THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.

January 1, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2013 Favorites, Contemporary, Facing History, italy, Literary, New York City, Reading Guide, Theme driven, Unique Narrative, y Award Winning Author

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others.

September 30, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, China, Scifi, Thriller/Spy/Caper, US Northwest, y Award Winning Author

WE ALL FALL DOWN by Michael Harvey

Michael Harvey’s sequel to THE THIRD RAIL is WE ALL FALL DOWN, in which PI Michael Kelly wears out a great deal of shoe leather trying to save the citizens of Chicago. An unidentified perpetrator may have released a biological weapon in the city’s subway system. When people begin to sicken and die, a highly trained team of brilliant scientists is called in to identify the substance (is it a strain of anthrax?) and try to find a way to contain it. Kelly is a student of Thucydides, who wrote eloquently about the Plague of Athens in his classic work, “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Kelly wonders whether, twenty-four hundred years later, a modern, man-made plague will decimate Chicago.

August 7, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Sleuths Series, Thriller/Spy/Caper, US Midwest

INCENDIARY by Chris Cleave

Imagine that you’re a working class Cockney mother with a husband who detonates bombs and a young son who is four years and three months old. You stave off your anxieties about the uncertainty of your life through mindless sex encounters. Eventually, you meet a neighbor – a journalist named Jasper – and, while your husband and son are at a soccer game, you invite him to your flat. At the exact same time you are in the throes of sexual abandon, there’s a massive terrorist bomb attack at the London soccer stadium, vaporizing over one thousand people – your husband and son among them. How do you go on? How do you live with the remorse?

March 12, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Literary, Unique Narrative, United Kingdom

THE THIRD RAIL by Michael Harvey

The Windy City is the setting for Michael Harvey’s fast-paced thriller, THE THIRD RAIL. Private investigator Michael Kelly is part of a task force that includes a detective named Vince Rodriguez and a no-nonsense FBI agent, Katherine Lawson. Their goal is to find a sadistic sniper who shot several passengers riding Chicago’s public transit system.

April 22, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Sleuths Series, Thriller/Spy/Caper, US Midwest

THE SIEGE by Stephen White

On a fine Saturday morning in April, the Yale campus is suddenly jolted by terror the likes of which no one could ever have imagined. More than two dozen students have gone missing in the past thirty-six hours, many of them the children of parents prominent in industry and government, and most of them recently “tapped” for one of Yale’s secret societies…

August 23, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: NE & New York, Psychological Suspense, Thriller/Spy/Caper