The Shotgun Rule - Charlie Huston

First line: "It's a bad house."

Teens George, Paul, Hector and Andy make an odd little gang, but for the most part they are good kids. Each has his oddities: Andy is George's brainy little brother. He's skipped several grades so that he's now at the same level as George and his pals. Paul has a secret at home that makes staying away the most appealing option.

When Andy's bike is stolen by the youngest of the infamous Arroyo brothers, the boys set off to retrieve the stolen property. The boys find Andy's bike, but they also find something they weren't expecting, a crank lab. The know better than to mess with the drugs, but boys being boys, Paul decides taking some of the meth is worth the risk. He pictures a new car procured with the money he could make from selling the drugs.

However, the drugs don't result in a car for Paul. Instead, a level of trouble the teens never fathomed invades their lives, unleashing their secrets as well as the secrets of the generation that preceded them.

Read by Charlie Thurston, the audiobook version of The Shotgun Rule brings out the stark contrast between the teens' youth and naivete and the gravity of the danger they find themselves in. Thurston builds up the immaturity and lack of sophistication through his light-hearted treatment of Huston's humorous scenes with the boys, including Andy's repeated references of himself as "such a dildo" and an episode about "the shotgun rule" that ends with Paul saying, "Shotgun. It's a complicated issue." Their troubles are minor and relatively insignificant.

Then when the truly serious and deadly circumstances invade the Eden of these boys' lives, the terror and pain Thurston voices is intensified. This isn't just a scary situation, it's the destruction of youth's innocence.

But the effect isn't just in the young characters, Thurston is also able to elicit that intense fear from George and Andy's mother, as well as the helplessness of their father. His portrayal of Paul's father is eerily disturbing. Thurston also does a fine job juggling the Hispanic dialect with the Southern California accent.

But his crowning performance may very well be that of the obese, vocabulary-building drug boss, Geezer. His self-assuring air, his psychopathic tendencies, his need to control everything and everyone around him comes through in a powerful, yet also humorous portrayal.

Charlie Huston is a sure bet for a complex story that dwells in the gray shadows of life. He's a sure bet for humor amid the horror. Thurston has tapped into that magic to make the shivers stronger, the goosebumps higher and the laughs deeper.

The only minor distraction for me was Thurston's tendency to emphasize hard consonant sounds at the end of words, especially sounds like "t" and "p." Those stand out to me and can often pull me from the story for a temporary beat. But the overall strength of the recording is enough to fade my single listening quirk into the background.

The Shotgun Rule is now available on unabridged audio (ISBN: 978-1482948127) from Blackstone Audio. The paperback version (ISBN: 978-0345481368) of The Shotgun Rule is still available from Ballantine Books.

A Trio of Audios

Some audios have been getting away from me and in an effort to acknowledge them, I'm going to do three mini-reviews today.

The first is THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH by Charlie Huston. I want to link you back to Craig Johnson's review of this book that he wrote for Detectives Around the World week. My reaction is pretty much "everything Craig said and then some."

FIRST LINE: "I'm not sure where one should expect to find the bereaved daughter of a wealthy Malibu suicide in need of a trauma cleaner long after midnight, but safe to say a trucker motel down the 405 industrial corridor in Carson was not on my list of likely locales."

Huston's tale of a former school teacher recovering from a trauma, taking a job as a crime scene cleaner is unique, funny, moving. I think I experienced every range of emotion possibly while listening to this audiobook. The printed book handles dialogue a little differently, so if you have/had trouble reading this book because of that I'd highly recommend checking out the audiobook. Narrated by Paul Michael Garcia, the genius of Huston's dialogue shines through. And he has some rather challenging areas of dialogue for a narrator since Huston doesn't use much in the way of dialogue tags.

The novel is gritty and Huston isn't afraid to include profanity. So if you're sensitive to that, be forewarned. However, his use of profanity isn't gratuitous. He develops characters and mood and tone. There's a definite reason it's there and it serves its purpose well.

Garcia does an outstanding job as the narrator. He expresses the appropriate level of drama, never going overboard for the given situation. He nails the sarcasm and he's flat when the situation calls for it. The pairing of Garcia with this novel enhanced my experience with the book.

I owe thanks to Michael over at Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer for this audio. It's available from Blackstone Audio (ISBN: 978-1-4332-5753-7) or in print from Ballantine Books: hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-3455-0111-0); trade paper (ISBN: 978-0-3455-0112-7).


Next up I have BLACK ICE by Michael Connelly.

FIRST LINE: "The smoke carried up from the Cahuenga Pass and flattened beneath a layer of cool crossing air."

THE BLACK ICE  is the second book in the Harry Bosch series. Harry's maverick ways have earned him a position in the very undesirable Hollywood Division. When Robbery-Homicide swoops in and takes a case that should have been his call, Harry wheedles his way into the fold and begins investigating on his own. This, of course, does not sit well with the powers that be, so his supervisor dumps a load of unsolved cases in Harry's lap and instructs him to close as many as possible by year-end, a week away. When one of the unsolved cases begins pointing to the case Harry was boxed out of, he uses it as an excuse to head for Mexico and pursue both cases.

The plot is excellent. I commented to a friend while I was listening to the audio that somehow I keep reading a book either simultaneously or right after that somehow echos what Connelly does in his plot I'm reading at that time. I think it's very much a reflection on how he's influenced the genre. I appreciate the way Bosch grows with each book, the way he's affected by the events he experiences. Bosch is no superman; he has to deal physically and emotionally with his exploits.

While I thoroughly enjoyed this Bosch caper, I didn't thorough enjoy the audiobook. The narrator on this one is Dick Hill who also narrates the Jack Reacher series. The only probably is that he read Harry Bosch exactly the same way he read Jack Reacher. That flat tone and mood work for Reacher; Bosch is a far more dimensional character. While I don't think Bosch shows a lot of varying emotion at this point in the series, I think he feels it, experiences it and that didn't come across at all. I read THE BLACK ECHO, the first Harry Bosch, in print and felt my experience was better that way for this series.

THE BLACK ICE is available on audio from Brilliance (ISBN: 978-1-5933-5259-2), in print from Little Brown (ISBN: 978-0-3161-5382-9).

And finally today I have DOUBLE PLAY by Robert B. Parker.

FIRST LINE: "Joseph Burke got it on Guadalcanal, at Bloody Ridge, five .25 caliber slugs from a Jap light machine gun, stitched across him in a neatly punctuated line."

When Joseph Burke returns home wounded physically from the war, his wife inflicts emotional wounds by having left him for another man. Trying to re-enter his life, he attempts to take up boxing. Not really possessing the skill to box professionally, Burke takes a job as a body guard to protect a rich man's daughter. Burke falls for the daughter but is let go after a show of excessive force against a very powerful family. That is when Burke finds his job with the Brooklyn Dodgers protecting Jackie Robinson from the racial violence and threats during his rookie season.

This was a fun audiobook. Burke and Robinson's dialogue exchanges throughout the book are both dryly humerus and moving. The events had a tendency to jar me, and while I tell myself it is because I'm listening to a story set half a century ago, I'd like to hope they would have affected me the same way then. While it's a fictionalized story, the hate still existed and I think Parker did an outstanding job of bringing that through and contrasting it sharply with the loving relationship these two men developed.

DOUBLE PLAY does not deviate from Parker's style of writing. This has a tendency to affect the audiobook versions, however. His dialogue is sharp and intelligent and riddled with dialogue tags. When we read the printed page, we often just gloss over those. Audiobook narrators, however, do not. And so you're constantly reminded of the "he said," "she said," "Burke said," etc. all over the dialogue.

DOUBLE PLAY is narrated by Robert Forster, who I thought did an outstanding job of bringing to life Joseph Burke. He illustrates Burke's emotional scars and subtly lets his emotions peak through the tough-guy image. The narrator is great for this book, the book isn't so great for the audio.

DOUBLE PLAY is available on audio from Phoenix Audio (ISBN: 978-1-5977-7014-9) and in print from Berkley (ISBN: 978-0-4251-9963-3).


Technorati Tags: Audiobook Thursday, Charlie Huston, Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker

They Said WHAT? - June

June was a rather crazy month for me with lots of fun trips and a slew of crazy, wonderful reads. However, that didn't translate into a lot of blog work time, so I'm a bit behind. And since I was out of town last Sunday, I didn't get to post my favorite lines from June. So, I'm going to share those with you today, and then I have a wonderfully packed line-up for the rest of the week. I hope you'll check back often. Also, don't forget to enter to win one of the stunning book soundtracks from John Connolly in honor of his upcoming U.S. release of THE WHISPERERS.

Have a happy 4th of July and enjoy these great lines:

• from Gar Anthony Haywood's amazing CEMETERY ROAD;

"Because sometimes ignorance truly is bliss, and once it is gone, asking God to have it back is a wasted prayer."

"What I saw and heard during that time gave me no reason to think she would outlive me. She had taken the sorrow of a motherless child and made a funeral blanket out of it, a shroud she could curl up in to retreat from all the warmth and light of the world."

"He was fourteen years old at the most and, already, life and death to him were but interchangeable, equally valueless sides of the same coin."

"Some memories lose their shape and form faster than others. Details dim and disappear, forever out of reach of the conscious mind. Settings shift and grow vague, while the people in them perform all nature of tricks, morphing into others and moving about at will, either imposing themselves upon a time and place in which they played no part, or vacating one that holds little meaning without them. Six men in a room become two, three become five. The variations are endless."

• from Marcus Sakey's outstanding thriller, THE AMATEURS:

"The world narrowed to a long hallway, like the gun had black-hole gravity that warped space."

• from Charlie Huston's stunning novel THE MYSTIC ART OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH:

"I looked up at the sky outside the window.

A piece of it snapped off and dropped and hit me on the head.

And it was all there again, the whole thing, back in my head, one picture, entire. No longer broken into the little fragments I liked to keep it scattered in. Fragments hidden on ghost buses cruising L.A. Freighters of lost things. But not of me."

• from Ken Bruen's heart-wrenching THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS:

"Serena didn't have an extra chromosome; it was us, the normal ones, who were lacking the added spark. Would I could have held on to that moment, I could have just sampled the energy for a little longer. I'd no longer need oblivion."

• and finally, from Craig Johnson's magnificent JUNKYARD DOGS:

"It was a tough business coming to terms with your own mortality, and some people, once they are confronted with its face, never forget its features."

"Dog was seated in the front. He turned to look at me as if I'd lost my mind. He had Saint Bernard in him and some German shepherd with a bunch of other things, most of them domesticated except for when you had bacon - then he was part great white shark."

Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!!!!

Technorati Tags: Craig Johnson, Ken Bruen, Charlie Huston, Marcus Sakey, Gar Anthony Haywood

Craig Johnson reviews Charlie Huston

Well, I don't know about you all, but I'm fairly whooped. So, Craig Johnson has been ever so kind to take over the reigns here at the blog. Never mind that he's been traipsing all over France and West Virginia, he still has tons of energy! Take it away Craig!

If someone would've told this cowboy that the book I would choose to review on Jen's blog would be one about a slacker, trauma clean-up tech in Los Angeles, I probably would've laughed up my sleeve. It's true, though. The best book I read all last year was Charlie Huston's THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH.

I know I'm stretching the limitations by including a trauma-tech in with all the cops, PI's and detectives - but it's a dirty job and somebody's got to do it. For the uninitiated, trauma-techs are the guys that go in after the deeds are done and the POLICE - DO NOT CROSS tape is taken down. They're the ones who pluck the skull splinters from the acoustic tile in cheesy motel rooms after successful suicides or sponge down gas station floors after gang-banger drive-bys.

Our protagonist, Web, is a young guy a little down on his luck, his options are limited, and the kindness of friends and family is running out. He takes a job with Clean Team where he meets the daughter of a deceased client and is lured into a situation beyond his means - both physically and emotionally.

I could talk about the razor-edge dialogue, the gritty, pitch-perfect violence, or the black humor that's so funny you're likely to choke, but for the purposes of this review I think I'll talk about the environs of Huston's book.

In the last few years I've been to Los Angeles a lot, and I always go back to trumpet player extraordinaire Jack Sheldon's phrase, "Earthquakes, rattlesnakes, milkshakes and heartbreaks - what's not to love?" LA is a strange town of tawdry tinsel and streaming asphalt; a place where dreams arrive every day and drain onto the stainless steel morgue trays every night. Who better to stand witness to all the mayhem than the quicker cleaner-upper, Webster Fillmore Goodhue?

Huston snags every detail, whether it's Chez Jay's, where I actually valet parked a truck with a friend, passed out in the bed, or the Harbor Freeway where I had a 9mm pointed at me. There's a sadness and a longing to the book that captures the absurdity and elusiveness of dreams. It's city of angels, and sometimes angels fall.

You might be put-off initially by the dashes that replace quotation marks but give yourself a chance and read this book. The tired old phrase of not-being-able-to-put-the-book-down was invented for Charlie Huston's THE MYSTIC ART OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH.

--Craig Johnson

Craig gave me this little snippet to say about him: "Craig Johnson is the author of Viking/Penguin's Walt Longmire series, THE COLD DISH, DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY, KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED, ANOTHER MAN'S MOCCASINS, THE DARK HORSE, and the upcoming JUNKYARD DOGS."

That doesn't say near enough about the man who tolerated me following him around his tour last year, signed all the books I put in front of him, greeted me with a fantastic hug at Bouchercon and never...I mean never failed to make me laugh. He'll also pull at your heart strings if you're reading his books. It is my honor to have him here today on the blog, and you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll be hearing about JUNKYARD DOGS just as soon as I get my grimy paws on a copy! You can find out more about Craig and the Sheriff Walt Longmire series on his website.

Thanks for being a part of Detectives Around the World, Craig!




Technorati Tags: Craig Johnson, Charlie Huston, Book Review, Detectives Around the World

You Have the Right to Six Words - The 2009 Grand Finale!

Well, here it is everyone...the final "You Have the Right to Six Words" post for 2009. Since we started with a bang, I wanted to go out with a bang, too. Seems like our finale bang is actually a couple weeks long, doesn't it?

This week I have a bit of a theme going on: it's the boys of Southern California! I'm hoping their post will bring with it some of that warmer weather, I'm already tired of freezing temperatures! Let's get started!

Leading off our final post is Charlie Huston who writes crime fiction, specifically pulp fiction, in a variety of formats. He has a trilogy of books featuring protagonist Hank Thompson. Charlie also has a series with protagonist Joe Pitt that deals with vampire clans. Charlie released the fifth and final book, MY DEAD BODY, in the Joe Pitt series this year. Toss in a couple stand alones, mix in a few short stories and add comic books. Yes, Charlie revived Marvel's Moon Knight, writing the first twelve issues, and more recently he revived Deathlok with artist Lan Medina.

2009 was a busy year for Charlie. In addition to MY DEAD BODY and the Deathlok comics, Charlie also released a standalone novel, THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH. Stephen King says Charlie Huston is "one of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century." And Charlie says,

Never did fix that attitude problem.

Next up is truly a crime fiction legend. His writing has influenced many other crime fiction writers, it's made its way to the big screen, and it comes from personal experiences as well as dedicated research. Joseph Wambaugh served a stint in the Marine Corps before attending college and then entering the Los Angeles Police Department. Joe's career with the police department last fourteen years, ending at the rank of detective sergeant. While still on the force, Joe published what he refers to as his "moonlighting novels," THE NEW CENTURIONS and THE BLUE KNIGHT. These novels would cause some problems as Joe's superiors did not care for the way he portrayed the police officers in his novels. He was taking a fresh approach and portraying them as real people, as humans with flaws.

In 1973, Joe published his first non-fiction work, THE ONION FIELD. Joe says, "I feel I was put on earth to write this story, and I've never had that feeling before or since. Nothing could ever stop me from writing THE ONION FIELD." It is the true story of the abduction of two Los Angeles policemen and the subsequent execution of one of those officers. THE ONION FIELD would go on to earn Joe his first Edgar award and take him into the realm of screenwriting.

In 2004 the Mystery Writers of America bestowed on Joe Wambaugh the American Grand Master Award, after which he would begin the first series of his career. The first book of the Hollywood series was published in 2006, HOLLYWOOD STATION. Last month Joe released the third book in this series and his fourteenth novel, HOLLYWOOD MOON.

Joseph Wambaugh has made a lasting impression on the police crime novel. And his lasting impression on this memoir series is

I was only an adequate copper.

I'll take Joe's word for it on that front but on the writing front, he's far exceeded adequate, and I'm so thrilled to be able to include him in the final segment of this year's memoirs.

So, that brings us to the final memoirist for 2009. T. Jefferson Parker has lived in Southern California his entire life. After earning a Bachelor's degree from the University of California, Irvine, Jeff went to work as a newspaper reporter where he covered police, city hall, and cultural stories, won awards and squirreled away ideas that would one day result in his first novel.

That one day came in 1985 with the publication of Jeff's first novel LAGUNA HEAT, which would make its way to the New York Times Bestseller list when it came out in paperback in 1986. It also made its way to HBO when it was adapted for a television movie starring Harry Hamlin and Jason Robards. Of course this was just the beginning of a stellar writing career. In 2001 Jeff published SILENT JOE, which earned him his first Edgar award for Best Novel as well as the L.A. Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. In 2004, Jeff would snag another Edgar award for Best Novel, this time for CALIFORNIA GIRL. As if these accomplishments weren't enough, Jeff also penned several short stories. His "Skinhead Central," published in THE BLUE RELIGION, earned him yet another Edgar Award just this year for best Short Story.

And that stellar career continues. Next month on January 5, 2010, Jeff will release his seventeenth crime fiction novel, IRON RIVER, which will continue the story of Charlie Hood, Jeff's protagonist from THE RENEGADES.

When he isn't hard at work on his next novel, Jeff enjoys spending time with his family hiking, hunting, fishing, playing tennis, diving, snorkeling and traveling.

I don't know that we could have had a better memoir to end this year's project on. I fell in love with it the minute I received it from Jeff:

I walked into a beautiful room.

And I believe he's let us all get a little peek at that room. What a gift for the entire crime fiction community, the entire crime fiction genre. Thank you, Jeff. And I also wish to thank Jeff for this wonderful picture that he provided. He informed me that the person in the background is none other than C.J. Box. A fantastic picture to wrap up the series as well!

Thanks to all the memoirists, today: Charlie, Joe, and Jeff; I am speechless. You have graced my blog with your participation in this project. I am honored; I am grateful; I am over the moon.

I will follow up tomorrow with an "Acknowledgements Page" to this year's project and share my overall thank yous then. But rest assured, I have put this project back on the calendar for next year. I'm going to spend a little time collecting memoirs again and we'll have Season 2 start next summer.

Thanks everyone! Happy Reading!