The Crime Warp

I listened to the Audible Audiobook of Live by Night over three weeks whilst out on my morning walks.  Apart from The Godfather, this is the only gangster thriller I’ve ever read/listened too, and was really pleased that I did! Joe Coughlin is the youngest son of a Boston police captain.  He’s chosen a life of crime as Prohibition provides incentives for a lucrative life outside the law.  Joe’s career in crime moves from Boston to Florida and finally to Cuba, as he moves from city to city, falls in love and tries to answer the question of whether he’s an outlaw, his preferred view, or a gangster, or whether there’s a real difference, because both are underpinned by violence, murder and rejection of the law. I really liked listening to Live by Night – Lehane creates a strong atmosphere throughout the novel, not just by creating a compelling picture of individual people and places, but by showing how people’s lives were affected by the impact of ...

I’m listening to more novels as Audible Audiobooks when I go out for long walks and came across this novel almost by accident as I was looking at Audible releases.  Now I don’t especially look for books that have a technothriller theme, but I do think that novels like this explore and challenge important issues about technology, its impact on privacy and how it changes people’s behaviour.   So, the novel…Bethany Lehrer is the government minister in charge of the Digital Citizen (Digicits) programme, where people who sign up to the programme receive a digital ID which acts as a trusted ID for all public services.  Unfortunately, there are a few teething troubles with the pilot group, whose computers are invaded by pictures of dancing pigs, which defy all attempts to remove them.  More troubling is an online whistle-blower, sic_girl, who is posting information claiming that the Digicits programme has been hacked and private data compromised.  The...

Love You Dead is about Jodie Bentley, a childhood ugly ducking who reinvents herself as a beautiful woman looking for love.  Her plan is to marry a rich man so she can realise her dream of affluence and status.  Once she's got the money, well...the man dosn't really matter - it's then simply about finding a way to to get rid of him and keeping the money of course.  "Getting rid" of course, means murder! Jodie has a few false starts but she's a woman at the top of her game, effortlessly using her beauty and charm plus a dogged determination, that can only be desribed as professional, to find, seduce and entrap a wealthy man into her scheme of love, marriage and an extremely short life expectancy. This isn't the only part of the story - there's the matter of Grace's previously unresolved case, Sandy - that ever present ghost from the past - a plotline that never seems to be quite tied up, and finally his vile and manipulative senior officer Ca...

Most of the books I read in the crime and thriller genre are pretty serious, whether its serial killers, black widows or just homicidal maniacs.  So when I saw this book and read the write up it piqued my curiosity and I wondered whether it would like up to expectations.