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Under the skin by Michael Faber
Amazon description: In the opening pages of Under the Skin, a lone female is scouting the Scottish Highlands in search of well-proportioned men: “Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.” At this point, the reader might be forgiven for anticipating some run-of-the-mill psychosexual drama. But commonplace expectation is no help when it comes to Michel Faber’s strange and unsettling first novel; small details, then major clues, suggest that something deeply bizarre is afoot. What are the reasons for Isserley’s extensive surgical scarring, her thick glasses, her excruciating backache? Who are the solitary few who work on the farm where her cottage is located? And why are they all nervous about the arrival of someone called Amlis Vess?The ensuing narrative is of such cumulative, compelling strangeness that it almost defies description. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that Under the Skin is unlike anything else you have ever read. Faber’s control of his medium is nearly flawless. Applying the rules of psychological realism to a fictional world that is both terrifying and unearthly, he nonetheless compels the reader’s absolute identification with Isserley .
**My review: It gets under the skin.
This is a strange story in that it doesn’t fit any particular genre, but rather many genres. Issley spends her days in her vehicle trolling the roadways for hitchhikers. Some are kept and some are thrown back. But for what purpose are they kept? Slowly the story unfolds and we find out just why some are kept. This story makes you think about animals that are kept as food in a whole other light. I will ever look at a hamburger or a piece of chicken quite the same way again. In fact, I may just forgo meat altogether. At times a bit unnerving, this story keeps you riveted because of the questions it raises.
The Black Angel-Series book 5
In the fifth Charlie Parker novel, the private investigator, recently remarried (after the murders of his wife and child), has been trying to pull his life back together. But when his partner’s cousin goes missing, Parker can’t avoid getting back in the game. And when he realizes the young woman’s disappearance is connected to an older, darker mystery, he once again is forced to risk life and sanity in a desperate good-versus-evil battle. Connolly, who resides in Ireland but writes about the U.S. like he’s lived there all his life, once again blends the -private-eye novel and the supernatural thriller in a way that’s altogether unique. Parker himself, one of the genre’s more disturbed heroes, is a complex creation whose depths have still, even through five novels, been barely explored. The Charlie Parker novels are not for everyone (especially those who like their private-eye yarns unencumbered by philosophical or theological overtones).
In this book, we get to know a bit about one of the hit men as the search is on for a lost relative. Great writing as always. 5 stars
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListThe White Road-Series Book 4
“I have learned to embrace the dead and they, in their turn, have found a way to reach out to me.” It’s becoming increasingly clear from pronouncements such as this that PI Charlie Parker is hardly your garden-variety mystery protagonist. In Connolly’s latest spine-tingling opus (after The Killing Kind), readers gain further insights into the soul of this tormented man-a hero of uncommon depth and compulsions. We also learn more about Angel and Louis, Parker’s longtime cronies (and gay Odd Couple) who function as Greek chorus, avenging angels and their buddy’s conscience. Angel resembles “the runway model for a decorators’ convention, assuming that the decorators’ tastes veered toward five-six, semiretired gay burglars,” while Louis possesses “six feet six inches of attitude, razor-sharp dress sense, and gay Republican pride.” (Note to Connolly: how about a spin-off novel for these two idiosyncratic supporting players?) Parker’s description of his newest case-”dead people, a mystery, more dead people”-exemplifies his bluntness; true to form, he’s never far from a cutting remark or casual wisecrack (hearing that an especially odious character has “found Jesus,” Parker observes, “I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him”). When a former colleague who’s practicing law in Charleston, S.C., asks for Parker’s help on a racially charged murder case, Parker reluctantly leaves his Maine habitat. The South that he encounters is found in no guidebook: it’s a pernicious locale where the good old boys are far from good, where country music speaks “of war and vengeance” and where one soulless individual “smelled of slow burning… like the odor left after an oil fire had just been extinguished.” Adding eerie overtones to Connolly’s intricately plotted tale are more of Parker’s musings on the concept of death and the nature of evil-soliloquies often accompanied by spectral visions. The malevolence here is almost palpable (even more so than in Parker’s earlier outings).
At this time I am so hooked on this series, I’m getting them as they come out in Hardcover. Finally, we get to learn more about Luis and Angel. And I concur with the reviewer -we need a book just about them. Two funnier nor deadlier characters have I come across. The witticisms are razor sharp. 5 stars
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListThe Killing Kind- Series Book 3
Arachnophobes, proceed at your own peril. Elias Pudd, the archfiend in Connolly’s masterful third suspense novel (following Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow) finds such grizzly uses for spiders of all, er, stripes that he makes that dastardly villain Hannibal Lecter seem like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Pudd, however, is just one in a splendidly drawn cast that propels this gripping, intricately plotted tale. When a road crew in northern Maine accidentally unearths a grave site, the bodies turn out to be members of the Aroostook Baptists, a cultlike religious group whose members disappeared in the 1960s. Meanwhile, private investigator Charlie Parker (from the earlier novels) is hired to investigate the suspicious suicide of Grace Peltier, who was working on a graduate thesis concerning-guess what?-the Aroostook Baptists. Further muddying the waters is the Fellowship, a group led by the supremely unctuous Carter Paragon (nee Chester Quincy Deedes, “the name on his birth certificate and his criminal record”), which turns out to be far more sinister than anyone realized. From Connolly’s opening words-”This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart”-it’s clear that this is no ordinary thriller; indeed, his random musings on the manifestations of evil, coupled with Parker’s visions and flashbacks, lend the book a dark, intriguing overlay. Lest things become too intense, however, the author’s wry sense of humor easily lightens the situation, often harking back to earlier noir writers: “she had the kind of body that caused highway pileups after Sunday services.”
This book creeped me out with all the spiders. But don’t let that deter you from reading it. Connolly gets better and better with each book. Additionally, he comes closer to a confrontation with his past. 5 stars
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListDark Hollow- Series Book 2
Irish writer Connolly’s follow-up to Every Dead Thing, which won the 2000 Shamus Award for Best PI First Novel, is just as grim, hard-edged and compulsively readable as his debut. Recently relocated to his home town of Scarborough, Maine, newly licensed PI Charlie Parker tries to get some overdue child support from wastrel Billy Purdue as a favor to Purdue’s ex-wife Rita, an act of charity that ends up pitting Parker and his friends Angel and Luis against mobster Tony Celli. Celli is looking for $2 million that Purdue might have heisted during a botched ransom exchange, and a pair of killers named Abel and Stritch are on the loose. There’s also a trail of dead bodies, all of them linked to Purdue’s search for his birth parents, a line that stretches from his family to an old woman who kills herself after running away from a nursing home. She claims to have seen Caleb Kyle, a vicious serial killer who hasn’t been heard from since Parker’s youth. It’s this element of the plot that lends a supernatural air to the already creepy proceedings (Parker has visions of his dead wife and daughter); the book opens like a Stephen King novel, with a violent prologue, visions of nameless evil darkening the stars, and the dead past coming alive. Since the novel is set in Maine, it feels like an homage to the master of Pine Tree State horror. Luckily, this very violent hunt for a revived serial killer can survive comparison with the best, especially when you consider that Connolly is creating pitch-perfect American dialogue and believable American characters from a desk in Dublin.
A great follow up book to the first. Charlie Parker’s a great character that’s realistic. 4 stars
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One serial killer who tortures children and another who steals victims’ faces after mutilating their bodies give readers two grisly plots in one darkly ingenious debut novel. New York Homicide cop Charlie “Bird” Parker left the force when his wife and baby daughter were gruesomely murdered (while he was boozing down the block), but he agrees to trace a missing woman as a favor to his old partner. The trail leads from Brooklyn wise guys to a dying rural Virginia town where the shameful secret (children were tortured and killed by wealthy local eccentrics) is linked to the missing woman. Stepping on toes and muscling past stonewallers, Charlie eludes hired killers to flush several villains into the open with the help of two friendly hitmen, a competently lethal gay couple who provide a refreshing change from both stereotypes. Charlie receives a phone call from Tante Marie, a Creole woman near New Orleans whose detailed psychic visions of “The Traveling Man” match the profile of the killer. Scoping out the bayous, Charlie teams up with his old FBI buddy, Woolrich, for more convoluted probing involving a plethora of psychic tips, bodies in the bayou and Creole gangs. A romance with a beautiful Brooklyn profiler who joins the case helps make the New Orleans sequence of the novel sing. The tortuous plot seldom falters and each character is memorable.
A fantastic book of mystery with occult overtones. Charlie Parker is a man haunted by his past. I loved that he didn’t bow to stereotypes when writing about the gay couple, Angel and Luis, who are also hit men. 4 stars
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListThe Black Jewels: Trilogy: Daughter of the Blood / Heir to the Shadows / Queen of the Darkness
Anne Bishop’s critically-acclaimed Black Jewels Trilogy is the saga of a young but still-innocent Queen more powerful than even the High Lord of Hell-and the three sworn enemies determined to win her and gain a prize that could be terrible beyond imagining…
A beautiful trilogy of fantasy and magic. One of my favorites.
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Book description: See’s engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or “old sames”) Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily’s voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women’s ceremonies and duties in China’s rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women’s inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life. Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her sisters’ foot binding (”Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace”), the story widens to a vivid portrait of family and village life. Most impressive is See’s incorporation of nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women—here between Lily and Snow Flower—that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan province (”My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart,/ An invisible rebellion that no man can see”). As both a suspenseful and poignant story and an absorbing historical chronicle, this novel has bestseller potential and should become a reading group favorite as well.
My review: A beautifully poignant book about friendship, love, sisterhood and saving face. Some readers may be put off by the foot binding that takes place. It must be understood that in those times, this was an acceptable act of beautification done only by the upper classes in China. Much like plastic surgery, body piercing and tattoos are today. This book is one of my favorites and one I will be sure to re-read in the future.
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListStray- Rachel Vincent ****
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListVincent’s debut, an urban werecat fantasy, is a good story that suffers from about 200 pages of bloat. Faythe Sanders is a Texas grad student with a secret: she’s a shape-shifting werecat. After she’s attacked by a Stray—a werecat without ties to any pride—Faythe’s father, the Pride Alpha, orders her to return to the family compound. As it turns out, two other werecat tabbies have gone missing, indicating an organized effort by the formerly go-it-alone Strays. The author’s world building is intriguing but overly narrow, reducing the range of jungle feline behavior to a keen territorial instinct. Secondary characters abound, including Faythe’s intended, formerly human werecat Marc; five years earlier, she escaped the pride on what was supposed to be the eve of their wedding. Unfortunately, they both have frustrating character tics that are only exacerbated by the novel’s length: Faythe is more often too-stubborn-to-live than kick-ass, and all the tears Marc wells up over Faythe don’t forgive his insufferable jealousy. A polished tale may hide within this one, but Vincent needs to rein herself in a bit if she wants to build a readership.
Bad Blood-L. A. Banks {Book 1} 4 stars
Sasha Trudeau knows all about working beneath the shadows, back-alley deals, and things that go bump in the night. She also knows that the world is unaware of the existence of the paranormal—and that the government would like to keep it that way. As a highly trained Special Ops soldier, Sasha and her team are an elite group of individuals who are survivors of werewolf attacks, now trained to be loyal to only to each other and their government. But when she returns from a solo mission, she finds that her team has mysteriously gone missing. Shocking government conspiracies, double-dealing vampires, and a host of stunning revelations about who—and what—she really is are only just the beginning…
L. A. Banks has yet to fail me in one of her books. This book is no exception. Fast paced with a new and intriguing spin on the werewolf myths. As always, Ms. Banks provides good detail and descriptions for her characters. You feel as if you know them and root for them to win. If you haven’t read her before, this is a good place to start. Also check out her Vampire Huntress Legend series. Phenomenal writing!
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