Saturday 29 October 2011

Church of england in Crisis

St Paul's has lost a good man here.  Shame....and now the Church is pursuing legal action to remove OSX protesters which might lead to police action which Christian groups have vowed to resist with a 'ring of prayer...

It's gonna get ugly, and odds on it will be the CofE that is the loser.


http://gu.com/p/33x2m

Wednesday 26 October 2011

a Snappy, Intriguing Thriller

 

final priceAs part of Amazon’s Encore series, this is a self-published book that Amazon have picked up to ‘mainstream’ publish, with shows the days of dodgy, sub-standard vanity publishing are long gone, because this is a very well written and packaged book indeed.

Final Price is not a whodunnit, it's a ‘how will they catch him' tale and a good one at that.  Shamus works for a Honda car sales showroom in Delaware and finally has had enough of the awkward customers who take him for a ride, beating him down on a deal, getting close to buying then suddenly going off to buy from elsewhere- usually the nearest rival- who undercuts by a handful of dollars.  So he decides to get his own back and teach them a lesson....violently.  In steps Chang, a Chinese man mountain detective and his sidekick Nelson, an autistic crime analyst, and the chase begins.

Organised into fifty-odd short sharp chapters, this rattles on at a fair pace and is a good, snappy read. Okay so it's formula writing, but so what.  Sometimes you want to pick up a book and know exactly what you're going to get and enjoy it just for that alone, like wearing a favourite old coat.  By introducing intriguing, awkward characters into his book J. Gregory Smith has successfully added extra dimensions to the formula and it works a treat.  It's also entertaining to get the perpetrators view of things first hand, even slightly sympathising with him at some points, and to see also he is not the cold, perfect, well organised serial killer we like to imagine such criminals to be, but a rather more bumbling, opportunist and actually human loser that makes him uncomfortably at times, more than a little understandable.

Having said that J. Gregory Smith doesn't let too much cod psychology, navel gazing or literary pretension get in the way of his driving narrative, and he never loses sight of the fact he has a tale to tell...and a very well told, if slightly predictable one, it is too.