clair081

Is a self-published digital book eligible for a review, particularly a negative review? Is it "piling on" to say negative things about straight-to-Kindle crime fiction? And when does a book pass from "promising" to "a few hours of my life I'm never going to get back." Maybe it's not fair to start a review with questions like that, anyway. I picked up a free Kindle book called Extreme Malice, by R.E. Swirsky, which seemed to be a legal thriller or a "perfect crime" story (or possibly something else entirely) set around Calgary (a city I've visited and about which I've only found a couple of crime novels). It sat in my Kindle for a while and yesterday I finally got around to opening it. It starts out slowly, but a lot of books do. More troubling, there is a lot of repetition in the language (spots where a pronoun would be fine, but a name or noun is used repetitively instead). But the plot was OK, as Jack leaves on a business trip o...

There are a number of reviews of Sophie Hannah's newest "Zailer and Waterhouse" book already, so I'm not going to summarize the plot. It's a puzzle, of sorts, with a husband having confessed to smothering his stroke-stricken wife but with no motive that he will admit to. The plot is less the point of the story, though, than the characters, who are one and all very odd. What got me into the novel (as with all the books in the series) was the comic interior monologues of the various voices through which the story is told. DS Charlie Zailer is a quick-witted and sarcastic observer of everything going on and everyone involved, and her now-husband DI Simon Waterhouse is comic in a completely different way: laconic, brilliant, and emotionally damaged in a way that only becomes clear well into the series, Simon is a center of gravity around which everyone in the Spilling police station orbits. And in The Carrier there's an additional, compelling voice, with whom the ...