They Said What?

Since I was in L.A. last Sunday, I didn't have a chance to post my favorite lines of April. So, I'll post it today, just a tad bit late. I didn't fit in as much reading last month, but I still found some great lines to share with you.

First up are a few lines from Andrew Gross's new thriller RECKLESS. I think Andrew did an amazing job of creating images that truly represent the fear and destruction of terrorism in this day and age. His choice of imagery is a big part of what made RECKLESS so powerful. The following are some of the excerpts that had tremendous impact on me:

• "If he had ever been worth saving, the statute of limitations had long run out. The pieces of his soul had scattered across the globe. Like an F5 blowing into town. Leveling most everything. Scattering the rest."
• "'What if there were people on an organized basis, people of influence,' she suggested, 'who wanted to do our country systemic harm, using a new strategy, a 'change of direction,' as they referred to it.' She steeled herself, 'Not by flying a plane through our tallest buildings, like before, but by driving one figuratively, sir, through the heart of our most vital national asset. The root of everything we stand for.'"
• "The triumph that comes after a bloody battle. Where it's hard to tell who has won and who has lost."

I finished Don Winslow's POWER OF THE DOG and I know I've peppered the last few favorite lines posts with excerpts from this book. Had I been reading a print copy and not listening on audio, I may have had even more lines. Winslow never ceases to amaze me with his pen. But the fact that I recalled so many of these to look them up and include them, I think says a lot about the writing in this book. The final line I'm including is:

• "I'm a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation."

And finally, I have a few lines from Michael Koryta's SO COLD THE RIVER, which is due out in June. You'll hear a lot more about the book later, but overall, the writing in this book is amazing and I didn't think there was another level Koryta could reach in his writing but he proved me wrong with this masterpiece. Here are a couple sneak peaks:

• "Artifacts of their ambition. Only through study of those things could you truly understand people long departed. General artifacts could be over-analyzed, layered with undue importance. It was critical to find things that indicated ambitions and aspirations, that tired bit about hopes and dreams. The reality of someone's heart lay in the objects of their desires. Whether those things were achieved did not matter nearly so much as understanding what they had been."
• "The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh, yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?"

And finally, it's subtle lines like this one that always make me devour Koryta's work. This is a line that could easily be overlooked by someone reading too quickly or God-forbid, scanning:

• "The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown."

I just love that image.

One last thing I'd like to mention in this post today is a book I received in the mail this week. It was put together by Brad Meltzer for his son and it is stunningly beautiful. HEROES FOR MY SON. I've added the book jacket photo to this post, but I assure you it doesn't do this book justice. I wasn't expecting to receive this book, but when it arrived I couldn't stop looking at it. I'm reading the stories inside and learning many things I never knew, feeling inspired and just smiling an awful lot. The day after I received the book, I took it to work because I wanted people I work with to see this, too. In a day and age where I think our heroes are chosen for the wrong reasons, I'm encouraged by this book. I have to say that I'm incredibly thankful that Brad didn't save this exclusively for his son, but shared it with the world. We can all stand to be reminded of these heroes. They span genders, races, religions, even political parties. I don't have children myself, but I have a lot of people I'm planning to bestow this book on. I hope everyone will take time to look at this book and open their hearts and their minds.

I also wanted to share this short little video I found about the book on Brad's website. It talks about how this book came to be. I enjoyed hearing about it, so I thought you might as well:

Brad Meltzer on Heroes for My Son from HarperStudio on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Great Lines, Michael Koryta, Brad Meltzer, Andrew Gross, Don Winslow

Monday Mystery Backlist - THE MILLIONAIRES

This week's Monday Mystery Backlist title is a thriller from Brad Meltzer. With all the chaos in the banking industry, THE MILLIONAIRES is a perfect backlist title to recall.

The tagline for THE MILLIONAIRES is "What would you steal if you couldn't get caught?" for Charlie and Oliver Caruso that would be an abandoned bank account with three million dollars. However, what they think is a fool-proof plan turns into the nightmare of their lives when the bank, the Secret Service and a PI set their sites on the brothers and start closing in fast.



THE MILLIONAIRES is available in hardcover (ISBN: 978-0446527293) or mass market paperback (ISBN: 978-0446611923), so if you're looking for a Christmas gift for your thriller-lover, this may be just the ticket.

You Have the Right to Six Words - Better Hold on to Your Hats!

I have a loaded post for you this week - Week 9 of YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SIX WORDS! - so folks, hold on to your hats and away we go...


We'll start with our recap memoir. Beth Groundwater is the author of the Gift Basket Designer mystery series. Beth spent the first part of her career working in the computer science field where her writing talent was put to use in the technical arena. She wrote manuals and proposals and reports. But good planning and goal-setting allowed Beth to retire from the computer software world early and put her writing skills to work in the fiction arena. When she's not writing, you can probably find Beth in her garden or in the setting for her second Gift Basket Designer mystery series novel, on the ski slopes. Beth's first novel, A REAL BASKET CASE was a nominee for the "Best First Novel" Agatha Award in 2007. Earlier this year, Beth followed that up with the sequel TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET accompanied by an ambitious blog tour. Beth certainly knows the value of hard work:

Networked and persisted until surprise - published!

New on our list of memoirists this week is a man who is far from new to the world of crime fiction writing. He's a New York Times best selling author many times over and he leaves us on the edges of our seats with thrillers such as THE MILLIONAIRES, THE ZERO GAME, THE BOOK OF FATE, and of course his newest hit THE BOOK OF LIES, which was released this year in paperback. Of course you know I'm talking about Brad Meltzer. Brad wrote his first New York Times best seller THE TENTH JUSTICE while a student at Columbia Law School. As a matter of fact, Columbia gave him credit for writing this book! Brad's books have been translated into over 25 languages. But not only do we know Brad for his crime fiction novels, he's also a comic book writer. Last year he won an Eisner Award for his JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA. And he was also one of the co-creators of the television show JACK & BOBBY. It seem contradictory to the genre Brad writes in but by golly:

I'm a Meltzer, not a fighter.

Lisa Lutz has been a bit of a nomad for the first part of her life. She attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University. After those college adventures, and no college degree, Lisa set to work on trying to be a screenwriter. And she succeeded in writing and optioning a screenplay called PLAN B. However, she also learned that screenwriting was not where she would stay in her career. So, she packed herself up and headed out to - Westernville, New York? Yep! And that is where she wrote the bulk of THE SPELLMAN FILES. Since then, Lisa had found her way to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and most recently she's made her way back to San Francisco. She's also found her way to two more Spellman publications: CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS and REVENGE OF THE SPELLMANS. And she's found herself nominated for both a "Best Novel" Edgar Award and a "Best Mystery Novel" Macavity Award. Her fourth book in the Spellman series, THE SPELLMANS STRIKE AGAIN, is due out at the beginning of 2010. And Lisa thought she didn't get around near enough, so her books are extending her reach. The Spellmans are published in over 20 languages around the world. For Lisa:

Six words is WAY too long.

The final hitter in this powerhouse line-up is also a writer who is no stranger to successful books. His ten mystery and suspense novels have won him nominations for Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Agatha and Macavity awards. Jeff Abbott is the international best-selling author of two highly acclaimed series: the first being his Jordan Poteet mystery series about a librarian and then his Whit Mosley series about a justice of the peace and a detective. He has also penned three standalone thrillers and tomorrow he will release TRUST ME, his fourth standalone and eleventh novel. In his new novel, Jeff will introduce Luke Dantry who works tracking extremists on the Internet. However, the safety of his computer job will soon be shattered.

The novel is not Jeff's only writing format, however. He has also written short stories included in such anthologies as BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and THE WORLD'S FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES. So what is a successful thriller writer's favorite book? Why it's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, of course!

Jeff says, "writing brought me my wife, a career I never dreamed I’d have, tons of opportunities, getting to meet the most interesting people in the world . . .you get the idea." So it is not hard at all to understand why his memoir would be:

Writing opens a thousand doors.

This week I think we loaded the bases and hit a grand slam! Many thanks to Beth, Brad, Lisa, and Jeff for being great sports. Are you groaning from my baseball analogies yet? This was a fun week of memoirs. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I hope to see you back here again, same time next week! Happy Reading!


Bouchercon countdown: 85 days!