ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL BY DECLAN BURKE

I downloaded to my Kindle last weekend Declan Burke’s latest novel, Absolute Zero Cool. And without a shadow of a doubt it’s cool with a capital C.

I rattled through AZC. It’s highly original, witty, laugh out loud at times, thought provoking and sprinkled with cracking dialogue that, I think, is a hallmark of Declan’s writing. AZC is a terrific read.

AZC has been nominated for the Irish Book Awards in the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award category; a tremendous achievement and many congrats go to Dec. He’s in very good company though - the other nominees are:

Taboo by Casey Hill, A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black, Bloodland by Alan Glynn, The Bloody Meadow by William Ryan and The Reckoning by Jane Casey.

RADGEPACKET – TALES FROM THE INNER CITIES VOLUME 6

I’m chuffed to bits this evening and will be for a while. I submitted a story to the upcoming Radgepacket anthology and it’s been accepted.

Yippee!

Radgepacket - Tales from the Inner Cities Volume 6 is due for release in March 2012, published by those wonderful people at Byker Books. I can’t wait.

Many congratulations to the other twenty one writers also accepted; I’m sure I’ll be in good company.

Finally, a huge thank you to Ed and all the folks at Byker Books.

Nice one!

BEAT to a PULP: HARDBOILED

My congratulations go to all involved in this PROJECT. The cover is stunning and I’m sure the stories will be too.

VIVA LA MADNESS

I’m a big fan of Layer Cake. The film, which I have watched several times but more so the book from J.J. Connolly. I picked up Layer Cake many moons ago from a long closed and much missed local independent bookshop. This was also many moons before Layer Cake was made into the film.

I’d read here and there that JJC was working on a sequel to Layer Cake but nothing transpired. Until today when I was browsing my local Waterstone’s and came across this cracking looking trade paperback. The Viva La Madness blurb runs like this:

The long-awaited sequel to the cult classic Layer Cake. The authentic voice of British gangster fiction returns with a tour de force in this long-awaited sequel to Layer Cake, the bestselling debut by J.J. Connolly that 'jump-started British crime fiction into the present' (Uncut). More authentic in its language and scene-setting, smarter in its characterisation and plotting than anything that had previously gone by the name of gangster fiction, Layer Cake attracted a big cult following and became a Crime bestseller (it also became the most shop-lifted book in Britain). The Get Carter of the noughties, Layer Cake has also been made into a highly-praised film by Matthew Vaughn, starring Daniel Craig, Michael Gambon and Sienna Miller. Now J. J. Connolly is back with a sequel that sees him on the same stunning form, with his trademark razor-sharp dialogue and quick-fire violence, but also finding dark humour and pathos in the lives of violent men. From the many levels of the London underworld portrayed in Layer Cake, Viva la Madness moves to international crime with trans-Atlantic drug deals, money laundering and high-tech electronic fraud, portrayed with the same uncanny believability. The anonymous hero of Layer Cake is pulled back into the drug game before he can escape to a sunny retirement: in an authentic but dazzling combination of London low-life, Caribbean high-life and Venezuelan drug cartels toting machine-guns in Mayfair. The brilliance and the madness is back: 'Viva la madness!'

So out the window went my promise to only buy new books for my Kindle to save my groaning bookshelves. Well who could resist…

I’ll let you know how the book treats me.