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By Nico Vreeland, on February 21st, 2013  Author: Nele Neuhaus
2013, Minotaur
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
Nele Neuhaus is evidently the reigning queen of Germany mystery fiction, and it’s not terribly hard to see why. Neuhaus, like other European mystery writers (Stieg Larsson in particular), has a dark view of humanity, and a boring hero to face off against it. In both Snow White Must Die and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a flavorless investigator looks into a crime that leads to a group of seemingly normal citizens. As the investigator digs deeper, he or she discovers that nearly every one of the people he or she meets has a terrible secret, almost nobody has a conscience, and the overall effect of victory is the relief of survival, not the pleasure of triumph. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 26th, 2012  Author: Patrick Somerville
2012, Little Brown
Filed under: Literary, Thriller
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
In the third act of This Bright River, Patrick Somerville’s enjoyable but uneven second novel, the leading lady tells the main character: “’Maybe you should stop mumbling through the world. Or complaining about privilege. I feel like you may not quite understand how unbearable a trait that is.’” She should’ve spoken up three hundred pages earlier.
Patrick Somerville is a writer of rare talent, and he’s especially gifted with an ear for lively dialogue and a pitch-perfect sense of humor that adds energy to his fiction without capsizing it into farce. His most recent story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature was the funniest, most charming book I read in 2010. But even a great writer can turn out a bad novel, and through the first fifty pages, that’s what I feared This Bright River would be. Luckily, I was wrong. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 22nd, 2012  Author: Nick Harkaway
2012, Knopf
Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thriller
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Nick Harkaway is an undeniably ambitious writer, a romantic, and an effusive stylist. These qualities can add up to a rollicking read like The Gone-Away World, where the characters and plot never stray far from established genre territory, but the vivacity and fun of the storytelling carries the day.
Or a romantic, ambitious stylist can turn in a bit of an overworked dud. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happened with Angelmaker. This time around, Harkaway entirely reinvents his voice and his subject matter, and winds up missing the mark.
The Gone-Away World follows a gang of post-apocalyptic heroes-for-hire as they try to save the world from an evil corporation/government. Harkaway packs the story with comedy and adventure, and he succeeds in making it a hell of a ride.
Angelmaker follows a clockmaker whose primary goal in life is to not become a gangster. Harkaway, staying true to the voice of a staid clockmaker, reigns in the rambunctiousness, and the whole thing feels much flatter as a result, more like a chore than a rollercoaster. It took me three months to finish reading it, and I’m one of Harkaway’s biggest fans. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 15th, 2012 [This intense mystery is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Gillian Flynn
2012, Crown
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
Find this book at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
A month ago, an article in the New York Times detailed how commercial authors like Lisa Scottoline now feel pressure to write faster than ever, some cranking out two novels a year in order (so they claim) to stay at the forefront of their readers’ minds.
I won’t list all the reasons this is bad for the publishing world, because Gone Girl happens to be a much more eloquent argument against the two-books-a-year publishing model.
Gillian Flynn writes one mystery every three years, one mystery worth at least half a dozen of the crappy, wooden thrillers cranked out by the Lisa Scottoline method. Flynn’s previous book, Dark Places, stunned me with its excellent execution of a tricky premise, and it instantly became one of the top five mysteries I’ve ever read. Now Gone Girl joins it and indicates that Flynn just might be the best mystery writer alive.
…
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By Arthur McCulloch, on April 19th, 2012 Author: Daniel Silva
2012, Harper
Filed Under: Thriller
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Portrait of a Spy is about what you’d expect of a mass-market paperback spy novel. A new terrorist mastermind threatens the post-9/11 world and an elite force of spies must penetrate the evil network before it’s too late. Sigh.
The main character, Gabriel Allon, is a cross between a Dan Brown and a Robert Ludlum protagonist. Except, unlike Dan Brown’s hero, he’s not an art historian, he’s an artist. That’s right, an artist spy! No, seriously.
I actually think an artist spy could make for a unique and engaging character. Unfortunately, this book is missing a few pieces, and the most noticeably absent is character development. Gabriel Allon is a flat character, and throughout most of the book very little is invested in developing him any further. I get the impression that the author probably made more effort to establish his protagonist’s character in an earlier novel. Unfortunately, Portrait of a Spy is little more than Allon in action, and since the reader never really is able to connect with the character, there’s little reason to fear for his safety or otherwise care. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 2nd, 2012 [The taut time-traveling novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: David J. Kowalksi
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.
Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.
As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.
Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 9th, 2012 Author: Donald E. Westlake
2011, Hard Case Crime (Titan)
Filed Under: Thriller
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
When Donald E. Westlake died in 2008 he had over 100 novels under his belt. He left at least one unpublished, left in the care of fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins for some forty-odd years. Supposedly written in the ’70s, The Comedy is Finished was completed and ready for publication right around the time Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy came out in 1983. Although the motives and characters are different, the basic plot about a celebrity kidnapping was similar enough to his unpublished novel that Westlake tabled the book for fear of being called a copycat. After Westlake’s death, Collins found a publisher, and The Comedy Is Finished finally saw publication last month.
Set in the post-Vietnam days when yuppies begin to settle into the nascent ’80s, the novel focuses on an aging comedian, Koo Davis, who is kidnapped by a group of Marxist twentysomethings unable to move on from the radical days of the previous decade. Koo is pretty much a Bob Hope analogue, a relic of a past era of entertainment. Even through some traumatic experiences, he constantly manages corny one-liners and paraprosdokians.
At first this fell a bit flat for me, but Koo’s seeming incapability for seriousness reveals itself as a well-crafted shield for a deeply insecure and sad old man. Westlake’s effort isn’t high literature by any stretch, but he did touch a few nerves of emotion that serve the book nicely and left me genuinely surprised. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 18th, 2012  Author: Daniel H. Wilson
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:
There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.
Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 29th, 2011  Author: Maile Meloy
2011, Putnam Juvenile
Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.
Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.
From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.
It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.) …
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By Sean Clark, on December 27th, 2011 Author: Cody McFadyen
2008, Bantam
Filed Under: Thriller, Horror
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
This is a book that will in no way exercise your mind, or place any demands upon you as a reader. When I first started it, I read the first few pages, gave a book-snobby, mocking laugh, and put it right back down on my counter. I scooped it up on the way out the door to work a few days later, since I was running late and couldn’t remember where I had left 1Q84.
I crushed through the first third or so of the book on my commute that day, and found myself engaged and ready to read on the next day. A thriller about team of detectives hunting down a serial killer, The Darker Side takes a lot of cues from The Silence of the Lambs, and, since the murders center around a theme of Catholic contrition, even more from Seven. …
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