PositiveLos Angeles Book Review... French manages to portray the attitudes and prejudices of Cal’s maleness without judgment, while ultimately also demonstrating the necessity of his acceptance of the limits of his moral code and his distance from the violence, both natural and social, that predates his entrance into what he had thought would be his retreat from urban strife ... The Searcher blends qualities of French’s best novels ... French expands that closeness and cruelty from a family to a community, and in so doing tells a tale that blends the history and the contemporary reality of a relentlessly palpable village crossroads.
James Sallis
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...[a] remarkable new novel ... From the very first pages, the narrator moves quickly through events that would provide enough material for several novels ... Sallis is playing with expectations of the shape of conventional crime fiction, which this book both is and is not ... Sallis seems to be speaking simply, telling a story without much shape of its own, but his ability to evoke moments of everyday life ultimately delineates powerfully the experience of a woman who matters to us, in a life that, from her own point of view, she feels \'taking shape around me.\' The final shape of her life is achieved gradually, step by step, in her encounters with people and events that are ordinary and extraordinary, placid and violent, particular and universal, disconnected and inextricably intertwined ... Sarah Jane, though, is an extraordinary novel about a woman’s sometimes violent and ultimately insightful encounter with ordinary life.
Gianrico Carofiglio, Trans. by Howard Curtis
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe complex structure of Carofiglio’s narrative, with multiple structural and social parallels at the local and national level, contrasting criminal and civil worlds, and personal events in the lives of the characters, serves to reinforce the emphasis of the novel on the crucial role of structure in human life. But it is ultimately the ethical and sometimes contemplative Fenoglio who holds the whole novel together. His humanity holds out hope for some respite from the violence and corruption that lie behind all the story’s events. As he himself says of his role, what he does (and who he is) \'gives meaning to chaos.\'
Denise Mina
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...a critique of the culture that noir so effectively portrays ... Her focus on the fate of Glasgow’s women is one of the most compelling aspects of the book, in its resonance with our own time as well as in her critique of the role of women in the noir genre ... The Long Drop is an indictment of the brutal and masculine world of noir. Mina contrasts this world with her portrait of the role of women in her story and in the culture, a portrait that is in the background of the narrative but at the center of the novel’s impact ... Manuel’s story, in Mina’s hands, overlays those horrors on our own world of ordinary horrors and of a male ego that so fully demands compliance that truth and conscience and empathy are abandoned.
Tana French
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThese narratives, particularly the scenarios that Conway and Moran toss back and forth, are the real subject of The Trespasser. In a forensic thousand-and-one nights (compressed into four days, from early Sunday morning through Wednesday), Conway and Moran tell each other the story of the crime over and over again ... Despite the procedural format and the puzzle of the crime, The Trespasser is not a systematic, clockwork journey toward a final revelation or resolution. What French achieves in the end is a moment of clarity for Conway and the reader, when the stories finally reach a momentary balance and coherence that may be the closest we can get to truth or peace.
