New Year: The Crime TBR Stack

 Now that the new year posts, columns, and Substacks have died down, it's time to get down to business. In this case, reading business.

I'm currently in my annual reread of Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, but will be diving into non-fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, and whatever I did out of the local Little Libraries.

For crime, I have three books on the stack:

King of Ashes - SA Cosby

I used to start the year off with late Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor series. But now that Jack is done and Ken is no longer with us, I've picked up starting the year off with SA Cosby. Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, All Sinners Bleed, and My Darkest Prayer were all great finds. While Cosby is not the poet Bruen was, he does have that same sense of place, its dark secrets, and characters who live and breathe on the page. Plus every book so far has been a gut punch. So I'm making his latest, about a Virginia family in a rural town who run a crematorium and must deal with criminals who want their money. 

 Hard Town - Adam Plantinga

I discovered Plantinga while researching the unpublished third Holland Bay novel. He wrote a guide for writers researching police procedure and culture, imbuing it with an unexpected level of humanity and humor. Not only are cops shown working day-to-day, but all the in-jokes among them and shared jokes between them and their brethren on the fire department came through.

And then he wrote a novel, Hard Town. Kurt Argento is a retired and widowed cop who moves to Arizona for the quiet life of a handyman. When a woman and her son show up asking for help, Argenta tells her he's no investigator. He's done with that life. But then she disappears, and like Stephen King's Derry, Maine, he discovers his new home of Fenton, Arizona is something much dakrer than it appears.

Moonraker - Ian Fleming 

A Nazi who builds rockets? Who would ever believe that?

Fleming's Bond is more of a gangster fighter, even if some of the gangsters were Soviet spies and assassins. So, while Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Diamonds Are Forever hued closer to the real world than the movies based on them, the book Moonraker proved as over-the-top and unbelievable as its own movie, a rip-off on Star Wars. The book debuted in the mid-1950s, when missing Nazis made convenient supervillains. The movie appeared in 1978 to cash in on George Lucas's unexpected hit.

Now? A Nazi building rockets. Was not on my bingo card for the 2020s.