New Reviews: Billingham, Black, Campbell, Ellory, Harper, MacBride

One competition for October and it is open internationally closes 31st:
Win one of five copies of Someone Else's Son by Sam Hayes

Here are this week's reviews (in all but once case the author or the reviewer is Scottish, and in one case both! Plus two of the non Scottish authors are Brummies (where I live)):

The tv series Thorne, starts tonight with the adaptation of the first Thorne book, Sleepyhead. Geoff Jones reviews the ninth in this series, written by Mark Billingham: From the Dead;

Paul Blackburn reviews the fourth Gus Dury from Tony Black - Long Time Dead set in Edinburgh;

Maxine Clarke is in Glasgow with Karen Campbell's Anna Cameron in her third outing: Shadowplay;

Pat Austin is impressed with R J Ellory's latest standalone: Saints of New York;

Amanda Gillies enjoys Tom Harper's latest thriller, which involves the Holy Grail: The Lazarus Vault

and Craig Sisterson reviews Stuart MacBride's most recent DS Logan McRae book: Dark Blood set in Aberdeen.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.

New Reviews: Campbell, Ellory, Eriksson, Fossum, Liang and Morley

Every week six new reviews are added to the website. I've set up a poll to get a bit of feed-back to see if that's too few, too many or about right. Please spare a few seconds to vote and/or leave a comment. Thank you :-).

And here are this week's new reviews and details of the current competitions:

Latest Reviews:

This week we're visiting all over the globe: Scotland, America, Sweden, Norway, China and Italy.

Pat Austin reviews the début novel from Karen Campbell, The Twilight Time, set in Glasgow and concludes that despite its problems, she'd probably read another;

Kerrie Smith is very impressed with Richard & Judy selection: R J Ellory's A Quiet Belief in Angels - another Brit setting his books in America;

I was very disappointed in Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night which spends a lot of time away from the detectives

A second review of Broken by Karin Fossum comes courtesy of Maxine Clarke who writes that "BROKEN is a wonderful, haunting book, full of powerful, overwhelming emotions";

Sunnie Gill pops over to China to look at how the past has impacted on present-day China in Diane Wei Liang's Paper Butterfly;

and Geoff Jones reviews Spider by Michael Morley which is set in both Italy and New York and is the first in the Jack King ex-FBI Profiler series.


Current Competitions:

Win a copy of Death on a Branch Line by Andrew Martin*

* no restrictions on entrants (ends 30 June)


Win a copy of Blood Lines by Grace Monroe**

** UK/Europe only (ends 5 July)

The Book Depository interview R J Ellory

Here are a couple of snippets from the Book Depository interview of author, R J Ellory, whose fifth book, A Quiet Belief in Angels was selected for this year's Richard & Judy bookclub:

MT: What does it mean to you to be on the Richard & Judy list?

RJE: It has been unimaginable. Truly! To put it in perspective, the paperback print run for my last novel City of Lies was something in the region of 7500 copies. Yesterday I received a call to say that another print run of A Quiet Belief had been authorised, which now brings the total number of copies in circulation to 193,000.

MT: What draws you to crime-writing Roger?

RJE: The simple fact of putting an ordinary individual into an extraordinary situation. The vast majority of us never have to deal with bank robberies and murders and suchlike. For me it has always been the challenge of representing the nature of people, how people deal with difficult and trying situations, how they cope with the tougher aspects of being human. A wonderful lady at the Bookseller Magazine called Sarah Broadhurst once said that I didn’t write crime fiction as such, I wrote ‘human dramas, but always in some way focused around a crime’, and I think that’s possibly the best description that was ever given of what I am trying to do.

Read the whole interview here

R J Ellory hits the big time

The new Richard and Judy book club list for 2008 has been announced and it's good news for R J Ellory whose 'A Quiet Belief in Angels' has been selected. His appears to be the only crime title chosen. The full list, from Publishing News is here:

9 January A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)

16 January Random Acts of Heroic Love, Danny Scheinmann (Black Swan)

23 January The Rose of Sebastopol, Katharine McMahon (W&N)

30 January A Quiet Belief in Angels, RJ Ellory (Orion)

6 February Notes From an Exhibition, Patrick Gale (Fourth Estate)

13 February Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris (Viking)

20 February The Visible World, Mark Slouka (Portobello)

27 February Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones (John Murray)

5 March Blood River, Tim Butcher (Chatto)

12 March The Welsh Girl, Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)

Regular readers of this blog might remember that R J Ellory gave a talk at Mere Green Library earlier this year and read an exclusive extract from said book.

Roger Jon Ellory at Mere Green Library

Last night Roger Jon Ellory braved the cross-city train line to come up to Mere Green library to give a talk and read from his forthcoming book. Though a native of Birmingham he has chosen to set his books in America. His new book, out in August, is 'A Quiet Belief in Angels' and is set both in Augusta Falls and New York and covers a time span of over fifty years. The audience got a sneak preview as Mr Ellory read out the prologue and the first chapter. There were many gasps from the audience when Mr Ellory revealed that he had ony spent six short visits in the US and most of his research was from maps. Nonetheless a friend of his has told him that he'd captured a New York neighbourhood perfectly, even though he hadn't been there. Mr Ellory hopes that he writes crime novels that leaving people thinking and remembering them unlike the quick thrill reads you can devour and remember nothing of a day later.

When asked if he had any specific writing schedule he replied that his was ridiculous as he worked an 85 hour week as a drug rehabilitation counsellor and would do a few hours writing after getting home at 10pm. At the weekend he would write 9-6pm, Sat and 9-8pm Sun and he rarely goes on holiday.

Mr Ellory didn't bring any books to sign but I hope he notices a surge in his public lending rights money as we commandeered every copy in Birmingham library for our display and every copy went out swiftly.

(The above is from memory, so I apologise if there're any errors. Mysterious Yarns also came and I hope she enjoyed it too.)