Category: Books

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.

We’re only two Bosch novels in and already the man finds himself fighting a bull. It’s difficult not to think “we’re at this point already?” For a policeman who is supposed to be grounded in his approach to the law, Bosch finds himself caught up in multiple flights of fancy in The Black Ice. It’s hard to say whether he does more or less bad police work than in his previous outing, but he’s still a fun guy to hang around.

From the mid-noughts to the mid-tens, Jennette McCurdy played the breakout character in a Nickelodeon sitcom, which got her a degree of fame and fortune (allegedly garnished due to a bureaucratic failure). Then she kind of faded away. Her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, has generated a lot of buzz, which seems unusual to an outsider to the Nickelodeon ecosystem. iCarly was watched by millions, but as McCurdy herself says, it was the dead-end fame of child acting, an ecosystem that can be near impossible to escape.

Internationally, at least, it could be said that McCurdy is now more famous for this book than she ever was for iCarly or Sam & Cat. The 65 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best seller list certainly isn’t hurting her, but it’s also proof that her success isn’t entirely down to her notoriety: a combination of good publicity and a compelling story have allowed her to escape the walled garden of childhood fame for literary stardom and a potential new career.

Hixploitation! Scott Von Doviak is a genre man par excellence. What he did for multigenerational heist mysteries in Charlesgate Confidential he does for murderous road movies in Lowdown Road. This is the sort of book designed to be read in a day, if not a single sitting. It’s Hard Case Crime, so you know you’re there to, at the very least, bask in the cover.

When you take on a project to read a detective who’s been going for thirty years, it can be daunting at the beginning. In 1992, when Bosch debuted on the page, the Vietnam War was still providing residual trauma to a nation that had nothing to show for their pointless incursion, and fictional law enforcement was allowed to be actively homophobic and more than casually transphobic into the bargain.¹ Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo introduces one of the better named policemen to the criminal milieu, but the man and the author are, at the outset, very much products of their time.

When Detective Harry Bosch is called out to inspect a body in a drainpipe, what was initially discounted as a simple overdose immediately becomes apparent as a murder. Bosch identifies the victim as someone he knew back in the tunnels of Vietnam, and almost immediately finds himself deeply embroiled in a case spanning jurisdictions, departments, and decades.

By the time Bill Buford’s Heat and its impossibly long subtitle came out in 2006, the modern era of food writing was well and truly kicked off; Anthony Bourdain was on his fourth book and second television series. Buford is not Bourdain, but no one was. Rather than being from a chef turned writer, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany is the tale of its author’ journey from writer to at least cook, if not a chef.

Heat is different to read fourteen years later, especially as the man who opened so many doors for Buford was ultimately revealed to be a sex pest (to put it mildly), but fortunately it’s about so much more than that.

Before The Survivors, Jane Harper had written three books: two set in drought stricken and lonely Australian wilderness, and one set in dense forestation. The drier books were intense and deep, but the forest floundered in not being able to locate a purpose for its characters or a compelling setting for them to come apart in. In The Survivors, Harper offers readers a new environment in the cold beaches of Tasmania, and she works it. That it's her third book about a pariah returning to the society that shunned them to reckon with their past is something that we'll politely gloss over at this point.