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Category Archives: mystery
Drood by Dan Simmons
Drood
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
The Manual of Detection
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
L.A. Confidential is James Ellroy’s masterpiece. It’s on par with Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler as a noir novel. The third book in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, it’s easily the best police/detective novel of the last half of the twentieth century. Do not compare it with the L.A. Confidential movie based off the book, it’s much, much better. Based off some true events and interspersed with real people throughout the book, L.A. Confidential is a quintessential American crime novel that should be read by everyone.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
Kop by Warren Hammond
Kop
Inherent Vice
Inherent Vice
Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is a private investigator who has moved up the chain from taking snapshots of cheating spouses to investigating missing people. When an ex-girlfriend comes in to ask for help with her married boyfriend, Doc finds himself getting involved in a bigger mystery then he signed up for. Police informants, a detective named Bigfoot, a brainwashing dentist cult, Vegas casinos and the beginning of ARPANET start getting involved as Doc gets almost as confused about what’s going on as we are.
As Doc starts finding out more about old friends then he wanted to, he has to start making decisions about which side he is on and which side he should be on. After Doc, his friends and the plot wind their way around the west coast, Pynchon winds everything up in a neat little pile and leaves the reader wondering what just happened. Inherent Vice is an entry point for readers who want to know if Pynchon is for them.
The Eight by Katherine Neville
The Eight
The book has two linked stories, one in the 1970s and one in the 1790s. The 1970s plot follows computer expert Catherine (Cat) Velis as she slowly finds herself in ensnared in a plot to recover a mystical chess board(the Montglane Service which used to be owned by Charlemagne) before the other side can. But the plot makes you work to find out who is on which side of the board. Is Cat the Black Queen or a simple pawn (who can cross the chess board to become a Queen or be easily disposed of).
In the mid 1970s, Cat finds herself on the outs with her consulting company boss and gets shipped off to Algeria to help with some oil activities (the start of OPEC). On her last week in New York, Lily (a chess loving daughter of a family friend) brings Cat to a chess match between two Soviet players. One is an over the hill player and the other is a prodigy who hasn’t been seen in years. When the over the hill player turns up dead in the men’s room, Cat starts finding herself in the middle of a mystery surrounding some ancient chess pieces which might be for sale in Algeria.
Meanwhile in the 1790s, two orphans (Mireille and Valentine), who were raised in a convent, are cast out along with all the other nuns to hide the secret of the Montglane Service. The Montglane Service is a mystical and powerful chess set once owned by Charlemagne. As the nuns leave the convent, Mireille and Valentine find themselves in Paris during the middle of the French Revolution and the abbess heads to Russia to find her lifelong friend Catherine the Great. Mireille finds herself involved with Napoleon, Voltaire, Talleyrand, Robespierre and Leonhard Euler as she struggles to help hide the chess set and find out who is trying to gain the power of the Montglane Service for themselves. Mireille’s diary links the two stories as Cat finds herself on the same path that Mireille took 200 years previously.
You can tell this is the author’s first novel, as she tries too hard at times to make the chess analogies with the characters as the same time they are popping up in the plot. This story predates Indiana Jones, Dan Brown and The Name of the Rose
In 2008, Neville released a sequel The Fire