21/02/16: Lawrence Block – The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes (2015)

"Murder was easy. The tricky part was getting away with it."

The first Lawrence Block I have read, and I am hugely impressed. This is a disturbing tale that is absolutely riveting. It's dry, wry and funny in places, and heart-stopping in others. Private eye Doak Miller plots with Lisa (the blue-eyed girl of the title) to murder her wealthy, violent husband. It's morally all over the place, so that you don't know the good guys from the bad guys – or even if there are any good guys. It asks some fairly sinister questions about human behaviour as the plot takes the main character – and the reader – to some dark places. Be prepared to be shocked. A cliché, I know, but it's genuinely hard to put down. I had to keep on reading, hooked and horrified, to learn how this novel panned out.

18/02/16: Gore Vidal – Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal (1953)

Hugely enjoyable crime thriller set in Egypt at the time of the 1952 revolution and published under the pseudonym Cameron Kay. This is a quick read and certainly not intended to be a "great work of literature". It does not need to be: as a hardboiled pulp novel, it's brilliantly done. The plot races along. You get mysterious, glamorous women, dangerous gangsters, smuggling and political intrigue. As other reviewers have pointed out, there's rather too much attention to racial attributes when describing characters. That gripe aside, this is a fun, dynamic romp of a tale that you can devour in a couple of sittings.