Hiaasen drags a motley cast of characters to a remote key in the Everglades and lets their various lunacies duke it out.

An en­ter­tain­ing romp.

Sonchai Jit­pleecheep is a devout Buddhist, half Thai and half American, and one of the few Bangkok cops who is not on the take. An American marine is murdered grotesque­ly in a manner that ac­ci­den­tal­ly kills Sonchai's partner and soul brother. Sonchai must help the FBI in­ves­ti­gate and seek his own revenge. The trail takes them through the foulest gutters and the palaces of the wealthy. We encounter pros­ti­tutes, monks, shemales, jade collectors, and gangsters in a tour of the Thailand that most Westerners barely glimpse.

When we were in Spain in July, we visited the Dalí museum in Figueres. The museum is Salvador Dalí's monument to himself; he spent his latter years building it. The guided tour was well worth the money. I came away believing that Dalí was both enormously talented and full of shit.

The next day, purely by chance, we passed a sign for Gala's castle at Pubol while driving around in the coun­try­side. We spent half the morning looking around the castle that Dalí had bought for Gala, his …continue.

The unnamed nar­ra­tor—My name? If I told you that you'd be as clever as me—is an up-and-coming London drug dealer who wants to retire by his thirtieth birthday. He's pro­fes­sion­al, low-key, and a little bit cocky, and he has every chance of pulling it off. He re­luc­tant­ly does a favor for the crime boss Jimmy Price and suddenly his plans are derailed. Double-crosses, snitches, betrayals, murders, hold ups, and stings ensue. There's little honor among thieves, save for our hero's immediate circle.

It's easy to see why Layer …continue.

Charlie Parker, the hero of John Connolly's books, has always been able to rely on his friends, the former assassin Louis and his life-partner Angel, for backup when events turn blood­y—­most recently in The Unquiet.

Louis' past is catching up with him, leading to a bloody climax. As we explore that past, we learn how a gay, black teenager in a sundown town was recruited to be a “reaper”. When Louis and Angel are set up, Parker and other friends must go in after them.

Partly an ex­plo­ration of the …continue.

A paedophile chained up an eight-year-old boy's parents, then took the boy and killed him. DI Jack Caffery finds the case par­tic­u­lar­ly stressful: his brother was abducted and never found when they were boys. His girlfriend is falling apart too.

Part thriller, part psy­cho­log­i­cal study, part police procedural. Hayder ratchets up the tension as the internal and external pressures on Caffery grow.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

General Sternwood is old, rich, and crippled, with two wanton daughters. Philip Marlowe is brought in to deal with a black­mail­er. Within hours, he is tripping over dead bodies, live dames, tough guys, and skeletons in closets.

Chandler's famously convoluted story holds up well seventy years later. His style and his stories are much imitated, but retain their freshness. Marlowe lives by his own code of honor, which keeps him going in his dirty, no-good world. He cracks wise and rarely carries a gun while he does what needs doing.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

Ten LAPD patrolmen congregate regularly in MacArthur Park for “choir practice”: late-night bitchfests, marathon boozing, and group sex with a couple of cocktail waitresses.

LA's finest are not exactly fine specimens of humanity, but then neither are the people they serve, whom they consider little better than the ones they arrest. The choirboys include an idealist, a psychopath, a prankster, and a world-class mooch. They fight and they drink and they argue: everything but discuss the things that really bother them. Wambaugh lampoons the choirboys, but he reserves his full contempt for their …continue.

Trou­ble­mak­ing cops–the Res­ur­rec­tion Men–from all over Scotland have been sent to the Police Training College to make them into team players. DI John Rebus is one of them, though his real job is to get the dirt on three bent cops. The senior officers who sent Rebus in seem to mistrust him too, since the Res­ur­rec­tion Men have reopened an old case where Rebus's behavior was ques­tion­able.

Back in Edinburgh, DS Siobhan Clarke is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the murder of an art dealer, where Rebus's old nemesis, the crime boss Big Ger …continue.