ALPHA by Greg Rucka

Greg Rucka knows how to write an action-packed story filled with interesting characters, and he does it again in his latest book, Alpha. The story is begging to be made into a summer blockbuster movie. Wilsonville (a theme park a lot like Disneyland) is a well-thought out background to the events in the novel. Rucka […]

REDEMPTION, KANSAS by James Reasoner

Redemption, Kansas is one of the more human Westerns I’ve read of later. Author James Reasoner invests time and emotion in his characters in this book that pays off for the reader. This is one of those books that could be effortlessly translated into a movie. The main character, Bill Harvey, is a young Texas […]

A GHOST OF A CHANCE by Bill Crider

A Ghost of a Chance in another book in Bill Crider’s long-running Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery series, and it’s a pleasant return to fictional Blacklin County, even though there’s all that death and shooting with intent to kill that follows. The author always tosses out a few mysteries that end up getting solved with homespun […]

THE LIVING SHADOW by Maxwell Grant

The Shadow is one of my favorite pulp characters, but more for the appearance and mythos than for reading pleasure, which is a backhanded compliment, I know. The simple translation is that I am enamored of the character, but I simply haven’t read as many of his books as I have Doc Savage or the […]

THROTTLE by Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Joe Hill and Adam Johnson

Throttle is the first fiction I’ve seen that was written by horror writer Joe Hill and his father, Stephen King. It’s an interesting bit of fiction because one of the primary issues in the story is the relationship between fathers and sons, and it was written for the newest venue in literary entertainment, the ebook. […]

EDGE OF DARK WATER by Joe Lansdale

For the last few years, Texas writer Joe Lansdale has been writing books about what most people consider to be the “good old days.” Only Lansdale is showing his readers that those “good old days” were filled with murder and desperation, and a scattering of heroes who had no other way to survive other than […]

THE NAME’S BUCHANAN by Jonas Ward

When I was a kid, I read a lot of Westerns. Cheap paperback adventures I’d picked up from swap shops and favorite secondhand book stores. Those books came with yellowed, dog-eared pages and what seemed like the smell of gunsmoke oozing from them, which was probably just dust and mold. But each one of them […]