Hiding out in a remote pub from a vengeful gang family, Tom finds his hosts are just as dangerous. Excellent darkly comic rural noir; a touch of Magnus Mills in the escalating body count. Lots to enjoy here!
Month: February 2019
The Man With The Getaway Face [AKA The Steel Hit], by Richard Stark (Allison and Busby, 1986)
After having plastic surgery, Parker agrees to an armoured car robbery. Lean noir thriller from a modern master of the genre. Not a wasted word across its 150-odd pages. My first in a series read-through of Donald E Westlake’s Stark/Parker novels.
A Time To Scatter Stones, by Lawrence Block (Subterranean Press, 2019)
Matthew Scudder comes out of retirement to help a friend of his partner’s. A lovely late novella-length addition to the long-running Scudder series, with meditations on love, sex, and getting old as well as a situation to resolve.