A word on some words

Well I guess it must be December because all the blogs are filling up with their owner's choice for the best read of 2012. And I don’t see why the hell mine should be any different.

I’ve read a lot this year, though nowhere near as much as I would have liked. Time is the fire in which we all burn and I still have a mountain of books, both paper and ‘e’ waiting patiently for my attention. Earlier this year I stared doing some book reviews for Out of the Gutter, I may have mentioned that once or twice on here already. Writing those reviews has been a blast, but it has, by necessity streamlined my choice of reading and 2012 saw me consuming a lot more in the Crime / Noir / Hard-boiled arena, than perhaps I might have otherwise. I’ll point out the obvious and say that not all of my picks were first published this year, but as I read them in 2012 they shall reside here regardless. Anyway onwards! In no particular order, here are my favourites. There were plenty of others that were good, but these were better.  



Make of that what you will, but you could do a lot worse than dropping your Dollar, Pound, Euro or Dinar on any of these excellent works.

 

Trick or Treat

Halloween is almost upon us and we will soon be drowning in countless horror anthologies; I predict most of them will have at least one ghoulish pumpkin on the cover (remember you heard it here first).

Hey don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it, but if wading through endless tales of ghosts and goblins sends a shiver down your spine. Here are a couple of quick reads that you can blow through while you’re waiting for another load of kids in bed sheets to knock on your door. You are meant to give them beer and cigarettes right?

Order from Amazon

 

 

 

 

Nigel Bird proves once and for all that there is more to British crime than wise cracking cockney gangsters with this dark story of life on the cruel streets of a Scottish town.

 

 

Order from Amazon

 

 

 

 

Two girls go on the run with a trunk load of pot and wind up being persuaded across Northern California by a sociopathic killer. Now that right there is my kind of road movie Mr. Pitts.

 

Both of these are high on my hit list so I’ll be reviewing them over at Out of the Gutter sometime soon. But don’t sit around waiting for me to get my act together, go and check them out for yourself.