The Compulsive Reader » Crime Fiction

To say that the book is engaging is a gross understatement. The Accusation is the kind of story that you miss meals to finish, sneak read, and stay up late to keep going. It’s ultra-fast pace...

http://compulsivereader.com/2019/07/30/a-review-of-the-accusation-by-wendy-james/

Some of it has an edge – to be absolutely just – but I think even Johnson himself lost interest in it, characters and story, the whole shebang, way before the close.  The novel sputters to ...

http://compulsivereader.com/2015/04/16/a-review-of-nobody-move-by-denis-johnson/

Besides being a very fine mystery, Stout’s novel is as well a provocative meditation on contemporary history.  He reminds us that the primary source for the recent past lies in the memories of...

http://compulsivereader.com/2015/03/29/a-review-of-carolina-skeletons-by-david-stout/

All the characters are terrific, utterly convincing; there is an authentic sense of place: Chelsea, N.Y., a blue-collar neighbourhood where authority figures, police officers most of all, are tr...

http://compulsivereader.com/2014/11/09/a-review-of-act-of-fear-by-michael-collins/

Without wishing it to sound anything like routine: another extraordinary novel from James Sallis. This one, like many of his others, is hard to pin down exactly. Paranormal, science-fiction and ...

http://compulsivereader.com/2014/04/26/a-review-of-the-killer-is-dying-by-james-sallis/

Though solving the crime does certainly drive the narrative pace in The Lost Girls, this book is a rich, dense novel, that goes so much deeper than whodunit. As is almost always the case with We...

http://compulsivereader.com/2014/04/23/a-review-of-the-lost-girls-by-wendy-james/

It is not a conventional crime novel by any means, but then you wouldn’t expect convention from Sallis. The horrors are to be read, in part, in the voice: disconnected, spare, skittish, lamben...

http://compulsivereader.com/2014/03/26/a-review-of-others-of-my-kind-by-james-sallis/

If you’re like me, you’ll want to read everything that Hammett has written, but be warned that this is not literature, simply because language doesn’t set out to do everything.  Then agai...

http://compulsivereader.com/2013/05/13/a-review-of-the-return-of-the-thin-man-by-dashiell-hammett/

There is a (slight) postmodern knowingness to it all (Anders, the narrator, is a literary critic after all, and alludes to other writers within his own anxious tale) but Cook delivers a good sto...

http://compulsivereader.com/2013/01/05/the-crime-of-julian-wells-by-thomas-h-cook/

Within deWitt’s book there’s also a side-text about the destruction of the balance of nature and the consequences of a rabid search for gold, whether it be black gold or the original deal, as...

http://compulsivereader.com/2012/04/03/a-review-of-the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt/