Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

The past year seems to have been a bonanza for short story collections, and editor Luca Veste proves that last is certainly not least with his collection Off the Record, which was released at the end of November.

Featuring a mind-boggling thirty-eight stories from a who’s who of the crime fiction community, Off the Record is structured around the clever premise of taking a classic song title and writing a story inspired by it. To avoid making this review ridiculously long, and to leave you plenty to discover fresh for yourselves, I will just mention a handful that stood out to me for one reason or another.

“Light My Fire” by AJ Hayes is an incredibly dark tale of a love triangle gone awry. What could have been a run of the mill story of revenge instead turns into a truly disturbing look at how one man’s journey out of the mouth of madness ends up being another’s entrance into it as they both seek answers to the murderous events of the past.

Ian Ayris’ “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight” features a working stiff bloke in the London Underground on his way to the daily grind. In what turns out to be an interesting twist, however, the grind in question isn’t quite what you may be expecting.

Iain Rowan tackled a biggie when he chose the legendary “Purple Haze” as his track, and he more than lives up to the challenge in this story of three well-to-do college boys who head into the projects looking to score drugs only to discover a high they never anticipated. (more…)

The interwebz is a strange and wonderful thing, where places like Twitter and Facebook make it easy to connect with people who share your interests and passions. One such person I was fortunate to meet this past year on Twitter is The Scottish Scribe, Fiona “McDroll” Johnson. At first I thought we merely shared a love of all things crime fiction, but came to realize McDroll was quite the budding author herself…if a bit reluctant initially to post her stories online. With much well deserved encouragement from her friends far and wide, however, before we knew it she’d gone from reluctant writer to author with three short story collections available! In addition to that, she helped organize, and contributed to, the wonderful anthology The Lost Children, all the proceeds of which benefit the children’s charities PROTECT (US) and Children 1st Scotland. It is truly my pleasure both to call McDroll (sorry, Fi, you’ll always be McDroll to me) a friend as well as to give her the keys to the joint for a guest post.

As we draw ever nearer to Christmas the battle of ‘Buy My Book’ on Twitter and ‘My Top 5 Reads of 2011’ on Facebook is hotting up nicely with constant reminders of all of the great, and occasionally not so brilliant, fiction that is out there in the digital marketplace.

If you are anything like me, you will have developed a worrying habit with ‘1-click’ buying over the past year and now dread to look at your monthly bank statement to actually discover how many 86p or 99 cent purchases you’ve actually made. Frightening!

I used to arrive home from my Saturday trawl through the second-hand bookstores and sneak 3 or 4 new titles onto my TBR pile beside my bed which, when it finally toppled over, would be redistributed around
the house so that my ever-growing compulsion for crime novels couldn’t be detected.

Now of course, life is very different as my purchases are made in secret as my darling little kindle, that I love so much, can hide a multitude of my sins which are even purchased when I’m in bed after midnight when they can silently, as if by magic, arrive to be added to the ever increasing list that never topples over.

I’m really hoping for an explosion in the Kindle market, this festive season, (other ereaders are available), not only because I would love more people to buy my darling books, but also I would love a much wider audience to be able to access a higher quality of new writing from brilliant contemporary writers than is currently generally available in paper format.

Walk into any of the chain store bookshops or look on supermarket shelves in the UK and you will see a wide collection of well known names. Great writers, yes, but do you really want to only read the blockbusters, the familiar? (more…)