Small Crimes keeps rolling along...
Chauncey Mabe at the Sun-Sentinel will be reviewing Small Crimes this Sunday, but the review is online now at
SunSentinel's Off the Page blog, and it's a terrific one. A short blurb from Chauncey's review:
"Small Crimes proves a deft entry in the tradition that goes back to Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California — small masterpieces celebrating the psychopath as a grinning archetype, as American as apple pie."
The Jan-Feb issue of Bookmarks Magazine includes Small Crimes as one of their highly rated crime books, with the following critique:
"Published as a paperback original, Small Crimes just might be a small "piece of crime-noir genius," says the reviewer from the Washington Post, and other critics generally agree. Not only does the novel have clean, simple prose, ample suspense and twists, and a fast-paced plot--standard fare; it also offers brilliant psychological insight into tortured souls, and on a deeper level, it is a moralistic tale about how small crimes beget larger ones. A couple of reviewers note some stock background characters, but overall, Small Crimes convincingly depicts the wide-ranging effects of police corruption in small-town America."
Over at Barnes & Noble's website (bn.com), they're running a short (and embarrassingly flattering) review
on their mystery book page.
A few weeks ago The Boston Globe also gave it a
great review, saying:
"A Jim Thompson mentality on a Norman Rockwell setting... 'Small Crimes' is a strong piece of work, lean and spare, but muscular where a noir novel should be, with a strong central character whom we alternately admire and despise."
And Small Crimes made a lot of people's best of the year list. Not just NPR and The Washington Post, but a lot of readers, including topping
Bruce Grossman's list on the excellent review-site, Bookgasm.
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