Stagger Bay
Written by Pearce Hansen — This is the second novel from the prolific writer of short stories, whose other work includes Speedy’s Big Moving Day, collected in Anthony Neil Smith’s Plots With Guns – A Noir Anthology. Moving from Oakland to Stagger Bay in an…
Wee Rockets
Set on the mean streets of West Belfast – heartland of The Troubles but now in the throes of regeneration – Wee Rockets follows a group of young working class boys who aspire towards thugdom; you couldn’t call them a gang at the outset but…
The Dead Women of Juárez by Sam Hawken
It’s a tough sell setting a crime fiction book against a backdrop of real life horrors without coming across as sensationalist or trivial. But this is precisely what Sam Hawken attempts to do in his first book, The Dead Women of Juárez, and pulls it…
Wee Rockets
Written by Gerard Brennan — After last summer’s riots, and the resulting chorus of accusation and analysis from a remote middle class media, Wee Rockets feels like a very prescient book, focused on feral kids with lives dominated by casual brutality and rabid consumerism. Reading…
NTN: Where the Devil Can't Go
Writtn by Anya Lipska — Where the Devil Can’t Go parallels the stories of two lead characters. Polish immigrant Janusz Kiszka builder-cum-PI has been a resident of London since the 1980s, long before the more recent economic exodus of Poles. Meanwhile rookie detective DC Natalie…
The Power of the Dog
The bad America that Ellroy does so well, and that DeLillo sometimes chronicles, is powerfully evoked in Don Winslow’s own lucid storytelling. Poetic and abrasive at the same time, he drags your raw and sorry ass into the world of Art Keller, a Vietnam vet…