THE LEVELS - by Sean Cregan

The Levels
by Sean Cregan

Headline - Hardback out now.
Paperback due August 2010.

I’ve been waiting for another exciting young crime writer to come along – someone who fits nicely into the same stable as other favourites of the same generation such as Stuart Macbride, Michael Marshall Smith, John Rickards and Steve Mosby - and Sean Cregan fits the bill very nicely thank you.
He fits very very well in fact and it’s not a well-kept secret that Cregan is in fact the new name for ‘the artist formerly known as’ John Rickards.
I loved John’s previous series of four books which kicked off with Winters’ End, but this change of style, name and publisher has certainly been worth the wait.

The Levels is a towering urban housing estate – a failed project and the stuff of real modern nightmares, but he manages to throw plenty of additional horrors into this not-too-distant future nightmare where the drug-addled residents run from each other, from the authorities and from a vicious serial killer who is also rampaging through the shadows.
The Levels read to me like a grimy, and likely much more realistic glimpse of a terrifying future than say, Blade Runner, the characters here have little in terms of technology or hover cars to escape their fates and I could do no better than the inner sleeve notes to describe it as ‘dark, feral, lawless’ – it is all of those and much more besides.
The characters, as with Sean’s (John’s) previous books, are well envisaged on the page and made me want to know more, to read more about their stories, particularly Ghost, one of the assassins known as ‘Furies’ in the novel, so it’s great to hear that at least two more books are planned for this new series – the next likely to be entitled The Razor Gate and due to be unleashed in January 2010.

A welcome breath of fresh air and a new take on what makes a ‘crime’ fiction book.

Keith B Walters

A fantastic new crime debut.

SNOW ANGELS
(An Inspector Vaara novel)
By James Thompson

Published by Putnam
(The Penguin Group USA)

I can’t recall where I read it, but I recently read that in the case of crime novels many readers aren’t too concerned with the plot of each book in a series, it’s the characters we love and love to follow.

Snow Angels – the debut by James Thompson has a great plot and characters that I’m really sad to have let go of now I’ve closed the book – so I hope that the second in the series comes along quickly.

Set in Finland, it has all the cold and darkness of the best Scandinavian crime fiction out there with some fantastic characters, particularly the damaged central character of Inspector Kari Vaara and his young American wife, Kate, who in a likely first for a novel both walk with limps due to separate events in their past.

Set at the bleakest time in Lapland, just prior to Christmas, the novel follows the investigation into the savage murder of a young beautiful Somali actress – the Snow Angel of the title. Hers, as with the other deaths and violence within the novel is depicted as it should be, without being gratuitous. The way in which each stage of the novel has an impact on its central characters is also as it should be – these are not just ‘on the page’ people, they are written very very real and on more than one occasion I felt I was standing right beside them in some of the key scenes.

The linking of some of the characteristics of the central crime to The Black Dahlia murder are well done, without being too heavily reliant and the possible links to Vaara’s ex-wife and her new husband in particular to the crime are horrible possibilities written for him to unveil at his peril.

Thompson has clearly put his damaged Inspector through the mill in this first novel, damaging him further, both emotionally and physically, by its climax and although I’d like him to give Vaara a slightly easier life in the next book, it’ll be very interesting to see what impact some of the events within Snow Angels have on his character in book two.

I would highly recommend this book and can’t wait to read more of Inspector Kari Vaara.

Keith B Walters

The Dead - by David Gatward

The Dead by David Gatward

Published by Hodder Children’s Books – July 2010


This, the first in a trilogy of children’s horror fiction titles from David Gatward is a clear shot across the bow towards a series of books by a certain Mr Darren Shan who has, let’s face it, pretty much taken the zombie/monster/horror for children market as his own.
There are, of course, others chipping away into the genre for this age-group, Charlie Higson’s The Enemy and it’s sequel due (which I believe is also entitled The Dead) are probably the closest Shan has had for direct competition.
But with this release, its marketing campaign and, in particular, its artwork and book jackets (which are by Mel Grant – who also does Shan’s covers as well as those amazing Iron Maiden album covers) this is as close as we’ll get to all-out teen horror warfare in the bookstores.

David is clearly a horror film and book fan, and wears his heart on his sleeve in a similar way to how I remember discovering Shaun Hutson’s novels years back. You just know when a horror writer loves their subject and when they are well versed in the traditions and the excitement of certain classic movie scenes.

The story is that of a young boy, Lazarus Stone (great name and hint of things to come) who is approaching sixteen when the book begins.
The appearance of a flayed man in his home to give him a message , a warning about The Dead and Hell, couldn’t fail to make me think of the Clive Barker Hellbound Heart novella and the subsequent Hellraiser films. The fact that David quotes a line from the Pinhead Cenobite on one of the first pages of his website demonstrates that these reference points in the book are of no happy coincidence – the man clearly loves his horror – and that’s great because it comes across in the book to the reader.

Lazarus, assisted in part by his horror movie loving friend Craig, is faced with questions over what his father does for a living and why he has mysteriously gone away without leaving a way of contacting him – oh, and the small matter of The Dead coming back into this world and bringing Hell with them.
As the story races along, it becomes clear that all may not be as it first appears for Lazarus and his loved ones.

It’s a fast paced book – perfect for the age group it is clearly aimed at, but this forty year old tarnished horror fiction and film fan got a lot out of it too, and I’ll certainly be seeking out books 2 & 3 (The Dark & The Damned) when they are released.

www.davidgatward.com
www.hodderchildrens.co.uk




Keith B Walters

Something is coming....Something is here...

Something is coming…..
Something is here…..
Justin Cronin at Waterstones Piccadilly reading from The Passage



A long and very hot day in London working, and the whole day carrying a book in my rucksack – a very special book and a very heavy book.
Thinking back, I have not been as excited about a book/author event since Stephen King at the Royal Festival Hall for Bag of Bones or, long before that, Clive Barker.

The Passage is a event book, it’s a huge novel with such scope and great characters that it cannot fail to draw you in. If it has one failing, and I’m guessing it’s not really a failing, it is that it is over too soon – you will devour it and then want more.

The amazing job that Orion Books did on its pre-launch promotion through advertising, the trailer for the book, the strapline ‘Something is coming’ and that striking image of Amy’s face for the book jacket and the teaser magazine certainly fuelled the fires into making it ‘the’ book of summer 2010.

I could not wait until the UK edition launch and ended up paying top dollar to get a US first edition to read, just in time for my reviewers copy to arrive of the UK edition. And it is THAT good. For once you can believe the hype.

And so, back to that hot night in London, and to the arrival of Justin Cronin at Waterstones Piccadilly to a good crowd of people.
I was expecting the place to be standing room only, but hadn’t realised that many stores already had stocks of signed editions on their shelves and that the author had also visited several others stores on his UK visit.
Nevertheless, the mentions on twitter by Orion’s own staff that they were queuing round their own offices to have their copies signed, just adds to explain just how important a release this has been for so many readers.

As I’ve already said, the book is epic, and it deals with an apocalyptic theme – so I was slightly on edge when Mr Cronin entered the room wearing sandals and asking for the lectern to be set up for him to read from – suddenly I wondered if by reading this book we’d all somehow bought into some new religion and he was about to preach to gospel according to The Passage. Had I missed something?

But fears quickly dissolved as he told of the writing of the book, the initial (well-documented) discussions with his daughter on their runs/bike rides which sparked the idea, and the three months of those discussions which made him realise that he had a story to tell at the end of it.

If you get the chance to see him talk about the book – do. He’s very close to the way that Stephen King describes his own work and I must confess that whilst he was reading a section I closed my eyes and just listened and compared his style to the way King would read his own work, and it was very very close in its tone, pace and style – nothing wrong with any of that, of course.

It was interesting to hear that he decide to leave Philadelphia as the last refuge in the novel as that was where he was from originally, so he put that in as a gift to those who live there.

He now lives in Houston Texas and, after reading a section from the book (one of the diary documents) about evacuation, he told of his own experience of having to pack up his own family to evacuate from the path of Hurricane Rita. Fortunately the gridlocked state they ended up in on the highway by 3am became a turnaround when the storm changed direction, but so soon after Hurricane Katrina nobody was taking any chances. What he experienced in that exodus clearly had an impact and was used to great effect within the evacuation scenes of the novel.

When asked about research he has different levels of doing it.
Firstly there is just the every-day studying the world around him and the way people behave and interact.
He cited the internet as a wonderful tool to find things out quickly and added that ‘if you want to know how to hot-wire a diesel locomotive train - I’m your guy!’
The Passage is a book about a journey, and he made the journey by car to ensure the locations and timings are correct. He did confess that he’d changed a few names as there are so many places called Yukka , and he did take the liberty of relocating one huge prison facility – other than that, everything is real geography.
The main area he felt he needed help with researching was that of firearms.
He arranged to go to the George Bush Park Firing Range and try out everything they had there.
For the second book (The Twelve – due in two years) of the trilogy, he also needed to know more about long distance high calibre rifle shooting. He said that he knew his dentist had a large plot of land and liked to shoot, so he asked him and, as soon as his dental clean was finished, the dentist locked up for the day so they could go and shoot things.

He was asked how his daughter felt about the book now. She was eight when she mentioned that his books were a bit ‘boring’ and that he should write a book about a little girl who saves the world. She’s now thirteen and has read it twice – a sign that a teenager probably likes something.
She has her own horse now, called Teddy, and that’s more than made up for her contribution.
That and the fact that Good Morning America showed a still of her with her father, so if she steps out of line he tells her to remember who was responsible for getting her face on national television.

He knew fairly soon when he started out that it was going to be a big epic long book and his reaction to realising that was ‘woohoo!’ He had something that would require that length of book, something that rarely happens for a writer.

Discussion then turned to which cover he preferred (US or UK) – Mr Cronin’s diplomatic response was to say that he loves everybody.
As the holder of the only US copy in the room, I had to hold my book aloft for all to see so comment could be made.
Most preferred the UK version, and I would be in total agreement with that.

When the question was asked about how he goes about writing and his structure to working on a novel I was somewhat surprised to find that he works to the fairly standard (for most writers) target of 1000 words a day.
He added that it’s not the getting started it’s the finishing that gets a book written.

All in all a great evening and I was so pleased to be there to hear Justin Cronin talk about and read from this fantastic first novel in the trilogy.

To hear him read from it made me think several things.
Firstly that I really needed to read it again now, probably at a slower pace, and now I had more of a handle on the rhythm of the book, the voice of the man who wrote it.
I also felt, with regards to my own writing, a mixture of two things; I am never going to be that good, and yet, oh my God I want to be that good.

And so, to my bookshelf returns a great book, now signed by the author.
As an extra surprise to the family when I got home, I also had Mr Cronin sign a copy of a photograph I took of my own ‘Littles’, which won a contest on his facebook page.



Now to read The Passage again and wait for two long years…..



Keith B Walters

Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes – One of Dublin Noir’s finest.
The Wrong Kind of Blood
The Colour of Blood

Published by John Murray


One of the best things about writing this piece is the fact that I know I already have two more novels in this excellent series to read (stacked within the ever growing ‘TBR’ pile of books here).

I’ve had a copy of the first in Hughes’s Ed Loy series for some time, but have only recently gotten around to reading it, resulting in me now having four books in total to read before I have to consider pestering the man to write another (which I’m sure he has underway anyhow – he’s unlikely to be waiting for a nudge from the likes of me).

Ed Loy is a great character and makes a nice change to have a modern Private Investigator rather than a cop taking centre stage in a series of crime novels. The fact that Loy can pretty much work to his own rules and code without the red tape of standard police procedurals lends itself to grittier work, with him able to really get his hands dirty and get as deep into the criminal underworld he investigates as he chooses to.

In the first novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, Loy is returning home to Dublin from America for the first time in twenty years for the funeral of his mother. At the request of an old school friend to seek out her missing husband, Loy finds himself sucked deep into a world of organised crime that has sprung up within the world in which he used to live.

The Colour of Blood goes deeper still, and much darker, with Loy taking on another missing person case, this time of a young girl. In the second book, dark and sinister family history, corruption, pornography and child abuse are all in the mix for an even tougher case for Loy.

Although reading them in sequence, the second book has little back-story needed, so could be read as a stand-alone with no problem at all to a new reader of the series.

Ed Loy is a great creation and Declan Hughes is a writer who deserves more attention – his novels are well structured and their plots and characters labyrinthine in their description - your full attention is required, but will be surely rewarded with a great read.

Now to make some headway into that ‘TBR’ pile to get to The Dying Breed and The City of Lost Girls.


Keith B Walters