Dave Cunane is Man­ches­ter's mouthiest PI. He gets tangled up with the wild daughter-in-law of the crooked Carlyle family. Marti wants him to prove the innocence of her father who's doing life for killing a cop. She doesn't go over well with Dave's own half-crazy girlfriend. Neither the Carlyles nor Dave's ex-police father want Vince King freed. It's not going to end well.

Chen Cao is an unlikely new Chief Inspector in the Shanghai Police in 1990, as he's a poet, a scholar of T.S. Eliot, and a translator of English detective novels. In Death of a Red Heroine, a national model worker has been found murdered in a canal. The death is po­lit­i­cal­ly sensitive and Chen's in­ves­ti­ga­tion leads him towards the son of a high-ranking cadre, which makes his position even more tenuous.

Qiu is as much concerned with the changes then happening …continue.

Watch Your Back! is one of the last Dortmunder novels, Westlake's comic series about an unlucky crook published between 1970 and 2008. Dortmunder and his crew have a sweet lead on an unoccupied penthouse apartment, but their usual planning space, the O.J. Bar & Grill, has been turned into a bust-out joint by the Jersey mob. So now they have two jobs to pull: rob the obnoxious rich guy's art and save the O.J. Of course, com­pli­ca­tions arise because nothing ever goes to plan in a Dortmunder book.

Enjoyable.

Basket Case, like most of Hiaasen's novels, is a humorous crime caper set in Florida. Quick-witted but neurotic reporter Jack Tagger has been exiled to the obituary department for mouthing off too often. When Jimmy Stoma, lead singer of the Slut Puppies, dies in an apparent accident, Tagger senses a potential story and a chance for a comeback. But he has to get the story before it gets taken away from him.

Hiaasen, himself a journalist, also uses the novel to explore journalism as a career and to …continue.

Upon hearing of Richard Adams' recent death, I reread Watership Down for the first time in many years. I first read it not long after Penguin published it in paperback. I believe that I was given the book for my ninth birthday in 1974, or perhaps for my tenth, but I think it was my ninth. Certainly the giver was my godfather, my Uncle Gabriel, who also gave me The Lord of the Rings and the Titus Groan nov­el­s—other books which I reread many times.

I'm happy …continue.

DI Nikki Galena and her team have been targeted by someone with a vicious grudge. One copper is dead, another is badly injured, Galena has been hounded out of her home, and civilians have been hurt too. The cops have no idea who's behind it.

The story is over­wrought but the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion was good and the story was en­ter­tain­ing.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord finds Flashy back in America where everybody wants him to be the aide-de-camp to the abo­li­tion­ist John Brown, who's plotting a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. The Un­der­ground Railroad want him to help Brown to start a slave rebellion; Kuklos (a proto KKK) want Brown to start a civil war to cause disunion; and finally the secret service want Flashman to sabotage Brown so as to …continue.

The “Butcher” is leaving dis­mem­bered corpses of women all over New York City and he seems to want to get Frank Quinn's goat. Quinn is a former police captain, who's been called back from retirement along with two of his former team members, Pearl, his ex-girlfriend, and the slovenly Fedderman. The “Butcher” is brilliant and the body count is climbing.

While the book is properly sus­pense­ful, I couldn't suspend my disbelief at the notion that the NYPD would have little more than Quinn's tiny team working on such a …continue.

Every month, Amazon offers hundreds of Kindle ebooks at $3.99 or less. As well as the dross, there are always a number of books that are great value at such a price. I just bought several from the September crop, including Bloodchild (Octavia Butler), The Con­fes­sions of Nat Turner (William Styron), Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (Charlie Holmberg), Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (Doris Pilkington), and Schis­ma­trix Plus (Bruce Sterling).

Flashman in the Great Game finds Flashy back to India, sent there by prime minister Lord Palmerston to look into worrying rumors of mutiny amongst the Indian troops and to sweet talk the re­cal­ci­trant Rani of Jhansi. After an attempt upon his life by Thugees, Flashman goes undercover in the native cavalry at Meerut, where the Sepoy Mutiny begins soon after. He then finds himself in the Siege of Cawnpore and the Siege of Lucknow and imprisoned at Gwalior before being almost …continue.