BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Black Dahlia (1987) (L.A. Quartet #1) James Ellroy   Devil in A Blue Dress (1990) (Easy Rawlins #1) Walter Mosley   Out of Sight (1996) (Jack Foley #1) Elmore Leonard    There is a great book and a not-so-great book in Ellroy's The Black Dahlia . In fact, it seems like two successive books - the first is an atmospheric but realistic police procedural bringing to life the Los Angeles of the late 1940s and the second is a piece of 'grand guignol' in which sexual obsession and the noir morals of James M. Cain's characters surge their way through a plot out of Raymond Chandler with a dash of Hammett's political cynicism.  We will come across the legacy of Chandler again in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress . It certainly cannot be said that the two 'books' merge perfectly seamlessly. The use of period slang at the start can confuse rather than enlighten so that we have to contend with some linguistic confusion as well as the plot confusion essentia

Nearly all the books below are so light a read that they could be blown away with just a breath of desert wind. The exception is Robert Harris' Fatherland which is very good indeed.  I have added a review of his well above average historical crime drama Pompeii but the bulk of these books are conspiracy thrillers that fed simultaneously off post-9/11 paranoia about the Middle East or the barely taboo chance to disrespect organised religion and/or an interest in cashing in on the Da Vinci Code (published in 2003). Two of Dan Brown's own follow-up books are included below. Fatherland (1991) Robert Harris Deservedly a thriller classic which postulates an alternative universe in which the Nazis won. Almost certainly in any 'Top 100' thriller list, somewhere alongside Len Deighton's much earlier SS-GB.      Knights of the Blood (Knights of the Blood, #1) (1993) Scott MacMillan and Katherine Kurtz This is cliched - Nazi vampires meet quasi-Templar vampires