September brings a host of quiet suspense, complex mysteries, and shocking thrillers, as we finish up summer and enter the long lead-up to the season of horror. Below, you’ll find an elaborate quest for vengeance, a nasty family inheritance drama, two works of techno-horror, and two different historical novels in which Walter White makes an appearance; there’s also new works from favorites Kate Atkinson and Richard Osman, for an assortment that should play to all tastes. Enjoy!Article continues after advertisement
As always, all blurbs are by yours truly unless otherwise stated.
George Makana Clark, The Wreckers
(Europa)
It’s a difficult, if not impossible, task to write something so sprawling that is also so funny; this book feels a bit like if Thomas Pynchon rewrote The Count of Monte Cristo, with some editorial input from Evelyn Waugh. The Wreckers is an elaborate, fiendishly plotted revenge tale, filled with Rabelaisian set-pieces and cutting asides, as complex as it is rewarding—in short, a brilliant work of fiction. In George Makana Clark’s epic shaggy dog narrative, artifacts from a long-ago collaborator in the slave trade become the basis for a valuable mining concern’s attempt at legitimacy, as scammers track down the far-flung descendants of a ambivalent marauder in order to exploit the riches of his loosely claimed territory.
