Hot New Thrillers
Wild Ride Novels that Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
The Game by Derek Armstrong is a darkly comic take on reality TV that's full of twists, turns, and the occasional snake. Kellerman's Obsession is also interesting.
Most thrillers take themselves way too seriously. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown purports to battle the Catholic Church that has repressed all of us for millennia. Dirk Pitt (in the series by Clive Cussler) saves the world at least once a year. Michael Crichton’s heroes rescue all of us from dinosaurs or the Evil People who Control Us through Fear of Planetary Suicide. James Patterson’s forensic psychologist Alex Cross hunts down serial killers so depraved that Ted Bundy would think they were weird. Some of these conspiracy theory books make Ian Fleming look like John Le Carre. Derek Armstrong, a newcomer to the thriller fiction genre, blasts and lambastes those thrillers that take themselves all too seriously. While still providing a wild ride of suspense and shocks, The Game is snort-and-giggle funny. Like Ben Elton’s Dead Famous, this over-the-top comic thriller takes on the dregs of our culture: serial killer entertainment, reality TV, separatist groups, and politicians.
Alban Bane, Your New Favorite Cranky PI
The major character, Alban Bane, a loaded name if there ever was one, is an ex-pat Scot who lives in Burlington, Vermont. He’s a disaffected private detective, that staple of the thriller genre, but Armstrong makes the old stereotype feel new again by deeply imagining the widowed, cranky, pill-popping character as more like House than a Raymond Chandler knock-off. He has several saving graces that include his two out-of-control teenaged daughters and a father-in-law who is, well, a character all of his own and has a bone to pick with Bane. He’s a fun character, and he is set to return in the second book of the series, MADicine, which is due out next year.
The Game is not high-brow stuff. Personally, though I enjoy Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, I like a galloping thrill ride as much as the next guy. Read more about high-brow literary books that your English teacher will like in this article.
The Game Is On
The premise is simple and yet involving: someone is murdering contestants in a reality show that’s a cross between Big Brother and Fear Factor. (The snake scene is hilarious.) Bane recognizes in the crimes the “signature” of a serial killer that Bane caught years ago, Tyler Hayden (perhaps a reference to Tyler Durgen?) but Hayden was executed by lethal injection, and Bane watched it. Is a copycat serial killer recreating Hayden’s signature? Or could Hayden have escaped somehow? Or were there always two serial killers? The end will keep you guessing, and the prose will keep you chuckling.
The Game is the funniest, most blistering read of this summer. If your heart doesn’t race as you near the climactic scene, you’re already dead.
Read about eight hot new summer books that you must read in this article. If you don't read them, you won't understand what everyone else is talking about.
Obsession by Jonathan Kellerman
Jonathan Kellerman’s latest Alex Delaware novel, Obsession, is almost as funny as The Game, though it doesn’t mean to be. The character of the dog is almost as carefully drawn as any of the humans, which just feels like a creative writing exercise.
You have to admire the sheer nerve of Kellerman to write 21 books about the same character, which is a feat of storytelling. The plot is interesting, too: a teenager who Delaware treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder asks him to investigate her adoptive mother’s deathbed murder confession. Is it guilt over something that the woman couldn’t control, a real murder, or just the drugs talking?
There are some nice surprises in here, and the plot does turn well on a couple of them. It’s a good read, and it’s always fun to revisit old favorite characters.
Author of RABID, A Novel, Coming in April, 2007
