Seriously behind on these so lets see if i can remember them all...

War Machine by Andy Remic (Book #16)
I used to read quite a bit of sci-fi military fiction, Jerry Pournelle being the main name that springs to mind, so when i saw this sitting in Waterstones i figured i'd give it a try. It seemed to be just the sort of thing i was after, like a 40k novel with all the purile fanboy naffness stripped out.

Whoops.

Instead it was full of purile fanboy naffness of just a generic nature. You know you're in for a bad time when everything is renamed because its the future. No one can shoot a gun in this book, instead they shoot their Magtech .5mm Kineto-Needlers. No one can eat a burger, instead they eat their Soycomp Tastirations. Absolutely everything is renamed this way and its all so pointless because none of it means anything to the reader, its total Hubbard-ism at its worst.

I finished it because i started it but, come the cliff-hangar ended, i'm afraid i have failed to cling on.

Utter toss.

Severed by Simon Kernick (Book #17)
Read a few Kernick novels now so i was fairly sure what to expect. Something english. Something pacey. Something actiony, with requisite twist and, most importantly, something thoroughly decent.

Boxes were ticked on all accounts.

Kernick novels always start with an insta-hook premise and this one was no different, a fella wakes up next to the horribly murdered body of his girlfriend. Even more madcap is that a video has been left for him showing him committing the deed! In return for this video not making it into the wrong hands (ie. the law) he has to make a delivery for a dodgy sort.

Our 'hero' is a bit handy himself though, ex soldier as he is, and quickly gets his act together to try and turn the tables.

Its a good read. I say 'hero' because as well as being pretty damn handy he is also something of a loser, a bit like Garth Ennis' Kev character only without the comedy. He realises he is a loser though, something of a broken man and its nice to see a novel about a man with honest flaws rather than being a 'ride off into the sunset at the end with the girl' sort.

Blood Work by Michael Connelly (Book #18)
Connelly is one of the biggest names in his field (crime thrillers) but i've read very few of them. Given this and a later entry i reckon i'll be rectifying this soon enough.

Blood Work revolves around an ex-FBI agent, ex because of a heart replacement op that he needs to recover from and the stresses of his job simply won't allow for that whilst he remains there. So he leaves the FBI to chill out on his boat and get better.

Until the sister of his heart donor turns up and asks him to investigate her murder, the one that saw him get the heart. She was seemingly killed as a bystander in a drug-store cash robbery but things soon turn out to be a little more complex than that, complex in that this was actually a serial killing.

I'll say no more for fear of spoilers but this was an excellent tale, very finely crafted and put together, possibly one of the finest i've read to date. There were even references to a previous case that were so well handled i have no idea if it was even a previous novel or something just made up to add to this one.

On the strength of this one alone it definitely made me want to read more Connelly and, as chance would have it, i had one lying around...

The Poet, by Michael Connelly (Book #19)
This one actually got name-checked in the above, though nothing more than that, so it was amusing that i happened to have it to hand.

In this novel a cop's suicide provokes his twin brother, a crime reporter (what were the odds!?) to look deeper into it. Given his initial distance from the case he is quickly able to find a couple of signs that point at it actually having been murder and, surprisingly for a crime thriller, the police very quickly agree with him and marshal their efforts to finding a murderer. Further digging by the reporter though shows multiple murders along the theme of his brother's, namely in the Edgar Alan Poe poetry left in their 'suicide notes' and things then scale up to become an FBI serial killer case which the reporter bargains his way in to being part of.

Again this was good, the escalation in particular being very well paced and handled. Of course there was the requisite twist (is that law now in crime thriller writing? Surely one day the murderer will be the obvious suspect!?) but in this case the reporter missed a really obivous problem with his (incorrect) assumption (he figured the twist was that it was The Girl, but he knew the inside leak was A Guy, thus it could never have been her) and i genuinely think that was a writing error, slightly different wording in one sentance would have covered it but i caught it and thus it bugged me. As a result the end denoument wasn't quite what it could/should have been.

Otherwise solid though.

Panic, by Jeff Abbott (Book #20)
A bit Kernick-y in its pace this one. A young documentary film maker comes home to find his Mum murdered, his Dad missing, and himself quickly persued by their killers/abducters. Turns out his parents were spies and his girlfriend is in with them/double crossing them/working for the baddies/working for the CIA.

I hate it when that happens, don't you?

Thats pretty much it really. Not a bad shell but its fast paced made me take it a bit less seriously and by the time the author starts throwing the KGB so casually into the mix it was one step too far and too late, just a bit silly.

If it were slower and thus tighter it would have been a good read. Instead it was merely decent.

Precious Blood by Jonathan Hayes (Book #21)
A jolly good one this one, a début novel from an ex-pathologist that i picked up cheap in Asda.

As a favour our hero, a pathologist (who else!?) is called in to examine a friends' niece who has been murdered in a nasty, ritualistic way. In doing so he ends up picking up the dead girl's flatmate who can't trust the police because the murderer was a cop.

Things develop and, a few murders later, it turns out that these girls are being killed in the same way as name-sake saints were on those saint's particular calender days. Seriously, some of these killings are nasty - it really didn't pay to be a saint did it!? But what ties these girls together is a mystery, as is the killer, and our hero throws himself into the investigation as he becomes more involved with the flatmate, who turns out to be quite damaged goods herself.

This was excellent. Very well thought out, well paced and well detailed. Despite not being a cop himself our hero gets reasonable police help and so clichés there are readily avoided.

---

A curious though occured to me in writing the above; out of the above five crime thrillers not one of them actually had anyone law enforcement-y as their leads. There was one ex-law, one reporter, one film-maker, one pathologist and one ex-soldier. Has it already become too clichéd for writers to write about crimes actually being investigated (competently) by proper legal investigators?