Kim Miller
Under the guise of writing a murder mystery thriller, Lehane gives us an extraordinary exploration of human darkness. Three boys, eleven years old, are playing in the street and something happens. Something that refuses to 'unhappen'.
As adults they live very different lives. One's a reformed criminal. One's a copper. One is just surviving, unable to throw off the darkness of the childhood experience. They rarely meet until a teenage girl is murdered. As the investigation proceeds the intertwining of their lives becomes shrouded in suspicion and alienation. They are drawn together but repulsed from each other at the same time.
Lehane writes very realistic characters. His prose is masterful as he lays open the deep emotions of these three men and their families. The plot has few twist and turns, this is not Agatha Christie dropping everything into place at the very end, it is the people that matter here. We become engaged in the lives of these disparate people, we feel with them, and we feel committed to them.
My only frustration with the book was the time it took for the setup. As Lehane fills in the stories of the three, first in childhood and then as adults, it is not until 30% of the way through that the strands start to draw together. I was engaged with the book from the start but it was not until that 30% point that I was hooked.
There was another point late in the book that he hinted at the identity of the killer. The 'means, motive, opportunity' triplets appeared on the horizon but the final reveal pulled the rug from under that idea. In the end, and after experiencing the depth of suffering of the main characters, it is the utter mundanity, the meaninglessness of the murder that hits the hardest.
This is my second Lehane novel and it certainly won't be the last.
Under the guise of writing a murder mystery thriller, Lehane gives us an extraordinary exploration of human darkness. Three boys, eleven years old, are playing in the street and something happens. Something that refuses to 'unhappen'.
As adults they live very different lives. One's a reformed criminal. One's a copper. One is just surviving, unable to throw off the darkness of the childhood experience. They rarely meet until a teenage girl is murdered. As the investigation proceeds the intertwining of their lives becomes shrouded in suspicion and alienation. They are drawn together but repulsed from each other at the same time.
Lehane writes very realistic characters. His prose is masterful as he lays open the deep emotions of these three men and their families. The plot has few twist and turns, this is not Agatha Christie dropping everything into place at the very end, it is the people that matter here. We become engaged in the lives of these disparate people, we feel with them, and we feel committed to them.
My only frustration with the book was the time it took for the setup. As Lehane fills in the stories of the three, first in childhood and then as adults, it is not until 30% of the way through that the strands start to draw together. I was engaged with the book from the start but it was not until that 30% point that I was hooked.
There was another point late in the book that he hinted at the identity of the killer. The 'means, motive, opportunity' triplets appeared on the horizon but the final reveal pulled the rug from under that idea. In the end, and after experiencing the depth of suffering of the main characters, it is the utter mundanity, the meaninglessness of the murder that hits the hardest.
This is my second Lehane novel and it certainly won't be the last.
In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', Jekyll is worried about his dark side and tries to slice off that part of his personality, creating the monstrous Hyde in the process. Tim Major takes these characters and envisages them as a pair of investigators to explore the dark side of humanity.
The wealthy Muriel Carew attends a fund raiser party at a London mansion where she encounters her ex-fiance, Henry Jekyll. Suspicious stuff happens and on leaving the party she finds a dead body. Following up her suspicions, and with a few more clues, she finds her way to the obscure office of Hyll Investigations, the current workplace of her ex.
People in 1890s London have been reported missing. Their families have been contacting Jekyll to find them. And now Muriel is awkwardly imposing herself into his work. She proves to be a better investigator and together they stumble through Victorian London to discover the whereabouts of the missing, either alive or dead.
It is the nature of these abductions that gives Major his grist for the mill as he walks us down the stairs into some horrific basement of human desire and cruelty.
The two characters of Jekyll and Hyde form a symbiotic pair, one working in daylight and the other in darkness. Each one knows nothing of the thinking of the other but Muriel interacts with both, a complicated trick that Major handles well.
The novel carries itself well for the most part but I thought it lost some punch towards the end. The final crisis is sold short as the depravity behind the abductions is revealed and the denouement lets us down rather gently.
In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', Jekyll is worried about his dark side and tries to slice off that part of his personality, creating the monstrous Hyde in the process. Tim Major takes these characters and envisages them as a pair of investigators to explore the dark side of humanity.
The wealthy Muriel Carew attends a fund raiser party at a London mansion where she encounters her ex-fiance, Henry Jekyll. Suspicious stuff happens and on leaving the party she finds a dead body. Following up her suspicions, and with a few more clues, she finds her way to the obscure office of Hyll Investigations, the current workplace of her ex.
People in 1890s London have been reported missing. Their families have been contacting Jekyll to find them. And now Muriel is awkwardly imposing herself into his work. She proves to be a better investigator and together they stumble through Victorian London to discover the whereabouts of the missing, either alive or dead.
It is the nature of these abductions that gives Major his grist for the mill as he walks us down the stairs into some horrific basement of human desire and cruelty.
The two characters of Jekyll and Hyde form a symbiotic pair, one working in daylight and the other in darkness. Each one knows nothing of the thinking of the other but Muriel interacts with both, a complicated trick that Major handles well.
The novel carries itself well for the most part but I thought it lost some punch towards the end. The final crisis is sold short as the depravity behind the abductions is revealed and the denouement lets us down rather gently.
Set one hundred years into the future, China has invaded Vietnam and is twenty years into a heavy handed occupation. Lin, born in Vietnam but adopted and raised in Australia, has returned and works within a chaotic insurgency. She's a gang member and Bao, the powerful gang leader, is training her for leadership in battle.
I came to this book from the world of Gibson's Sprawl books, but whereas in Gibson the brutalism is in the overall environment (images of the Blade Runner movie), the brutalism in 36 Streets is in the damage being inflicted by various enemies on each other. It's more like a Bruce Lee world of wounding, dismemberment, and murder.
Into that world Napper injects mind enhancement through sophisticated software, future-tech body repair and modification, and a darkly envisaged computer game that is undermining a nation's trust in itself.
Lin has been hired by the developer of the computer game to find whoever murdered his business partner but as she delves deeper into the game and the people around it she finds herself bouncing between her gang, its street rival, the Viet Minh resistance, and the Chinese occupying forces.
Lin picks up a DNA fragment from Molly Millions, and there's a polite nod to 'tears in rain'. As I understand it the book was part of Napper's PhD thesis on cyberpunk and referencing his source worlds is fitting, and done respectfully.
Set one hundred years into the future, China has invaded Vietnam and is twenty years into a heavy handed occupation. Lin, born in Vietnam but adopted and raised in Australia, has returned and works within a chaotic insurgency. She's a gang member and Bao, the powerful gang leader, is training her for leadership in battle.
I came to this book from the world of Gibson's Sprawl books, but whereas in Gibson the brutalism is in the overall environment (images of the Blade Runner movie), the brutalism in 36 Streets is in the damage being inflicted by various enemies on each other. It's more like a Bruce Lee world of wounding, dismemberment, and murder.
Into that world Napper injects mind enhancement through sophisticated software, future-tech body repair and modification, and a darkly envisaged computer game that is undermining a nation's trust in itself.
Lin has been hired by the developer of the computer game to find whoever murdered his business partner but as she delves deeper into the game and the people around it she finds herself bouncing between her gang, its street rival, the Viet Minh resistance, and the Chinese occupying forces.
Lin picks up a DNA fragment from Molly Millions, and there's a polite nod to 'tears in rain'. As I understand it the book was part of Napper's PhD thesis on cyberpunk and referencing his source worlds is fitting, and done respectfully.
Set in the Sprawl, the world of Gibson's Neuromancer, but easier to read. Neuromancer set the stage for this book but it was dark and complicated and for an introduction to cyberpunk it was difficult to grasp. Count Zero has dark moments but it is not as opaque as its predecessor.
Count Zero is a young man who wants to be a cyber hacker, a Cowboy. He's given some software to explore that turns out to have a secret danger. Once he's been exposed to the power behind the code there is no escape from the people who now pursue him.
The story has three prongs: the young hacker, an art dealer on the trail of a mysterious sculptor, and a mercenary employed to abduct a scientist from a rival company. Inevitably they come together in an explosive climax, having left a lot of dead bodies in their respective wakes.
Where Neuromancer threaded the reader through a dark underworld, Count Zero has everything out in the open - 4 1/2 exploding helicopters from me.
Set in the Sprawl, the world of Gibson's Neuromancer, but easier to read. Neuromancer set the stage for this book but it was dark and complicated and for an introduction to cyberpunk it was difficult to grasp. Count Zero has dark moments but it is not as opaque as its predecessor.
Count Zero is a young man who wants to be a cyber hacker, a Cowboy. He's given some software to explore that turns out to have a secret danger. Once he's been exposed to the power behind the code there is no escape from the people who now pursue him.
The story has three prongs: the young hacker, an art dealer on the trail of a mysterious sculptor, and a mercenary employed to abduct a scientist from a rival company. Inevitably they come together in an explosive climax, having left a lot of dead bodies in their respective wakes.
Where Neuromancer threaded the reader through a dark underworld, Count Zero has everything out in the open - 4 1/2 exploding helicopters from me.
This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.
In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.
The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.
The stranger speaks of things he could not normally know and has a wisdom that is beyond 13 year old boys - such things as "that behavior is not inflammable. People do not burn in hell for that reason by itself." Such sayings make the local boy think that perhaps this new friend who now lives with his family really is the devil after all.
The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of rising paranoia and of people torn apart even from their inner selves.
And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.
This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.
In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.
The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.
The stranger speaks of things he could not normally know and has a wisdom that is beyond 13 year old boys - such things as "that behavior is not inflammable. People do not burn in hell for that reason by itself." Such sayings make the local boy think that perhaps this new friend who now lives with his family really is the devil after all.
The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of rising paranoia and of people torn apart even from their inner selves.
And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.
This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.
In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.
The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.
The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of people torn apart even from their inner selves.
And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.
This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.
In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.
The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.
The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of people torn apart even from their inner selves.
And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.