These are the releases that look good to me this month. I have some of these on my shelf already and still need to pick up the others. Hopefully I will be able to get to them in a timely manner.
Do any of them look good? Read any of them? Plan to?
Check out the full list after the jump.
Noir by Robert Coover from Overlook
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. “The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow” unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.
Do They Know I’m Running? by David Corbett from Mortalis
Roque Montalvo is wise beyond his eighteen years. Orphaned at birth, a gifted musician, he’s stuck in a California backwater, helping his Salvadoran aunt care for his damaged brother, an ex-marine badly wounded in Iraq. When immigration agents arrest his uncle, the family has nowhere else to turn. Roque, badgered by his street-hardened cousin, agrees to bring the old man back, relying on the criminal gangs that control the dangerous smuggling routes from El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, to the U.S. border.
But his cousin has told Roque only so much. In reality, he will have to transport not just his uncle but two others: an Arab whose intentions are disturbingly vague and a young beauty promised to a Mexican crime lord. Roque discovers that his journey involves crossing more than one kind of border, and he will be asked time and again to choose between survival and betrayal—of his country, his family, his heart.
Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski from Minotaur
In this neighborhood, make a wrong turn…
… and you’re history.
Mickey Wade is a recently-unemployed journalist who lucked into a rent-free apartment—his sick grandfather’s place. The only problem: it’s in a lousy neighborhood—the one where Mickey grew up, in fact. The one he was so desperate to escape.
But now he’s back. Dead broke. And just when he thinks he’s reached rock bottom, Mickey wakes up in the past. Literally.
At first he thinks it’s a dream. All of the stores he remembered from his childhood, the cars, the rumble of the elevated train. But as he digs deeper into the past, searching for answers about the grandfather he hardly knows, Mickey meets the twelve-year-old kid who lives in the apartment below.
The kid who will grow up to someday murder Mickey’s father.
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells from Tor
John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it.
He’s spent his life doing his best not to live up to his potential.
He’s obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn’t want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives by rigid rules he’s written for himself, practicing normal life as if it were a private religion that could save him from damnation.
Dead bodies are normal to John. He likes them, actually. They don’t demand or expect the empathy he’s unable to offer. Perhaps that’s what gives him the objectivity to recognize that there’s something different about the body the police have just found behind the Wash-n-Dry Laundromat—and to appreciate what that difference means.
Now, for the first time, John has to confront a danger outside himself, a threat he can’t control, a menace to everything and everyone he would love, if only he could.
From Away by David Carkeet from Overlook
Denny Braintree, a wisecracking loner devoted to model trains, finds himself stranded in late-winter Vermont. His night at the hotel begins with promise, but then his prospective one-night stand walks out on him. Leaving town, Denny is mistaken for lookalike Homer Dumpling, a popular native son who mysteriously disappeared from town three years earlier. Instead of correcting the mistake, Denny dons his new identity as easily as a Vermonter’s winter fleece, and a good thing too–the woman he had hoped to sleep with has turned up dead, and Denny is the chief suspect.
As Denny tries to unravel the mystery, he struggles to hide his true identity from Homer’s increasingly suspicious circle of family and friends, including Homer’s prickly girlfriend. In Denny, Carkeet has crafted a fast-talking bumbler whose instinct for survival will face the ultimate challenge, with readers cheering him on all the way.
The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard from Vintage International Series (This is a reprint of a 1970 German novel)
For twenty years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life-insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works, Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb.
A Choice of Nightmares by Lynn Kostoff from New Pulp Press [This is a reprint of a 1991 novel]
Robert Staples is on the verge of finally making it as a second-rate actor when his agent asks him to deliver a package. Staples promptly loses the package, forcing him into the heart of a bloody and highly lucrative drug-running operation. Pulled in all directions by desperate men, sociopaths, and a sexually alluring woman, Robert soon finds himself embracing the explosive lifestyle. Fast-moving and sharply written, A Choice of Nightmares is a modern-day roman noir about drugs and money, and the passions they ignite.
So what am I missing? What March 2010 releases do you plan reading?
The Pull List is a new monthly series that highlights each months releases that look interesting.
