Every Cloak Rolled in Blood by James Lee Burke

 

This is a really, really good novel, even though it plays in that space around death and life and includes plainly supernatural doings. Meaning, it operates in a similar space as last night's novel, which I didn't like as much, at least in part because it did those things. On the one hand, it's easy to say it's that Burke's a better write--he really is. On the other, though, there's something about the handling of things, the way so many of the characters in this novel rage and fight against the ghosts and the demons; Connolly's characters are either blind to all-a-that or they're deeply a part of it and just treat it as like Tuesday. Connolly's makes the horrific bland, Burke's embraces the horror while still somehow making the mundane horrific. There are spiritualistic undertones in the Burke novel that border on the religious, and that's really not my jam, but there are reasons, and Burke can write, so I'm just going to say this is a beautifully painful novel that at points slants against my preferences.

A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly

 

Look, a novel written by someone who actually cares about the story! And the characters! It's not a great novel, by any means, there are some premises that choke my suspension of disbelief, here, that might not if this were a complete story instead of an episode (this is apparently part of a long-running series); I'd probably have an easier time if it were straight horror instead of trying to commingle that with a detective story--in the sense of trying to be a detective story, rather than that of using detective story tropes to frame a horror story, which works just fine. As it is, this feels like some of F. Paul Wilson's later Repairman Jack novels, where he's fighting supernatural forces almost all the time; the author got a little creepy in a detective thriller and it sold and he kept needing to use more creepy in his detective thrillers. This is--really--a nicely-written novel that just does some things that don't vibe right for me. Better than the last few, anyway.

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palma

 

Yet another novel laden with blandness the author attempted to cover up with dazzling and daffy local color. Cluttered and crowded and massively disjunct, with the strong whiff of an inability to tell dreams from detritus. Dude, you should have let the short story be.

Ghost Month by Ed Lin

 

DNF. Got a little bit more than halfway through it and realized I didn't care at all what happened, and there wasn't enough enjoyment in the prose to make up for it. Spicy-zany local color slathered over bland.

The Dead Student by John Katzenbach

 

This is not a very good novel. It's inconsistent about POV, it's cluttered--though at least thank the gawds there aren't any stupid twists. The omnicompetent sociopath with the long-term plan that rolls to its conclusion without hiccup or hesitation ... that's several real strikes against the novel, right there. The prose is reasonably clear, and the characters who aren't the sociopath are well-drawn--though whatever future they have is not likely to be pleasant. The ending is morally ambivalent, in ways that might be thought-provoking if the novel were more intelligent.

Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty

 

This is a grim little crime novel, the main threads are the self-destructiveness of revenge and the horror of the police state. The copyright's 2009, but there's some very current stuff in there about American attitudes toward immigrants--mostly about how the people with the power and the money find them convenient and inexpensive; the Cuban internal politics might be right for the time, but that's before Fidel died. The characters are remarkably well-drawn, and there's a twist that someone interested in decoding novel-twists before they land might have been able to decipher; I don't usually put any real effort into it, sometimes I just understand things well before they appear (this was not one of those things). Pretty good stuff, and the library I was at today had a good double-handful of his novels, all I have to do is make sure I'm not picking up a sequel.

One-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips

 

A quick little very-genre mystery, set (mostly) in the Black neighborhoods of Los Angelis in 1963, with lots of racial tension in the air and full-throated racism still being much more socially acceptable than the present. It's clear that Phillips knows the area and the history, and it's clear he wants you to know--there are parts of the novel that feel like a history lesson or four. The main narrative voice is almost clunky, almost affectedly bland, there's not a lot of grace to it, it feels at times almost as though the text is summarizing the events of the novel; the teachings on history and social things come almost as fast and furious as the narrative elements. The story takes a few turns, ends up in a very noirish place, where the best the hero can manage is for the powers that be to leave him alone. It's not exactly a superb book, but it wasn't a waste of my evening, it wasn't ever so bad I considered DNFing it.