Disclaimer

Product Description

“You never get away. You’re always getting away.”

Karen and Ray want out. Rossi wants his ear back. Doyle wants Ray. Melody wants a good story. Sleeps just wants to do some soft time. A trans-Europe road-trip screwball noir, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS features a cast of cops and robbers, losers and hopers, villains, saints and a homicidal Siberian wolf. You’ll never see the Greek islands in quite the same light again …

Praise for THE BIG O:

“Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir, and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Declan Burke’s THE BIG O is one of the sharpest, wittiest and most unusual Irish crime novels of recent years … Among all of the recent crop of Irish crime novelists, it seems to me that Declan Burke is ideally poised to make the transition to a larger international stage.” – John Connolly

“Burke has married hard-boiled crime with noir sensibility and seasoned it with humour and crackling dialogue … fans of comic noir will find plenty to enjoy here.” – Booklist

Review

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
“As distinctively Canadian as a Tom Thomson painting. . . . Crime Machine is as good as Canadian crime fiction gets.” — Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail
 
“A marvelously controlled writer, equally confident with characters and narrative.”
— Toronto Star
 
“Teeming with questions, possibilities and clever, enticing dialogue.”
— The Hamilton Spectator

“With Crime Machine, Blunt delivers another twisting page-turner that will keep readers up late at night, proving yet again that he can deftly toe the line between terror and intrigue.”
— CBC Books

“First-rate series. . . .You can hear the crunch of snowshoes through the bush, smell the buckshot mingling with fresh blood.”
— NOW (Toronto)

“Another winner from one of Canada’s leading crime writers.” —The Peterborough Examiner

From the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

The long-awaited new instalment in the award-winning, bestselling John Cardinal mystery series.

A year after the death of his beloved and troubled wife, Catherine, John Cardinal has moved into a new, but very humid, condo. He has fallen into an easy routine of work on cold case files and platonic movie nights with friend and colleague Lise Delorme. The quiet of a snow-covered Algonquin Bay is shattered when the decapitated bodies of two people are found in a summer home on Trout Lake. The victims, visitors from Russia, are in Algonquin Bay attending the annual fur auction. This is by no means a routine murder investigation as Cardinal soon discovers, but a horrific piece of a very twisted puzzle. Blunt has, once again, given us a page-turning plot, a remarkable cast of characters and the comfort of John Cardinal at the helm.

From the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Lamin and Zion meet in church, where they've been dragged by their grandmother and foster mother, respectively. Their fast friendship grows even tighter after Lamin is put out of his home by his mother and her abusive boyfriend. He joins Zion in a crack-dealing scheme, and soon the teens are living large. Lamin finds romance with rich girl Lucky, and Zion secretly spends time with his friend's younger sister, Olivia. But after Lamin gets shot in a club, he realizes that it's time to get legit. While he is able to use his drug money to finance a career in music videos, his hustling life always threatens to catch up with him. Lamin, Zion, Lucky, Olivia, and Lamin's ex-con cousin take turns narrating the story, a tactic that makes an already fast-paced tale even more of a page-turner. Each character's perspective illuminates the misguided decisions the others make. However, despite their bad choices, readers will root for them. The language and situations are occasionally explicit, but also perfectly in character for these Staten Island young adults. While some of the story lines are pulled from a variety of rap videos and rapper bios, the plot also has unique twists that will keep readers going. Urban fiction is hotter than ever with teens of both sexes, and this is a strong entry in the genre.–Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Lamin and Curtis are cousins and have been raised like brothers. When Curtis goes to jail for defending himself and killing a high-school bully, their lives are forever changed. Lamin starts spending Sundays with his grandfather and visiting Curtis. When a new guy shows up at church, Lamin finds a lifelong friend in Zion. Zion has passed through the foster care and prison system and has never really had family. So they become brothers and start a drug-trafficking enterprise that provides big money and a comfortable lifestyle. When Lamin gets shot, he decides to give up the life of a drug dealer and go legitimate. During his recuperation, he begins reading up on the one dream he has always had--to be a film director. Zion is not ready to give up the hustler life but becomes Lamin's silent partner. When Curtis gets out of jail, he is jealous of Lamin's success and his friendship with Zion. Each of these men is forced to deal with his past and pay for his sins. Lillian Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

SUMMARY:
Kicking off a new trilogy of vampire stories, this first title introduces psychologist Meghann O'Neill, who specializes in treating victims of abusive relationships. She is also a vampire who suffered the cruelty of the man who turned her into an immortal creature. Over 30 years ago, she left Simon Baldevar staked on a roof to die. But he survived--and now he's begun his sadistic games by murdering the humans Meghann has sworn to help through her practice.

Secret government operative Sasha Trudeau earned a long vacation with her lover and fellow Shadow Wolf, Hunter, after the brutal wolf-like attacks that left New Orleans in an uproar. But when her team calls with news of vampire slayings, Sasha knows it’s only a matter of time before another war breaks out among the supernatural denizens of the world … The vampires are nobody’s ally, but the cold-hearted deaths of their own kind make them even more bloodthirsty than usual. But who is the culprit? With the Seelie and Unseelie courts claiming innocence and aligning together, Sasha’s team is at a loss. Until they discover that they’re facing ancient creatures from the depths of hell itself, bent on unleashing pure fury …<

SUMMARY:
In this sequel to "Crimson Kiss, " Meghann O'Neill continues to run from Simon Baldevar, the creature responsible for her immortality. Taking human form, Meghann is found by Simon, who takes her as a vessel of his desires. Now Meghann is pregnant with his child. Simon has always believed a vampire's offspring will possess all their strengths and none of their weaknesses, and he will stop at nothing to possess his "child of the night."

SUMMARY: "It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's "Mass in B Minor," and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach." So begins Iain Banks' "The Crow Road," the tale of Prentice McHoan and his complex but enduring Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, has returned to his home village of Gallanach full of questions about the McHoan past, present, and future. When his beloved Uncle Rory disappears, Prentice becomes obsessed with the papers Rory left behind -- the notes and sketches for a book called "The Crow Road." With the help of an old friend, Prentice sets out to solve the mystery of his uncle's disappearance, inadvertently confronting the McHoans' long association with tragedy -- an association that includes his sister's fatal car crash and his father's dramatic death by lightning. "The Crow Road" is a coming-of-age story as only Iain Banks could write -- an arresting combination of dark humor, menace, and thought-provoking meditations on the nature of love, mortality, and identity.<

SUMMARY:
"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLSThe war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.

SUMMARY:
In The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks presents a distant future that could almost be called the end of history. Humanity has filled the galaxy, and thanks to ultra-high technology everyone has everything they want, no one gets sick, and no one dies. It's a playground society of sports, stellar cruises, parties, and festivals. Jernau Gurgeh, a famed master game player, is looking for something more and finds it when he's invited to a game tournament at a small alien empire. Abruptly Banks veers into different territory. The Empire of Azad is exotic, sensual, and vibrant. It has space battle cruisers, a glowing court--all the stuff of good old science fiction--which appears old-fashioned in contrast to Gurgeh's home. At first it's a relief, but further exploration reveals the empire to be depraved and terrifically unjust. Its defects are gross exaggerations of our own, yet they indict us all the same. Clearly Banks is interested in the idea of a future where everyone can be mature and happy. Yet it's interesting to note that in order to give us this compelling adventure story, he has to return to a more traditional setting. Thoughtful science fiction readers will appreciate the cultural comparisons, and fans of big ideas and action will also be rewarded. --Brooks Peck

From Publishers Weekly

Accompanied by a lengthy essay, "A Few Notes on the Culture" (1997), these seven arresting short stories and the disturbing novella that provides the title for Banks's latest SF collection all date from 1984–1987, the period of his bizarre mainstream novel The Wasp Factory and the extravagant genre novel Consider Phlebas, both cult-inspiring works. In short pieces like "Road of Skulls" and "Piece," Banks turns convention upside down and inside out, with shocker-endings that linger like smoke rising from a crematorium. "Odd Attachment" traces a marooned spaceman and his AI suit on a tortuous survival trek across an uninhabited planet, illustrating Banks's preoccupation with the "self-generative belief system" that applies to both humans and AIs in the Culture, the setting for the title story and some of his SF novels. Viewing Earth and Homo sapiens through the eyes of the Culture, a galactic group-civilization spawned by a handful of humanoid species several thousand years in the past, allows Banks to speculate on his dearest philosophical topics: the preferability of anarchy in space, denunciation of market economies as "synthetic evil," never-ending education for both humans and machines, and genetic manipulation. For all their wrenching images and sadistic twists, Banks's unsettling tales bestow a grim gift, the ability to see ourselves as others might see us.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

'Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance' William Gibson 'Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth' The New York Review of Science Fiction 'Unfailing inventiveness and wit' Guardian

Amazon.com Review

It's not easy to disturb a mega-utopia as vast as the one Iain M. Banks has created in his popular Culture series, where life is devoted to fun and ultra-high-tech is de rigueur. But more than two millennia ago the appearance--and disappearance--of a star older than the universe caused quite a stir. Now the mystery is back, and the key to solving it lies in the mind of the person who witnessed the first disturbance 2,500 years ago. But she's dead, and getting her to cooperate may not be altogether easy.

From Kirkus Reviews

From versatile Scottish writer Banks, another sf yarn about the tolerant, diverse, far-future Culture (The Player of Games, 1989, etc.). The Culture is subtly controlled by prodigiously intelligent artificial Minds, who, Banks intimates, spend most of their spare time navel-gazing. Here, a huge, enigmatic object referred to as the Excession appears in space and interacts with the Culture's energy grid in ways previously considered impossible. Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen of the Department of Special Circumstances is sent to investigate--but, sidetracked by beautiful, talented, spoiled-brat operative Ulver Seich and by old flame Dajeil Gelian, it will be a long time before he draws near the object. Meanwhile, certain Minds occupying a vast array of self-controlled spaceships suspect that still other Minds are involved in a conspiracy--but to what end? With the Culture thus distracted by the Excession, the cruel, dangerously expansionist alien Affront seize the opportunity to hijack a Culture battle fleet and start a war that they only gradually realize they've been suckered into and can't possibly win. Brilliantly inventive and amusing--whole sections read like strings of knowing jokes--but a mess: Chattering spaceships with splendid if confusing names (e.g., Not Invented Here and Shoot Them Later) don't compensate for the absence of real characters. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

First published in the U.K. in 1998, Banks's latest novel steps back from the usual grand scale and ultra high-tech of his well-known "Culture" SF series (Excession, etc.) to the intrigue-ridden courts of a politically fragmented world. In Haspidus, a woman named Vosill, a foreigner from the distant archipelago nation of Drezen, serves as personal physician to King Quience, in spite of social mores that treat women as little more than property. Vosill's servant--actually a spy reporting to one of Quience's trusted right-hand men--finds himself doubting his master's claims that Vosill is a danger to the king, even as he uncovers evidence that suggests that Vosill is much more than she seems. Meanwhile, across the mountains, the stern warrior DeWar serves as chief bodyguard to General UrLeyn, the Prime Protector of the Tassasen Protectorate. His close contact with UrLeyn earns him the distrust of UrLeyn's fellow generals; those loyal to UrLeyn fear DeWar himself could be the perfect spy and assassin, while others worry he will discover their own secret plots. As conspiracies unfold and loyalties shift dangerously in both lands, the story of Vosill and DeWar and their unspoken connection unfolds with masterful subtlety. Banks's new novel should further expand his reputation for creating challenging, intelligent stories full of notable characters trapped in complex situations that have no easy solutions. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A doctor's devotion to her king and to her profession embroil her in a web of court intrigue and murder as she strives to preserve the health and well-being of the king she has come to love. On the other side of the world, a general's bodyguard risks his life to protect his master. Interweaving a pair of separate but linked tales of devotion and treachery set on a technologically backward world, Banks (The Player of Games) demonstrates his considerable talent for subtle storytelling. Recommended for most sf collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.