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treeduck's MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE THREAD


treeduck
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Duck.....please say you copy & pasted all of that.......

 

 

Looks very interesting indeed. I shall look into it further.

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QUOTE (-D-RocK- @ May 4 2007, 06:59 PM)
Duck.....please say you copy & pasted all of that.......


Looks very interesting indeed. I shall look into it further.

Of course I copied and pasted it mate...

 

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I did have to type some parts in this thread though, such as the James Hall and Dan Simmons excerpts, a few pages ago. They don't exist anywhere except in the pages of the books involved, so I had to type those bits out. Not this time though.

 

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Ok it's about time I brought Dean Koontz into this thread, but when I say Dean Koontz I mean GOOD Dean Koontz, back when he was Dean R Koontz. I say that because ever since about 1992 and the novel Hideaway Dean has disappointed me greatly with one poor novel after another. I carried on reading new books by Koontz for years after that point, hoping he'd return to his best form, but unfortunately he never did. So by about 1998 I finally gave up.

 

For a while there though he was really impressive, books like Watchers, Phantoms, Strangers, Lightning, Midnight, The Bad Place and Cold Fire are all excellent suspense novels. All these books I read between about 1986 and 1991, ages ago in other words and it's this era of Koontz that I want to concentrate on. I'm curious to see if they can stand the test of time.

 

So for this first dip into classic Koontz I'm going back 19 years to my 1988 UK hardback copy of Lightning, here's how it looks. The pages have yellowed a bit but otherwise it's in mint condition, let's see if the story is as pristine...

 

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/3908/lightninget4.jpg

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I don't know what to make of reading this again yet, the writing is clunky, but the story is interesting so far. Koontz has a tendency to make some of his main characters overly sentimental or have silly quirks or both which can make me grimace a bit. Some sentences are terrible as well like this one: "Markwell had no doubt that in a physical confrontation the stranger in the peacoat would win handlily against most adversaries, especially against one middle-aged, out-of-shape drunken physician." Made me laugh when I read that...

 

Anyway it's definitely not as good as I remember. I dunno maybe I just grew out of these books? We'll see anyway...

 

 

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http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/3908/lightninget4.jpg

 

Ok I'm enjoying this one a little better now. The suspense, Imaginative ideas, and time travel story are good, and I'm concentrating on those features and forgetting that Dean is no John Updike. It's pretty good really, but not as good as I remember. I almost quit this book, something I never do, I left it unread at page 46 for about three days, but it's captured me finally. I was gonna forget the idea of reading the other Koontz "classics" but i've decided I'll read them after all, when I get round to them...

 

Doesn't sound good does it? And yes I know Dean's the multi millionaire and i'm the message board asshole babbling about his book, but hey at least MY hair's real!!

 

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And now it's time to bring back Elvis Cole, the follow-up to the last one I read back in January...

 

QUOTE (treeduck @ Jan 19 2007, 02:50 PM)
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0786889055.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I'm going to continue with the Elvis Cole series with the follow up to Free Fall, Voodoo River. I can't remember the story of this one at all but I know it's the tale that takes Elvis out from the glitter and smog of LA and off and away to bayous of Louisiana (of course I'm gonna read a book set in Louisiana when THE SAINTS are preparing to win the super bowl whooo hooo). Crais is actually orginally from Louisiana so he was probably able to draw on his old memories of the place to colour the story...

Yep I'm looking forward to reading this and I've got three more Elvis Cole novels after that, that I'll read later on in this MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE FEST plus there's two more recent ones that I haven't read at all yet. All I'll say to you people if you haven't read Robert's stuff yet is get going!!! Get busy!! Get Crais!!

 

http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/8386/sunsethp2.gif

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http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/8386/sunsethp2.gif

 

Yep this a good one, already Elvis has been accused of stalking a cop, been sapped in the face by her, right in the middle of her trying to pin a murder on a megarich movie mogul...and she even knows his enigmatic partner Joe Pike, is nothing sacred anymore??

 

This is only the beginning though...

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QUOTE (treeduck @ May 18 2007, 01:03 PM)
And now it's time to bring back Elvis Cole, the follow-up to the last one I read back in January...

QUOTE (treeduck @ Jan 19 2007, 02:50 PM)
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0786889055.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I'm going to continue with the Elvis Cole series with the follow up to Free Fall, Voodoo River. I can't remember the story of this one at all but I know it's the tale that takes Elvis out from the glitter and smog of LA and off and away to bayous of Louisiana (of course I'm gonna read a book set in Louisiana when THE SAINTS are preparing to win the super bowl whooo hooo). Crais is actually orginally from Louisiana so he was probably able to draw on his old memories of the place to colour the story...

Yep I'm looking forward to reading this and I've got three more Elvis Cole novels after that, that I'll read later on in this MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE FEST plus there's two more recent ones that I haven't read at all yet. All I'll say to you people if you haven't read Robert's stuff yet is get going!!! Get busy!! Get Crais!!

 

http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/8386/sunsethp2.gif

Yeah another good Elvis Cole caper. Not quite as good as Voodoo River but a little more complex and more interesting than Free Fall...

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Next is another one by First Blood author David Morrell this one from 1998...

 

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/2603/doubleimagedu2.jpg

 

This one is also set in Los Angeles and concerns a former war photographer who is being threatened by Bosnian war criminal he exposed. He hides out in the house of a famous photographer and while he's there he falls in love with a woman in one of the photographs stored in the house...

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So far so good with this one, though it's taken me ages just to get to the halfway point, I've only been reading it in little snatches...

 

I'm not sure what's gonna happen at this point in the story it's almost like the main part of the tale is over...I can feel an anticlimax coming on...

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http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/2603/doubleimagedu2.jpg

 

Well surprisingly this one turned out to be, in the end, one of the best thrillers featured here in this thread. A cleverly plotted tale with several unexpected twists and turns, plenty of well written action sequences, a super-exciting ending and just cerebral enough to satisfy. All in all a pretty good read.

 

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this book about photography as well, particularly concerning view cameras and the art of conventional photographic development.

 

 

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The next question I want to ask is...whatever happened to Marcel Montecino?? I know what you're thinking...who the hell is Marcel Montecino??? Well in the late 80s/early 90s he released two top notch thrillers, The Crosskiller and Big Time and appeared as if he was going to go on and become big publishing news for years to come, say the Michael Connelly of the day. Instead he just seemed to stop right there and disappeared off the radar. I think he did produce one or two more but he never really followed up on those first two books in the way I expected.

 

I'm going to read both of these books but I'll start with the second one, Big Time and save The Crosskiller till later...

 

I couldn't find a picture of my version of this book anywhere on the web, so I decided to make a few of my own infamously bad webcam pics of me, looking frighteningly intelligent (or just frightening) holding my copy, to make up for this. I blame David Morrell photography thriller for this...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/9249/picture009hb6.jpg

 

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/1444/picture008rh1.jpg

 

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http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/9422/picture006xu7.jpg

 

http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/5899/picture013co8.jpg

 

http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/1373/picture012ps3.jpg

 

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/2019/picture016za8.jpg

 

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7530/picture018fl3.jpg

 

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/629/picture019mg7.jpg

 

 

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I've not started this one yet so I'll just talk a little about what I remember about it. I first read it in 1991 or 92. it's set in New Orleans and Rio mostly and concerns a piano player and would-be song writer who has a self destruct button which manifests itself as his crazy gambling habit. He works in a bar or he does at first until he gets in deep with the mob, then he goes on the run and meets the female singer of his dreams. Does it work out? Does he become a song writing superstar or do the mob catch him?? Or both?? That's what I'm gonna find out...
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I love those quirky bad guy characters that often pop up in these kinds of books and the ancient white-haired assassin Dago Red Larocca is no exception, a guy so old and wasted he has a heart attack while he's trying to garrote you with piano wire. And don't even ask me about the "Rectifier"

 

no.gif wacko.gif

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I absolutely whizzed through this 600 page book, the last 178 pages in a hot and bothered 90 minute session. Which means of course, yes I liked it, it's pretty good, in fact, to coin a cliche or two, it was literally a "page turner" and I "could not put it down."

 

It wasn't without flaws though, Marcel kept jumping timelines, five months here, nine months here, eighteen months there and this hurt the momentum of the story and robbed the reader of certain aspects of story that we never found out about. The final shootout with the bad guys in the LA rainstorm was a little far fetched but I was riveted all the same, I have to admit. Another cliche from me. The epilogue was very disappointing and overlong. it seemed tacked-on and thus was an anti-climax. I wanted to know more about Izzy and what happened to her later but we never found out anything after the wild final scene with Sal catching her in bed with her producer

 

I really enjoyed the book but these gripes prevented it from going to another level. So in the end it's just one of the best of a bunch of pretty good books instead of being a near-classic. It's not as good as Marcel's first novel, The Crosskiller, I'll get to that one further on down the line...

 

I recommmend Big Time but if you want to read it you'll have to buy it second hand as it's been out of print for a while now.

 

Incidentally this is my top 5 so far of the books I've read that are featured here in this thread:

 

1 Body Language James W Hall

2 Big Time Marcel Montecino

3 Monstrum Donald James

4 Cold in July Joe R Lansdale

5 Double Image David Morrell

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Ok it's about time I brought one of my favourite authors into proceedings...

 

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/7632/silentterrored7.jpg

 

This book is these days known as "Killer on the Road" and it was the first novel I read by Ellroy. This was in 1990. I'd heard of him by reputation and I'd seen the film "Cop" starring James Woods, which was based on one of Ellroy's novels (Blood on the Moon) but I didn't really know what to expect. The blurb on the back made it seem like it was some pulpy slasher book, so I didn't expect too much. I was blown away though. It begins like diary of a peeper and ends up as diary of a serial killer. It's written in first person from the killer's point of view and you really do feel like you're reading a real killer's confession. Ellroy's guy I thought sounded like a cross between a hip psychologist and a street smart thug.

 

This is one of Ellroy's weaker novels but that doesn't mean this one isn't good, it's just that he got so much better after this, that in retrospect this seems a lesser work. It's totally essential reading though if you like mystery/suspense/crime fiction...

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http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/7632/silentterrored7.jpg

 

I'm about a third of the way into this one. This is a totally athentic account of an outsider who's mind is warped from the beginning of his life and is driven by violent desires that he can barely contain. So far we've covered his early life up to 1974 and he's specialised in petty burglary and peeping only as yet. No wonder it's so convincing though, it's almost exactly a mirror image of Ellroy's own early life. I'm up to the point where Plunkett is released from a year in LA County jail, where he met Charles Manson, and then he drifts along for 4 years doing various jobs before deciding to move to San Francisco. This is the point where the similarities between Plunkett's fictional life and Ellroy's real one part ways...

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http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/7632/silentterrored7.jpg

 

Excellent book! One thing about Ellroy he always delivers. If you read one book out of the 27 featured in this thread, this is the one to go for. And this book is far, far from Ellroy's best work, but that's how good he is compared to his contempories...

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Ok now it's time to go back to the New Orleans world of Dr Cicero Grimes and his crazy father...

 

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/7711/booktimwillocksbloodstajb4.jpg

 

He featured in Willocks first novel Bad City Blues, which I read back in January...

 

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/8056/badcitytv7.jpg

 

This is his third. These two sandwich his most celebrated work, Green River Rising. I'll get to that in due course...

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http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/7711/booktimwillocksbloodstajb4.jpg

 

Still reading this one and though I'm enjoying the mysterious machinations, the dark and desperate double-dealing and the crude character traits of the principles, there's something a little pointless about this tale. Tim is good at giving the impression that the story is leading up to a stunning conclusion, the answer to all of these weird and crazy escapades. The more I read though, the more I realize there is no answer, just the typical egotisical ramblings of the average fictional psychopath. It's a fun read but probably the literary equivalent of a Mars bar.

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Actually I really enjoyed those last 100 or so pages, I was probably a little bit critical of the book in my last post, but in the end it was actually better than Bad City Blues, even though it had less direction to its story by comparison, especially in the beginning. The book seemed to miss having a central villain at the height of his powers, Clarence Jefferson, the villain of the first novel reappeared from the dead, but was a shell of himself and just played a cameo role and the other villain was more of an old shadow than a full fledged threat. Still it was more entertaining with more interesting characters than Bad City on the whole.

 

So there you have it, in the end it was pretty good and let's face it most of us would rather eat a Mars Bar than beluga caviar anyway, right?

 

The Bloodstained Kings by the way were the old men bad asses, George Grimes, Jefferson and Faroe.

 

Ok I'll post about the next book as soon as I take a picture of it, the net has let me down again...

 

wink.gif

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Next up is Craig Holden, a former film rights agent from Toledo Ohio. I read his first book, The River Sorrow around 1995 and I was very impressed. I'll read that again later on, right now though I'm going to concentrate on the follow up novel. It's not as good as TRS but still pretty decent.

 

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5885/thelastsanctuaryya1.jpg

 

 

Here's a comment on it from Library Journal to give you a flavour...

 

"When Joe Curtis's car breaks down in North Dakota, he decides to hitchhike the rest of the way to Seattle and ends up with Rick and Kari, members of a militant religious cult based in Alaska. Midway through Idaho, Rick robs a convenience store and three people die. Suddenly, Joe and Kari are on the run from numerous law enforcement agencies as well as Rick, who was on his way back to the cult to deliver a shipment of arms and cash with Kari as his cover. Her devotion to the cult wanes as she is increasingly attracted to Joe, but she must return to retrieve her young daughter from the Alaskan compound before Armageddon. Pursued by Rick and the feds, Joe and Kari rush to rescue Kari's daughter and head off a repeat of Waco. The Last Sanctuary offers a rather opportunistic plot, but Holden (River Sorrow, LJ 9/15/94) has nonetheless crafted a compelling and readable tale of an ordinary man caught in a web of terror against the backdrop of militias, cults, and the vast Alaskan wilderness."

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