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View my Top Twenty List of Fiction
Books to Avoid
Check out some good books
available from amazon.com
Klavan is the author of four great books.
Don't Say A Word is a thriller about
a kidnapping and ransom. It was recently made into a movie
starring Michael Douglas. "I'll never tell..." (By
the way, the actress who plays the mental patient is named
Brittany Murphy. She was in the movies Clueless and The Prophecy
2. And more importantly, she was scantily clad in FHM magazine.)
The Animal Hour is about a girl who
goes to work one morning and nobody recognizes her. If anyone has
read 7 Steps to Midnight by Richard Matheson, you'll see
the beginning has a similar concept. However, the Matheson book
turns into a sort of spy novel. Klavan's book becomes a Gothic
thriller and is set at Halloween.
True Crime is a novel about a
reporter trying to clear a convict on death row. It might sound
like a familiar plot but it turns out to be pretty original.
Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie version.
Hunting Down Amanda is about a little girl who can
heal people.
You should pass on Corruption and The
Uncanny unless you're a really big Klavan fan already.
Klavan is also the author of a cool mystery
featuring John Wells called The Rain. It was written under
the pseudonym Keith Peterson.
Fahy's novel The Lyssa Syndrome
makes my Top Twenty. It's about a town infected with a new strain
of rabies. If you can find a copy somehow, read it.
(It recently reappeard on Amazon.com
A secondhand copy is much cheaper.)
Nightflyer is another great novel.
Eternal Bliss was pretty
good. It's about the kidnapping of a teenage model by his
obsessed fan.
Dream House is also good, but not one of my
favorites.
Chris Fahy has written a new novel, Fever
42. I'm trying to get some info on it, including
it's publication date. Barnes
& Noble has a listing for it, but no copies. The pub date
was supposedly November of 2001.
Probably has almost as many awards as books.
Among my favorites: "Carrion Comfort",
"Hyperion", and "Children of the Night".
He's a great author but stay away from
"Phases of Gravity" and "The Hollow Man"
unless you're already a big Simmons fan. I don't think they're
among his best books.
David Martin has at least 4 really good
books. Lie to Me and Cul-de-Sac
are really sharp thrillers featuring the same main character.
Tap, Tap is a creepy novel
about a man and his childhood friend who claims to be a vampire.
It has some good twists and interesting riffs on the vampire
myth.
Bring Me Children is a
thriller about a reporter trying to solve cases of murder and
baby snatching. Don't let the title put you off. This is not
Friday the 13th crap. This book has a neat
on-the-edge-of-supernatural feel like Dean Koontz's Whispers
and Andrew Klavan's The Animal Hour.
Pelikan is a crime novel about a man who is
blackmailed into committing a robbery with the help of his uncle,
a hooker, a clown, and three nuns. The subtitle is Love,
Redemption, and Felony Theft. It's set in New Orleans,
in the French Quarter.
I've read many great novels by Jeffery
Deaver. Deaver is the master of the kicker. I can guarantee one
major neck-snapping twist, one Atomic Bomb of a surprise, in
almost every novel.
Praying for Sleep is about
an escaped schizophrenic trying to reach the woman he met at a
murder scene some years before and the attempt to catch him.
In A
Maiden's Grave, a group of robbers hijacks a
schoolbus full of students and barricades themselves in an
abandoned slaughterhouse.
The Bone Collector is about
a paralyzed forensics expert and the female cop he recruits to be
his eyes and hands in the hunt for a mass murderer. This is
the first book in a series. The movie starred Denzel Washington
and Angelina Jolie. They play Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs.
The next books in the series are The Coffin Dancer
and The Empty Chair. The Empty Chair
is fantastic, maybe the best of the series. The Coffin
Dancer isn't as good as the others.
I read 16 Deaver novels. Three were published under the
pseudonym "William Jefferies": Shallow Graves,
Bloody River Blues, and Hell's Kitchen.
All three are part of a series featuring location scout John
Pellam. Bloody River Blues is my favorite.
Three of Deaver's novels are part of a series featuring a
woman in her 20's nicknamed Rune: Manhattan Is My Beat,
Death of a Blue Movie Star, and
Hard News. My favorite is probably Death of a
Blue Movie Star. My least favorite is Hard News.
John Varley is an extremely original writer.
His stories are funny, wild and original. Steel Beach
is a good way to introduce yourselves to his novels. His Gaean
Trilogy is also excellent. It's set on a Ringworld like space
station. In order, the books in the trilogy are Titan,
Wizard, and Demon. I think the
series gets better as you go along.
If you're new to sci-fi, you might want to
try one of his short stories before diving into a novel.
"The Phantom of Kansas" is a good place to start.
"The Pusher" is another good short story.
His story "The Persistence of Vision" won a Nebula
Award, but I didn't like it that much.
I was also disappointed by his novels Millennium
and The Ophiuchi Hotline.
Author of the Harry Bosch mysteries. I've
read The Black Echo, The Concrete Blond,
The Last Coyote, and Trunk Music.. The
Poet featuring the character Sean McEvoy is also very
good.
Michael Kimball's first suspense novel, Undone,
was fantastic. It starts out with a man trying to fake his own
death, but things go wrong....
I also enjoyed his next novel, Mouth to Mouth.
I read the beginning of his first novel, a comedy called Firewater
Pond, but I abandoned it. It wasn't terrible. I just got
sidetracked.
His books are major page-turners. Not only do
I gulp down his books, but they get me on a roll of reading again
after a slump. Among my faves: "Salem's Lot",
"Desperation", "The Stand", "Pet
Sematary" [sic.], "Insomnia", "The
Green Mile" and "The Waste Lands" (the third Dark
Tower book).
Really the only novels that I finished and
didn't like are The Dark Half and Gerald's
Game. And I abandoned "The Tommyknockers"
twice.
King's tandem of "Desperation" &
"The Regulators" and the serial novel "The Green
Mile" show that he's also an innovator, tying stories
together in unique ways or publishing in different formats.
My favorite King movie adaptations are
"The Dead Zone", "Pet Sematary", and
"The Shawshank Redemption." "The Dead Zone"
is the only movie version that I liked better than the book.
Kubrick's version of "The Shining"
and Brett Leonard's movie of "The Lawnmower Man" were
also pretty good, although they didn't resemble the source
material very much. (Mick Garris' "Shining" miniseries
and "Sleepwalkers" were terrible.)
Author of the bestselling Star Wars novel Shadows
of the Empire. It's set between The Empire Strikes Back
and Return of the Jedi. Ties in well with both movies.
Gamers may recognize the title from a popular
game for the
Playstation and PC.
He also co-wrote a very good novel based on the films
"Alien" and "Predator" called Alien Vs
Predator: Prey
Someone should have asked this man to write a Batman movie.
His episodes of the Batman cartoon were better than most of the
movies! :-)
Looking for a book? Find it at Amazon.Com
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