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ALTERED CARBON by Richard K. Morgan

The best noir crime novel I've read this year won't be found in the mystery section of your local bookstore. It's a science fiction novel that came out a few years ago which takes place several hundred years in the future with a setting that feels like Blade Runner and a narrative that is pure Raymond Chandler.

Some of the questions this book raises about what it means to be alive, let alone human, will keep you awake nights long after you finish the book. This was Morgan's first novel and it's extraordinary. I'm now reading everything this guy has written, including the graphic novels. His standalone novel Thirteen is also essential reading.

FIFTY GRAND by Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty has been a favorite since I read Dead I Well May Be, which I consider one of the best crime novels of the past decade. His latest, Fifty Grand, is another gem. Most of the rave reviews give a plot summary that I would surely botch, so suffice it to say McKinty is a poet, and this is one of the best books you'll read this year.

SAFER by Sean Doolittle

Sean Doolittle is one of the most compelling crime writers alive today. The amazing blurbs on his books reveal what everyone in the writing community knows, which is that Doolittle is redefining the crime novel one book at a time. With Safer he once again sets a new standard. He takes the tranquility of the suburbs and reveals what lies beneath, but not in the manner of a potboiler thriller that stretches credulity, rather with a disarming series of events that seem all too believable and close to home. This book is tense, claustrophobic, and compelling in a way that makes you think twice about what it really means to move to a safe neighborhood. Check it out.

Spook Country by William Gibson

William Gibson is one of the finest writers around, evocative of early Ray Bradbury with effortless descriptions of our symbiotic relationship with technology, and its profound effect on our relationships with each other. This book takes place in the same present as Pattern Recognition, which was also a beautifully written, haunting book.

Spook Country looks at society with eyes wide open to the new realities of government surveillance, but like all Gibson's novels, it creates a palpable sense of being part of something larger than yourself, while at the same making you feel strangely disconnected, an observer and no longer just a participant. It's hard to describe what it's like reading his books, but the prose is so fluid it almost becomes a dream state, so that you're living in this world he's created rather than just voyeuristically reading about it.

Gibson is a writer that consistently changes the way I look at my world. Check him out to see for yourself.

Volk's Game by Brent Ghelfi

This book is hands-down one of the best thrillers written in the last decade. An uncompromising look at modern Russian, Volk's Game has the pacing of a Lee Child thriller and the texture of a Martin Cruz Smith novel featuring Arkady Renko.

Brent Ghelfi introduces Volk, my favorite anti-hero and one of the more badass literary creations you're likely to meet. A scarred veteran of the war in Chechnya, he is a ruthless man leading a double life. His story gives readers a street-level, unflinching look at post-Soviet Russia.

The sequel Volk's Shadow is just as terrific, and don't feel obligated to read them in order. In a crowded market of copycat thrillers, these books stand apart. They are wholly original and impossible to put down.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe

This book is patently absurd, unapologetically silly, and utterly brilliant. The adventures of The Pirate Captain and his band of cutthroats sit somewhere between the Spanish Inquisition skits of Monty Python and the best of Blackadder, with a flair for anachronism that gives these books a voice all their own. In this particular adventure the pirates cross paths with Charles Darwin, but his research and the controversy it spawns might be slightly different from what you recall from history class. (And somehow the preposterous predicaments the crew find themselves in make you think more deeply about the actual social issues surrounding Darwin than you ever did during that boring lecture.)

There is nothing like a book that makes you laugh out loud to put things in perspective. Worried that creeping socialism has started to gallop because of the global economic crisis? Then read The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists.

Self-conscious because you never read Moby Dick and find most classical literature a raging bore? Then read The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab.

Still mistrusting of the French? Read the forthcoming The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon to learn all you need to know about the cultural undercurrents behind the constant bickering within the EU.

If you want to regain your sanity, stop watching the news and read these books.

The Shanghai Moon by SJ Rozan

When S.J. Rozan first introduced private investigator Lydia Chin and her partner Bill Smith, in many ways she redefined the P.I. sub-genre. Rozan managed to stay true to the form while redrawing all the boundaries.

In this distinctly American construct, suddenly we had a lead investigator who was Chinese, a character with one foot fully assimilated into contemporary pop culture, while the other foot (clutched tightly by her Mother) was planted in her family, her heritage, and the deep roots running up and down the back alleys of New York's Chinatown.

An added twist on the familiar was the fact that our protagonist was a woman, her sidekick a man. There are precedents in crime fiction, but Rozan fully infused the voice of the characters --- and their genders --- into the narrative. You can feel it when Lydia is our guide, and the shift is visceral and immediate when Bill becomes our eyes and ears. Somehow these characters were more human, more real.

There are no stock characters to be found anywhere in these books, which is one of the reasons S.J. Rozan has garnered so many awards and has such loyal readers. I count myself as one of them, and like those readers, I've been waiting seven years for a new Lydia Chin and Bill Smith adventure. So when I heard The Shanghai Moon was on the horizon, I started counting the days.

Much as this series changed expectations for the genre, The Shanghai Moon redefines what we should expect from a series. In fact it blows the notion of a "series book" out of the water in a very important, fundamental way, just as Robert Crais' novel L.A. Requiem shattered conventional wisdom about point-of-view and narrative structure.

Once a series is established, there is typically a defined scope for the novels. There are close-in, claustrophobic investigations along the lines of Agatha Christie. Sweeping adventures in exotic locales --- you can choose your favorite blockbuster thriller as an example. Spenser novels usually take place in Boston, and even when they don't, the size of the investigation is on par with the rest of the novels. Elvis Cole moves around plenty, but he is ultimately an LA private eye, his stage limited by the types of crimes he is likely to investigate. There are lots of variations, but the scale of these series that we love to read --- the actual scope of the plot and ambition of the investigation --- is fairly consistent from one novel to the next.

Shanghai Moon changes all that. It is two things at once, a fusion of two styles of mystery that rarely occupy the same nightstand, let alone the same book.

On one hand it is a tightly written P.I. novel --- a fast-moving murder mystery triggered by a straightforward investigation that goes suddenly sideways. By our old standards, this alone would have made for a terrific book. Rozan's fans would have cheered and critics would have sung her praises.

But The Shanghai Moon is also an historical novel --- scratch that --- historical romance --- of such epic scope that it boggles the mind how Rozan researched this book, let alone managed to weave the two storylines together so seamlessly, never sacrificing pacing for detail but adding such texture to the characters that by the end you wouldn't be surprised to find them walking down the street right next to you.

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might go something like this:
This is The Maltese Falcon, contemporized, only with the actual backstory of the falcon instead of the shorthand history delivered in by Sydney Greenstreet to an impatient Humphrey Bogart. Both stories began in the past, driven forward by the obsessive desire to possess a precious object. But in The Shanghai Moon, we are there every step of the way, and we get to share in that desire --- actually feel it for ourselves, instead of just voyeuristically watching while others stop at nothing to posses it.

Lydia Chin is brought in on a case by her former mentor Joel Pilarsky, a deceptively simple investigation into some missing jewelry. Their client is a woman who specializes in recovering assets of Holocaust victims that were lost during World War II, returning the found valuables to surviving family members. Some antique jewelry has been discovered buried at a building site in Shanghai, not far from a district that once held thousands of Jewish refugees. When the investigation suddenly becomes much more dangerous and complicated, Lydia and her estranged partner Bill Smith must discover secrets of the jewelry's tragic past in order to solve the mystery they face in the present.

The modern investigation is vintage Lydia Chin, smart and fast, at times funny and always exceedingly human and real. But the glimpses Rozan provides into historic Shanghai are unforgettable. Parts of the story are told by letters written by one of the characters, a young refugee traveling to Shanghai with her brother, leaving her mother behind in Nazi-controlled Europe. As she narrates her own journey the repercussions of the world war suddenly become incredibly poignant and personal, bringing a weight to history that is rarely felt in contemporary fiction.

Given the scope of this project one might suspect it would move at a different clip from Rozan's other Lydia Chin novels, but if anything it moves even faster, if that's possible. The juxtaposition of the two storylines has you turning the pages with double the impatience, and there is plenty of action and more than enough twists for those looking for a well-crafted mystery.

The Shanghai Moon is a book only S.J. Rozan could have written, and it was worth the wait.


This review first appeared in Reflections Of A Private Eye, the official publication of the Private Eye Writers of America.

Fowl Air

The guy who landed this plane deserves The Congressional Medal of Honor, he shouldn't have to pay taxes the rest of his life, and there should be statues erected on both the New Jersey and New York sides of the Hudson. The pilot, co-pilot, crew, and the passengers who stood on the wings in freezing water are all heroes. (Except for the wanker demanding more money from the airline.)

But who are the villains in this drama? Sure, you can point to the nimrods who ignore the periodic mishaps at LaGuardia Airport caused by short runways, steadfast in their denial that anything can be done to address the problem. And rumor has it one of the engines stalled a couple of days before this accident, which a more conservative or profitable airline might have replaced as a precautionary measure.

But it was a flock of geese sucked into the jet engines that brought the plane down. As a nervous flier I need someone to blame, so that I can reassure myself this wasn't a result of man's inability to fly, but rather the villainous act of a negligent airline or inept FAA --- or someone, somewhere, fouling the system.

I blame the geese.

Now it turns out there is a level of "bird protection" that varies by airport, depending on the runway proximity to wetlands, trees, and so on. And there are a wide variety of deterrents used to keep or scare birds away from planes. But since humans are inherently compassionate and amazingly short-sighted, apparently there are organizations actively trying to protect the birds, not the planes. No doubt these same people get together at Thanksgiving and stuff themselves with turkey while bemoaning the plight of wayward geese. Or perhaps they chow down on a Wendy's chicken sandwich while writing their local Congressman to preserve wetlands near the airport.

A friend of mine suggested the airline mount machine guns on the wings of the jets, just like World War I biplanes. If it works for Snoopy, why not a 737?

But I have a different approach to the problem --- eat the birds. To my vegan friends, listen up, this isn't about you anymore, this is about keeping our skies safe. Geese taste like chicken. So does duck. So does everything if you put the right sauce on it, and that probably holds true for eggplant and soybeans. So you might as well make it a goose-burger next time instead of a veggie burger, since the whole idea of the faux burger is to replicate the taste of cows, which thankfully aren't airborne.

Bon appetit. And while you're at it, have a ham sandwich, too, just in case pigs start to fly.


This post originally appeared on Inkspot.

WATCHMEN by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

The movie is coming, and it looks cool, but before you even think about buying a ticket, read Watchmen as it was meant to be experienced. TIME Magazine named it one of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 --- that's best "novels" in any form, not graphic novels.

Alan Moore is inarguably one of the great creators writing in any medium, having invented V For Vendetta, League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell, to name a few. None of these graphic novels translated particularly well onto the movie screen, and if you read Watchmen you'll see why. The book is so layered, with so much subtext, at best the movie will only be able to visualize the characters and pivotal moments. This was my problem with The Golden Compass as a film --- it looked beautiful but failed to capture the soul or impact of the novel.

In Watchmen even seemingly minor threads take you to unexpected places. A kid sitting near a newstand is reading a pirate comic, a seemingly random thread that ties back into the main story when you least expect it. The writing in that fictional comic is some of the most powerful prose you'll ever come across and could have stood alone as its own story, but as a subtext to what's happening in the world of forgotten superheroes, it's fantastic.

TIME called this book "a work of ruthless psychological realism." I've read it more than once and no doubt will do so again, and every time it knocks the wind out of me. Check it out.