What are you currently reading?

[QualityBookReviews]

An open discussion on what everyone is currently reading. Make recommendations to others, discuss what is new, hot, bestsellers, anything and everything related to books and the authors.

[I. J. Parker]

Finished P.D.James, THE PRIVATE PATIENT, (finally).  The Grande Dame of mystery has written a traditional mystery set in a country house, complete with vicars, local legends, and some very unpleasant people. The fact that it's a police procedural (protagonist Adam Dalgliesh) is beside the point. I have occasionally had the greatest admiration for James's style.  This time, not so much.  I kept wondering: do people really speak like that in England, even if they are members of the upper classes?  Mostly, things dragged with longwinded discussions, ruminations, and somewhat pointless POV switches.  Is it really OK to present a chapter from the point of the victim-to-be and end with "Closing her eyes and drifting into sleep, she thought of the peaceful night ahead and of the morning which she would never live to see."?

[charlie ness]

I'm looking for a British mystery fiction author's name, male, first book published after 2000 . I glanced at a book in the library,and here's what I know -   - Main person is a woman police detective in Yorkshire, Bradford or Huddersfield. She transferred there after serving in CO19, after an incident where she killed 3 hostage takers. She has a teenage daughter. They live  with a Sikh police officer who she wants to leave. She has a brief affair with her new boss who subsequently dies of a stroke - The book's characterisations were very similar to Stephen Booth's books, but NOT his. -Also NOT Graham Hurley,  NOT Simon Kernick,
 Peter James, Stuart McBride,Mark Billingham,     
 thanks, charlie -if you can help, please email me  <[e-mail]> 

[Tim Scanlon]

Just finished James Rollins' The Doomsday Key. Worth a read. Rollins knows how to keep the pace and interest up. I have a review at Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/147693104

 

Not sure what I'll read next. Maybe another Dexter novel.

[Julia Madeleine]

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville...it's really good.

[I. J. Parker]

Declan Hughes, CITY OF LOST GIRLS.  Another highly acclaimed Irishman. (I suspect that if one author -- Ken Bruen in this instance -- rises to the top, he tends to take his fellow countrymen with him).  This author has potential, but the book is a thriller with a particularly simple-minded and unoriginal plot.  The killer (he has his own chapters to ruminate anonymously) kills "three in one", leaving a cross with the bodies as a mark of the trinity. No logical reason for this appears.  The serial killing have been going on 18 years and on two continents. In the end, predictably, he turns on the protagonist's girlfriend and her two little daughters, again without much of a reason, not even that of feeling threatened.  The book was a big disappointment.

[Steve Anderson]

Just finished True Grit by Charles Portis. Fantastic read that absolutely lives up to the current hype. My new favorite character is little Mattie Ross. This is how you write a novel.

[Richard Krauss]

Just finished Peter Robinson's Bad Boy. Another excellent adventure in the Inspector Banks series. Now I'm onto Peter Rabe's never before published The Silent Wall from Stark House books. Here's a couple of lines from the hero after he wakes up in bed after a beating:

"I had a fierce headache. It expanded and contracted in a undulant way inside my skull, a jellyfish of pain."

 

 

 

 

[Susan]

I'm halfway through J. A. Konrath's The List. He's the one who's raking in bucks by kissing off trad publishers and pubbing his novels as ebooks. The List is .99 cents. Worth every penny. Solid writing. Interesting plot premis. Best of all, one of his characters, Lincoln, makes me laugh out loud. Very droll.

[David DeLee]

Reading SHRINK RAP by Robert B. Parker, the third in his Sunny Randall series. Makes me sad he is gone.

[I. J. Parker]

Fred Vargas, THIS NIGHT'S FOUL WORK.  This female author is French and has won wide acclaim. I couldn't get into the first one. This one I plowed through with many a muttering. A police procedural where everyone is so eccentric as to be disqualified from police work under normal circumstances, and a plot that (maybe) belongs in the dark Middle Ages or in some extremely backward third-world country, and not in a modern European one. Nuts!

[Frank Gates]

Just finished heat Wave and reviewed it. Now reading An Object in Motion a short story by Ronald Barrios (if you can call 80 pages a short story lol)

[I. J. Parker]

I stopped reading Sara Paretzky a number of years ago.  Feeling guilty, I tried BODY WORK, and found I still couldn't take it. Not altogether sure what's wrong.  I know I didn't like the characters (particularly at the club where customers get to paint designs on a naked woman), but worse, I don't like the protagonist. There is something so utterly morally superior about her and the people she approves of. And there are always agendas. Morally superior ones.  I prefer some shades of gray when it comes to moral judgments.