (1982; translated 1989)
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985; translated 1991)
• The Norwegian Wood (1987; translated 1989 and 2000)
• Dance, Dance, Dance (1988; translated 1994)
• South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992; translated 1999)
• The Elephant Vanishes: Stories (translated 1993)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994; translated 1997)
• Sputnik Sweetheart (1999; translated 2001)
• All God’s Children Can Dance (2000)
• After the Quake: Stories (2000; 2002 in US)
• Kafka on the Shore (2003; 2005 in US)
• Vintage Murakami (2004)
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006)
• After Dark (2007)
• 1Q84 (October 2011)

Non-Fiction:

• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1997; translated 2000)
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Related:

• A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008)

Movies from books:

• Tony Takitani (2005)

“I can always tell if a broad is lying to me. I spent a lot of years honing this bullshit detector.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 9, 2011)

In the 1960s, Mickey Spillane began to write The Consummata–a follow-up to The Delta Factor, the novel which introduced super-crook Morgan the Raider. After a series of disappointments with the Delta Factor film, Spillane stopped work on the unfinished The Consummata manuscript. Twenty years ago, he gave the manuscript to long-term friend, collaborator, and creative heir, Max Allan Collins. Since the death of Spillane in 2006, Collins has devoted himself to finishing the many Spillane projects left behind. So far fans have seen a number of publications, including Dead Street, The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang, and Kiss Her Goodbye. Now comes The Consummata–the long awaited sequel to The Delta Factor. The appearance of the sequel is reason enough to celebrate, but the novel’s publication also heralds the autumn return of Hard Case Crime following a short hiatus.

The Consummata finds Morgan the Raider on the run in Miami’s Little Havana and being chased by “federal suits” teamed with “local fuzz” who think he has 40 million dollars in stolen funds. With no place to hide, the chase seems to be coming to its inevitable conclusion, but suddenly Morgan finds himself snatched and hidden from the feds by some of Little Havana’s Cuban community. As Morgan hangs out with the Cubans waiting for the heat to cool down, he learns that the exiles managed to scrape together a fund of $75,000 to assist their relatives back in Cuba. Double agent Jaimie Halaquez wormed his way into the Little Havana exile community, and once he gained their trust, he lifted the dough. Morgan, grateful for the Cubans’ help, agrees to track down Halaquez and get the money back.

Easier said than done….

Halaquez, as it turns out, is “an S&M freak,” and this leads Morgan on the hunt for La Consummata, a legendary dominatrix who is rumored to be “setting up shop in Miami:”

“Sometimes she works alone, by appointment through intermediaries. Other times she has set up a location with other young women trained in the arts of sado-masochism. And, again, clients are by referral only. She has turned up in every major city in America and not a few in Europe. Her clients, they say, are among the most rich and powerful men in business and government. If she exists.”

“You don’t even know if she exists?”

“She is a rumor. A wisp of smoke. A legend. A dream. Lovely, a vision in black leather, they say….”

Of course, it’s inevitable that La Consummata and Morgan meet and tangle.

The Consummata is unabashedly pulp, so this is fast-paced action with not a lot of down-time. The story is set in the 60s, so expect the women to be sexy babes and the men (Morgan specifically) to be macho. This is a sequel novel, and for those who didn’t read The Delta Factor, The Consummata plays catch-up for approximately one chapter. Naturally, since the action hits the notorious bordellos of Miami and includes some of its working women, the book includes sex which is told from a male fantasy perspective. Overall, however, the emphasis is on action, reaction, and the recovery of stolen money.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mickey Spillaine and Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins Something’s Down There by Mickey Spillaine And by both authors together: Dead Street

Bibliography:

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins:

• Dead Street (2007)
• The Goliath Bone (2008)
• The Big Bang ( 2010)
• Kiss Her Goodbye (May 2011)
• The Consummata (October 2011)

“Do the things you’ve done in your past add up to the person you are now? Or are you reinvented by the choices you make for the future? I used to think I knew the answer to those questions. Now I’m not so sure.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 9, 2011)

Hard Case Crime is back after a short hiatus, and for avid fans, the line-up is impressive: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins (delayed release from a year ago), Getting Off by Lawrence Block, The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and Choke Hold by Christa Faust.

Choke Hold is novelist and former peep show girl Faust’s second title for Hard Case Crime, and it’s a sequel to Money Shot. Faust is Hard Case Crime’s first female novelist, and if you think that means a tender, sensitive look at crime, then think again. Faust’s protagonist is tough former porn star, Angel Dare, a woman who feels more comfortable giving a blowjob than extending a sympathy hug. In Money Shot, Angel, owner of an adult modeling agency came out of retirement for one last gig. Big mistake. The job is a set-up by some particularly nasty gangsters who are hunting for a briefcase full of cash. Angel, who’s raped, beaten and stuffed in the trunk of a car, finds herself on the wrong side of a prostitution ring.

Choke Hold (and the title’s meaning becomes clear as the story plays out) finds Angel living under an assumed name as a waitress in Arizona. She was part of the Witness Protection program for 19 months and attending mandatory therapy with a shrink named Lindsay:

“She was always making these unequivocal statements about ‘women in my situation’ that had nothing to do with how I actually felt. She also insisted that I was in denial about my ‘abuse’ in the adult film industry. I could never talk to her about the things that were really on my mind. About the fact I didn’t feel like a poor violated victim at all. I felt like some kind of war veteran. Like I’d been forced to turn off something important inside me to become the killer I needed to be and I didn’t have any idea how to turn it back on again. To become an ordinary citizen again, if such a thing were possible. So instead I spent most of our time during the sessions with her by telling the raunchiest, kinkiest stories about my ‘abuse.’ I think she secretly got off on it. Poor Lindsay just needed a decent orgasm.”

Angel’s boring life under the Witness Protection program comes to an abrupt end when she realizes that her cover’s been blown. With her emergency ever-packed, go-bag, “two shitty fake IDs” and a few grand in cash, Angel ran. She’s in Arizona, waitressing, and providing after-hours entertainment for her boss trying to work off the expenses of a forged passport when her past catches up to her in an explosively violent way. Thick Vic, crankster and washed-up porn star, unexpectedly walks into Angel’s diner and death’s along for the ride. From this moment until the novel’s conclusion, it’s non-stop action with Angel on the run from pissed off Mexican gangsters involved in illegal boxing matches and cocaine smuggling. And she’s also on the run from her old nemesis, brutal Croatian gangster, Vukasin.

Choke Hold moves the action from Arizona to the illegal boxing matches held in Mexico, to a Las Vegas porn convention with live-streaming action. Throughout the chase, Angel picks up two protectors, Thick Vic’s cocky son, Cody and Hank “The Hammer”–a legendary boxer who’s sunk to teaching in a tacky local gym, fighting illegal matches, and practicing a little loan enforcement on the side. It’s through Angel’s relationship with Hank that this pulp novel shows its depth beyond the action. Angel never sees herself as a victim, but here’s she’s used and abused more than once in an industry in which no one rides for free. Hank’s industry takes a similar approach. He’s boxed his way into physical damage and suffers permanent migraines and short term memory loss. There’s a sad connection between Angel and Hank–a connection of two people who use their bodies to get by.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christa Faust
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Money Shot And: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Bibliography:

• Control Freak (1998; 2002)
• Hoodtown (2004)

• Money Shot (2008)
• Choke Hold (2011)

With Poppy Z. Brite:

• Triads (2004)

“Have you thought about the question? Why we’re keeping you in a cage like an animal? Why you have to be put through all of this? Have you come up with a solution, Merete, or do we need to punish you again? What’s it going to be? A birthday present or a punishment?”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 10, 2011)

Danish Detective Carl Morck is a walking tormented shell of his former self. Recently returned to work, he is living with post-traumatic stress disorder following an incident that ended with the shooting death of one of his colleagues and a shot that paralyzed his friend, Detective Hardy. Morck was also injured by a shot to the head. So far the perpetrators have not been found and Morck lives with survivor’s guilt. He is difficult to get along with, often late to work, and no longer has his heart in his work.

To deal with his attitude, his supervisor, Superintendent Jacobsen, assigns Carl to head Department Q, a newly funded police department, and he stations it in the basement so that Carl is out of eyesight from his colleagues who are sick of his negativity and attitude. Department Q has been funded by parliament in order to solve dead cases, especially those that involve persons of interest or famous victims. Carl’s idea of a perfect work-day is to lounge around with his feet on his desk, napping or watching television. “In his end of the basement there were no people, there was no daylight, air, or anything else that might distinguish the place from the Gulag Archipelago. Nothing was more natural than to compare his domain with the fourth circle of hell.”

It’s not long until Carl realizes that Department Q has been funded to the tune of five million kroner. The money is all being channeled to the homicide division and hardly any of it is going to Department Q. Carl approaches Jacobsen and requests his own car and an assistant, letting him know that he is wise to the side-channeling of his funding. He gets what he wants.

As the book opens in 2007, we find out that Merete Lynggaard, a once promising Danish politician, has been kidnapped and held in captivity since 2002. She has no idea why she has been kidnapped. She only knows that she is in an empty concrete cell with two buckets given to her each day – one for her waste products and the other with barely edible food. Each year, on her birthday, the atmospheric pressure in her chamber is cranked up two notches. This will happen every year until she is able to answer her captors’ question: “Why are you here?” Of course, Merete has no idea.

There is a case file for Merete on Carl’s desk and the theory is that she jumped or was pushed overboard on a ferry while on vacation with her brother Uffe. However, no body was ever found and no reason for her to commit suicide was ever ascertained. Uffe, who was disabled in a car crash that killed their parents, is very close with Merete and she cares for him with a deep and abiding love. She is also a rising star in her political party.

Meanwhile, Carl is assigned an assistant named Assad. He is a man of many abilities, strange though they may be. He makes strong coffee, drives like a maniac, can take a lock apart in a second, knows people who can decipher encrypted words and numbers and is a mystery to Carl. He is Syrian and ostensibly is hired to clean Department Q and keep it neat. Carl makes the mistake of giving Assad a book on police procedure – Handbook for Crime Technicians. Assad reads the book and then gets antsy for Carl to start working on cases. He prompts Carl to start working on the Merete Lynggaard case and together they get a start on it.

Carl tries to find out more about Assad but he keeps his past close to his chest, alluding to difficult and bad times. He keeps a prayer rug in his office and kneels to pray to Allah during the day. He also plays Arabic CD’s and has only a passing knowledge of spoken Danish. He gradually becomes Carl’s partner, leaving his cleaning duties in the background.

The novel is noir, filled with great characterizations and action, and also comedic at times. Carl’s wife, Vigga, from whom he is separated, has gotten Carl to help subsidize a gallery that she is starting with one of her many young lovers. Carl is also raising Vigga’s son from another relationship. Vigga doesn’t believe in getting another divorce so Carl is stuck with her. Vigga has the uncanny act of calling Carl’s cell phone at the most inopportune times. Carl also has a boarder who pays him rent and is like a housewife to him. His name is Morton and he collects play animals and is a great cook.

Carl suffers from physical symptoms of his Post-traumatic stress disorder including chest pains, anxiety and panic attacks. He is attracted to his department’s psychologist and sees her for treatment. However, he spends most of the time trying to pick her up and she’s wise to him, telling him to come back when he can be honest with her.

This is a book filled with great writing, telling a page-turning story. I could not put it down. It has everything I’ve come to expect from the very best Scandinavian writers – an angst-driven hero, dark situations that confound the mind, characterizations that are stunning, and action-packed scenes. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen is definitely one of the ten best books I’ve read this year and certainly the best Scandinavian mystery I’ve read, bar none. It is excellently translated by Lisa Hartford.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 148 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (August 23, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jussi Adler-Olsen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbø The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Bibliography:

• The Alphabet House (1997)
• The Company Basher (2003)
• The Washington Decree (2006

Q series:

• The Keeper of Lost Causes (2007; 2011 in US) (originally called The Woman in the Cage)
• The Absent One (2008; 2012 in US) (originally called The Pheasant Killers)
• Message in a Bottle (2009)
• Journal 64 (2010)

“I don’t want friends, you silly shit. Friends—hah! Friends are the ones shoot you twice in the back of the head. Friends snitch you out for the long stretches. Up the joint, you see a guy doin’ life you can figure he had one too many friends.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (APR 27, 2011)

Winter’s Bone was one of the best crime films I saw in 2010. I discovered that it was based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, and I was surprised that I’d never heard that name before. But I’m apparently not the only one, and the success of Winter’s Bone is guaranteed to bring this author new readers. Woodrell is best known as a writer of Ozark Noir, but the Bayou Trilogy is, as the title suggests, set in a different geographical region. The trilogy is composed of three novels from Woodrell’s early writing career: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do. The protagonist of the trilogy is Cajun cop Rene Shade. Shade hails from the fictional Louisiana city of San Bruno: “a city of many neighborhoods, Frogtown and Pan Fry being the largest and most fabled, and great numbing stretches of anonymous, bland, and nearly affluent subdivisions.” These neighborhoods are sharply divided along ethnic lines with the French hanging out in Frogtown and the blacks sticking to Pan Fry. There’s also Hawthorne Hills–the wealthy impenetrable suburb of the powerful elite.

Former boxer now detective Rene Shade has French-Irish roots. His older brother Tip runs the Frogtown Catfish bar while younger brother, District Attorney Francois is trying hard to disguise his working class roots. Rene’s mother, Ma Blanqui rules a run-down pool hall, and Rene lives in a room above the family business. To add even more flavour to the local geography, a swamp, the Marias du Croche–full of water moccasins with plenty of attitude, lies on the outskirts of town. Rene’s father, John X, returns to Frogtown for the third novel in the series.

In the fast-paced, explosive action-packed tale Under The Bright Lights, a local city councilman is murdered and Rene Shade is pressured by his “superiors” to conclude that the crime was a simple burglary gone wrong, but it’s not long before all hell breaks loose with a range war between Frogtown and Pan Fry. A hired hit man with dreams of becoming a professional musician is just the tool of other ambitious, greedy men in a matter of contracts and corrupt local politics gone wrong.

Muscle for the Wing begins with a “protected” poker game being blown wide open (literally) by a violent gang known as the Wing. These ex-cons, led by a muscle-bound brute, Emil Jadick have moved into town with the intention of taking what they want and to hell with the consequences. Here’s the Wing’s first hit:

“Despite the low hum of air-conditioning, the victims sweated gushingly and shook with concern, for, not only were they being shorn of their gambling money, but history was staggering and order decaying before their eyes. The swinging side of St. Bruno night world had been run as smoothly and nearly as openly as a pizza franchise for most of a decade and now these tourists from the wrong side of the road somewhere else were demonstrating the folly of such complacence. Auguste Beaurain, the wizened little genius of regional adoration, had run the upriver dagos, the downriver riffraff, the homegrown Carpenter brothers, and the out-of-state Dixie Mafia from this town and all its profitable games in such an efficient manner that no one had truly believed he would ever again be tested this side of the pearly gates.

But here and now these strangers, too ignorant of local folklore to know how much danger they were in, were taking the test and deciding on their own grades.”

St. Bruno operates with its own customs and laws, and the reason the city doesn’t blow apart from crime and corruption is it’s controlled from the top down. So the rich white folks in Hawthorne Hills call the shots and occasionally throw a bone to a chosen few in Frogtown or Pan Fry. Everybody plays by the rules–more-or-less–although we see the sort of catastrophe that develops when someone gets greedy (Under the Bright Lights). In Muscle for the Wing, outsiders think the local muscle is soft, lazy and fat enough to be taken without much of a fight. It’s Shade’s job to stop The Wing from taking over.

The Ones You Do sees the return of Rene Shade’s father, former pool shark John X. Dumped by his young second wife who’s split with all the cash, John X returns to his roots with a pissed-off killer Lunch Pumphrey in hot pursuit.

The Bayou Trilogy is extremely violent, fast paced and the closest thing I’ve read to a pulp flick pasted onto 470 pages. There are no middle-of-road characters here. The busty, trampy babes slide into cut-offs three sizes too small, tote weapons, flip hash and are meaner than pole cats. As for the men–there’s a range of stupid, and others who are cunning, vicious or just plain evil. Woodrell can wrap up character in a nutshell. Here’s Mayor Crawford after hours in Under the Bright Lights:

He was in slacks and a polo shirt with a cherry half-robe loosely belted. Fit and silver-haired, he looked like the aging stud of a prime-time soap.

Woodrell’s Bayou world is not a place for outsiders–the author makes that clear. Only those born and bred in view of the swamp can understand the arcane rules and Cajun St Bruno philosophy of righteous violence and vengeance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mulholland Books (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Daniel Woodrell Interview with Daniel Woodrell
EXTRAS:	Under the Bright Lights excerpt Muscle for the Wing excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: New Orleans Noir edited by Julie Smith The John Turner series by James Sallis Also by Daniel Woodrell: The Outlaw Album: Stories

Bibliography:

• Under the Bright Lights (1986) *
• Woe to Live On (1987; 2012)
• Muscle for the Wing (1988) *
• The Ones You Do (1992) *
• Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir (1996; 2012)
• Tomato Red (1998; 2012)
• The Death of Sweet Mister (2001; 2012)
• Winter’s Bone (2006)
• The Outlaw Album: Stories (2011)
• The Maid’s Version (September 2013)

*The Bayou Trilogy (2011)

Movies from Books:

• Ride with the Devil (1999) (adapted from Woe to Live On)
• Winter’s Bone (2010)

“You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 28, 2011)

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz’s stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock’s lens—the camera as observer’s tool and observer as camera–with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director’s noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950’s, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99. Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa’s love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of the iconic movie we know today as PSYCHO. The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots for the motel, and during the illustrious shower scene. The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to Hitchcock. The author’s interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader’s suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course—the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral. I was academically stimulated by the author’s style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn’t emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Manuel Muñoz
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Psycho: Point Omega by Don Delillo

Bibliography:

• Zigzagger: Stories (2003)
• The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue: Stories (2007)
• What You See in the Dark (2010)

“He and Manny had been robbing dealers for about a year. Had been in the life for a long time before that, of course. Stole cars, broke into houses. They had met in Juvie, a place called Lima, out in Delaware County. Taking off dealers wasn’t something you could do if you didn’t know who was who, what to look for. You had to score dope to know dope dealers, or know people who did. Where to go, what to watch for. Manny had been in rehab and knew people who were out copping every day.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (MAR 26, 2011)

Dennis Tafoya’s first novel, Dope Thief, published in 2009 is an excellent novel and more emotional  of a book than I thought it would or could be. Ray, a young man of 30 who has spent time in “Juvie” and prison for much of his life, has found a way to get some money with his friend Manny by stealing from independent drug dealers. These mostly small-time dealers are unlikely to seek help from the police or the mob in getting back their money or drugs. Ray and Manny even have the DEA jackets to scare the dealers into submitting to them. This seems like a good deal for Ray and Manny until they find much more money and drugs than they expected from some hick drug dealers working out of a farm in northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, these drug dealers were associated with dealers in Connecticut that were moving into the area that are not too happy about the theft. These men use quick and violent methods to try to get their money and drugs back. This leads to some scary situations for Ray and Manny as they try to avoid these very dangerous and violent men and seek the help of Philadelphia area drug dealers who may not want the Connecticut competition.

This book is told in the third person perspective of Ray that makes it almost seem like a first person novel. Through this perspective, often through flashbacks, we learn of Ray’s guilt over the death of his high school girlfriend Marletta who died in a car accident while Ray is driving. Even though Ray was not at fault, he did not fight his conviction and imprisonment when the girl’s grief-stricken state trooper father framed him. Ray’s inner struggles are the best part of this book especially when he later meets Michelle in a Doylestown book store and struggles with finding the strength to become a better person and develop a meaningful relationship with her.

Ray also struggles in his relationship with his now dying father Bart but is fortunate and definitely appreciates the love and support he has received from Bart’s live in girlfriend Theresa. Theresa, who Ray sometimes calls “Ma” stays to raise Ray after his father is sent to the prison in Chester. Theresa’s positive influence on Ray becomes more evident as Ray struggles with his personal decisions about his future.

Dope Thief is one of the best first novels I have ever read and possibly the best, rivaling my favorites by Michael Connelly (The Black Echo), Steve Hamilton (A Cold Day in Paradise) and William Kent Krueger (Iron Lake). I was surprised to find that Dope Thief missed being nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, or Barry awards for best novel or best first novel in 2010. Dennis was nominated in 2010 by Spinetingler Magazine in the New Voice novel category but lost to The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville.

As I was reading Dope Thief, I was reminded of George Pelecanos’ The Way Home, another excellent book I had read several weeks prior. In both books, a young man struggles to find his way toward a better life, free of crime and drugs. However, Ray of Dope Thief grows up in a much more difficult home with a mother who gives up on him and a father who spends most of the time in jail, while Chris Flynn of The Way Home grows up in a fairly normal middle class home with parents that try to help him to succeed.

Since I’m from the Philadelphia area I was more impressed about the negative aspects of the area that fortunately I have not had to experience. I’ve driven by the prison in Chester where Ray’s father is incarcerated without giving it much thought other than being surprised at how nice it actually looks from the outside (except for the barbed wire…) However, I never had to visit anyone there or had to go visit my own or anyone’s child in a reform school that is just a few miles away. I’ve been very fortunate with my family but Dennis Tafoya in writing The Dope Thief made me realize it even more. Of course, the Delaware County portion of the Philadelphia area (where I have lived all of my life) has many great places and not just the prison, reform schools and drug dealers depicted in this book. Maybe I need to talk to Dennis about these nice parts the next time I see him. They are not so interesting though to a crime novelist I guess. Dennis does portray his own Bucks County much more favorably and I certainly enjoyed reading about the various parts of that area.

I became interested in Dennis Tafoya after seeing him at Noircon in Philadelphia in November, 2010 and then even more so after reading his story, “Above the Imperial” in Philadelphia Noir. I enjoyed the story and actually edited out a discussion of the story in the review to keep it from getting too long. I was certainly expecting to enjoy the book and expected to read about crime, death and the ugly parts of Philadelphia but did not expect the book to be as well written and deep as it is. I’m glad I still have The Wolves of Fairmont Park (2010) to read, and hopefully many more future books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dennis Tafoya
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Philadelphia Noir The Way Home by George Pelecanos

Bibliography:

• Dope Thief (2009)
• The Wolves of Fairmont Park (2010)

Found in these collections:

• Philadelphia Noir (2010)
• G.I. Joe: Tales from the Cobra War (April 2011)

“Hope McMaster had pulled a thread and everything she had believed about the fabric of her life had started to unravel.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (MAR 21, 2011)

Kate Atkinson has written a number of novels that feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There be Good News?, and now the fourth novel, Started Early, Took My Dog. I had read a total of ZERO novels in the series when I picked up Atkinson’s latest. This is a novel that can be read as a stand-alone, and although there were threads to the other stories, Atkinson’s novel is so very well-written, it’s not essential to begin with the first novel in the series.

Started Early, Took My Dog is ostensibly a crime novel, but to try and slot this excellent tale into such a neat and ultimately limiting definition is a mistake. While crimes take place, the emphasis is on the crimes that slip silently into simple everyday living: cruelty, casual violence, lying and possibly most importantly–failing to take a moral stand.

The book begins in 1975 with a horrendous murder. Two police constables are first on the scene to investigate a fetid smell emanating from a flat on the fifteenth floor of a rundown building. WPC Tracy Waterhouse “a big graceless girl only just off of probation, and PC Ken Arkwright, a stout white Yorkshireman” make a horrifying discovery that is not easily forgotten. As the novel plays out, Tracy Waterhouse never forgets the unsettling case in spite of the fact that her more-than-thirty-year career spans the killing sprees of some of Britain’s most notorious serial killers:

“They would both see the beginning of the Ripper’s killing spree but Arkwright would be retired long before the end of it. Donald Neilson, the Black Panther from Bradford, hadn’t been captured yet and Harold Shipman had probably already started killing patients unlucky enough to be under his care in Pontefract General Infirmary. West Yorkshire in 1975, awash with serial killers.”

The novel goes back and forth between 1975 and the present. Tracy Waterhouse is now retired from the police department and working as the head of security at a shopping centre. Tracy’s tale is intertwined with Jackson Brodie’s latest case–he’s been hired to track down the birth parents of an eternally optimistic New Zealander, Hope McMaster. Hope’s adoptive parents are dead, and curiosity leads Hope to hire Brodie. Armed with some bare bones information about Hope’s birth parents, Brodie discovers that nothing pans out, and while he heads into a dead end, he also slams into a long buried crime that involves West Yorkshire Police’s retired Detective Superintendent, the “butch old battleaxe” Tracy Waterhouse. Tracy’s years with the West Yorkshire Police have left her permanently scarred:

“Tracy had seen the worst and then some. She felt soiled by everything she had witnessed. Filth, pure and simple. Massage parlors and lap-dancing clubs at the soft end and at the other end the hardcore DVDs of people doing repugnant things to each other. The unclassified stuff that scrambled your synapses with its depravity. The young girls trading their souls along with their bodies, the bargain-basement brothels and saunas, sleaziness beyond belief, girls on crack who would do anything for a tenner, anything. Arresting girls for soliciting and seeing them go straight back on the streets; foreign girls who thought they were coming to work as waitresses and nannies and found themselves locked in sordid rooms, servicing one man after another all day; students working in “gentlemen’s clubs” (ha!) to pay their fees. Free speech, liberal do-gooders, the rights of the individual—as long as it’s not harming anyone else. Blah, blah, blah. This was where it got you. Rome under Nero.”

Tracy Waterhouse is a marvelous creation, and when the novel moves back between the present and 1975, we enter a time warp of attitudes–some of which do not significantly change with the passage of time. Tough female coppers are still either dykes or “lezzies” and prostitutes are still unsympathetic murder victims–women who “ask for it.” When Tracy joined the police force, she was there essentially to hold hands with women victims and pass the box of tissues, and while female detectives are no longer seen as fluff, neither are they seen in any sort of flattering light; they simply fall into a different, unpleasant stereotype:

“When Tracy was on the force her fellow officers—male and female—all assumed she was a dyke. She was over fifty now and way back when she’d joined the West Yorkshire Police as a raw cadet you had to be one of the boys to get along. Unfortunately, once you’d established yourself as a hard-nosed bitch it was difficult to admit to the soft and fluffy woman you were hiding inside. And why would you want to admit that anyway.”

I read a fair number of crime novels, and Started Early, Took My Dog is superior for its characterizations and the depth of the issues involved. This is not a simple PI procedural, or even a mystery that needs to be unraveled. Instead this is the story of several characters who are forever shaped by the decisions they made in a split-second moment. On one tier, there’s Tracy Waterhouse who’s haunted by an image of a starving child, and Jackson Brodie who’s haunted by the murder of his only sister, but there are many second tier characters who’ve either stood by and allowed terrible acts to occur or who’ve made poor judgments that have haunted them for decades. Atkinson takes a generous approach to all of her flawed characters, and in some cases at least, the characters have opportunities for redemption.

As a series character, Jackson Brodie possesses the requisite interest for a return visit. This novel shows him maturing and coming to some realizations about both his past and his present. Threads are left open for the fifth novel in the series, but until that one sees the light of day, I have some catching up to do with the other Jackson Brodie novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 127 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (March 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Atkinson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:When Will There Be Good News?One Good Turn Case Histories

Bibliography:

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
• Human Croquet (1997)
• Emotionally Weird (2000)
• Not the End of the World (2002)
• Life After Life (April 2013

Detective Jackson Brodie series:

• Case Histories (2004)
• One Good Turn (2006)
• When Will There Be Good News? (2008)
• Started Early, Took My Dog (2011)

“Standing there, I remember, I experienced the blissful sense of well-being that expats sometimes enjoy. I was a long way from things and people that I didn’t want to think about – including myself, my old self, the so-what lawyer with the so-what life I’d left behind in London. The me that you know now. I was in a place where today, every day, almost anything might happen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 23, 2011)

A.D. Miller’s noir thriller is nearly impossible to put down once started. Moscow, “that city of neon lust and frenetic sin” is skillfully painted in all its contradictions and juxtapositions. It is “a strange country, Russia, with its talented sinners and occasional saint, bona fide saints that only a place of such accomplished cruelty could produce, a crazy mix of filth and glory.”  Nothing is as it seems in this book and ethics are continually stretched to the limit.

The book is written in the format of attorney Nick Platt’s recollection of his time in Moscow as he shares it with his fiancee. Now residing in London, where he is from originally, he recalls the few years he spent as a lawyer in Moscow and how they affected his life. Can his fiancée still accept him and will she still want to marry him once she hears what happened during his time in Moscow? Will she be able to understand his part in the events that unfolded and forgive him? Is he able to forgive himself or is that even important?

Nick is in Moscow during Russia’s high-flying times, where makers and shakers easily spend two hundred dollars on a massage, where everyone has a scam and you’re part of it in some way, where banks loan millions of dollars to companies on a wish and a dream. It’s a strange time in a strange country. “The Russians will do the impossible thing – the thing you think they can’t do, the thing you haven’t thought of. They will set fire to Moscow when the French are coming or poison each other in foreign cities. They will do it, and afterwards they will behave as if nothing has happened at all. And if you stay in Russia long enough, so will you.” This is Nick’s predicament. He is caught up in several complex and laborious scams and he searches within himself to see when he first turned the other way. Or did he not see anything coming and get run over by a Mack truck.

The novel begins with Nick rescuing two sisters on the metro – Masha and Katya. They are young, long-legged beauties. Nick is close to forty, feeling his age and seeing his middle expand. Masha is 24 and Katya is 20, just old enough for Nick to enjoy without feeling any guilt. He is especially fond of Masha and together they hit the night life of Moscow and begin a passionate affair; at least it is passionate for Nick. At times, Masha appears to be play-acting and going through the motions but that’s okay with Nick who daydreams about a life with her. One day, out of the blue, Masha and Katya ask Nick to help with the legal work entailed in finding their aunt Tatiana a new apartment. Nick agrees and continues with the process even when he finds out that he has been fed a lot of lies.

Nick is also involved in the legal aspects of attaining a huge loan for an oil rigging company. In order for the loan to go through, the company must have its construction completed on time, a certain amount of capital needs to be generated in the future, and of course, there is that unending stack of Russian paperwork and workers that need to be bribed. There’s a little problem when the surveyor for the project disappears for a few days and then comes back with a report that everything is clean as a whistle. Then he disappears again. Who can say that this means anything at all? Who can say that it doesn’t?

Nick finds himself in a conundrum everywhere he turns. He tries on different realities for size and stretches his ethics like a rubber band. He enters a world where the lure of sin is almost impossible to resist. In Russia, do as the Russians do – but he is not Russian and there is a little voice in his head that tells him “Maybe I should look at this a little differently.”

This is the best kind of literary thriller and page-turner – one that is intelligent, complex and rewarding. There is no deus ex machina at the end and all the pieces work marvelously as they bring the reader to a thrilling conclusion, one that is heart-stopping and heart-breaking.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	A.D. Miller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More crime novels set in Russia:  Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith Moscow Noir edited by Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Bibliography:

• Snowdrops (February 2011)

“…he was aware he’d become someone he no longer recognized, someone terrible, something drawn up from the deep abyss, with no real purpose, an unquenchable thirst, a bottomless hunger, searching out some demon inside him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 7, 2011)

A provocative thriller will fasten a reader to the proverbial edge of the seat, either by laying a trail of clues to “whodunit” or leading us on a mad and oscillating cat-and-mouse chase through the landscape of the novel. In the case of Urban Waite’s contemporary, reflective and rousing cat-and-mouse debut, I was glued to the pages of perilous pursuit and quickened by the torn and haunted rogue heroes–Deputy Bobby Drake, and ex-convict and owner of a struggling horse farm, Phil Hunt.

There’s the law (Drake), the lawless (Grady), and then there is that equivocal and tarnished outlaw, Hunt–the name brimming with metaphor–whose reckoning is tethered to Drake’s by plaited doubts and dark obstacles reaching back to a coiled and inextricable past. In short, they are each other’s nemesis. The wives in this story are resolute and strong, providing a mirror for the reader to reflect on their moody tormented husbands. The northwest territory of Washington State becomes its own penetrating and terrifying, living character.

In the mountain wilderness passes between Washington and Canada, drug smuggling is a lot more challenging than it used to be, now that boundary crossing between Canada and the U.S. requires a passport and the roads are policed. Bricks of cocaine dropped from planes in the blue-black night below the high treetops and picked up by horseback, as well as human “mules” carrying condoms full of heroin implanted by ingestion, are the methods used to foil the law.

In the near-opening pages, newly married Deputy Drake, on his day off, sights Hunt’s abandoned horse trailer on the logging roads of Silver Lake and suspects an imminent transaction. He camps out and waits, haunted by memories, by the ghost of family history. Drake’s father, a once formidable sheriff, is serving time in prison. He supplemented his earnings as a drug courier, as Hunt is doing now. Hunt’s wife, Nora, is not too keen on her husband’s extracurricular activities, but their love is a firm and unalloyed bedrock that never diminishes. Hunt’s curled past as a convict is something for the reader to discover, a piece of information that is teased out and explored over the course of the novel, magnifying the psychological heft of this better-than-genre story. Hunts demons correlate Drake’s, and propel them and the story.

The plot mobilizes when Drake comes face to face with Hunt and Hunt’s young rookie in the midst of collecting the goods. Phil is a skilled horseman who escapes, but the “kid” is apprehended and suffers a gruesome fate in jail. The chase proceeds with a measured pace, hypnotic and bracing. The dead bodies pile up, thanks to the main supplier’s lackey, Grady, a former chef and sociopathic killer on the trail of Hunt and Drake alike.

Rounding out the cast are DEA agent and straight shooter, Driscoll, working with Drake; “the lawyer” (nameless) and drug deal maker; Hunt’s long time friend, Eddie; Bobby Drake’s perceptive wife, Sheri; and an array of cold-blooded, one-dimensional Vietnamese thugs. Then there’s the female mule, Thu, a Vietnamese women who lives in Seattle. The thugs and mule are necessary to the plot, but the theme is amply filled by the invisible relationship between Drake and Hunt.

I was additionally impressed by the nuanced juxtaposition of Sheri and Nora, and how they counterpoint Drake and Hunt. Phil tacitly grasps Nora’s adept comprehension of his essential nature. Drake, a newlywed, still grapples with Sheri’s judicious understanding of his confused motives. The counterpoint between the two marriages was lightly but substantively rendered, endowing the book with weighty subtext that accumulates and resounds as the story progresses. This was a testosterone-infused novel, and yet, in the final assessment, it is the women who impel their men.

Waite may not have broken the mold in this somber thriller, but he deftly contributed his own achievement. The spiritual struggle between good and bad is a conventional theme that the author probed with a fresh eye. There were a few scene contrivances to advance the plot, but they did not distract from this taut, intense story.

The prose is stark and shadowy, haunting and sensuous, weaving in the geography of the northwest so ably that I heard the wind like a susurrus whisper–and sometimes a howl–through the trees, and I lurched through the snaking roads. There are tendrils of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but less primordial, and Waite, at this juncture, is not as seasoned. But I did relish at some of the turns of event that will inevitably be compared to McCarthy’s work, and I suspect that Waite deliberately paid a nodding homage–as evidenced by the character (although minor) identified as “the kid.” Some readers may decry it as essentially formulaic, but that would be a limited view. What makes this novel stand out is the ethereal prose and the ever-strengthening bond between Hunt and Drake.

The events in this book are graphic, explicit and occasionally disturbing, but with a controlled restraint. There’s also a choice twist on the Mexican standoff. For squeamish readers, this is a fair warning that the novel isn’t for the faint of heart or for readers who abhor violence in literature. This was executed like a noir-western-opera-suspense-drama-slash-thriller fusion, with a harmonic equipoise of physical action and interior torment. The story is a hybrid brew of nihilism and romanticism, summoning a cauldron of terror and stirring it with an ache and longing for tranquility.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (February 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Urban Waite
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Smonk by Tom Franklin

Bibliography:

• The Terror of Living (2011)
• The Carrion Birds (April 2013)