“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The Thick Plottens: An Occasional Interweb Mash-Up Thingy

A nice little plug for Declan Hughes' The Colour of Blood in the Wall Street Journal, in which Laura Lippman (What The Dead Know) gives Deco the thumbs up: "He's doing a private-eye series set in Dublin. He's a good writer and Ireland today as a setting has a sense of shame and secrecy that the U.S. has lost. One of the hard things about being a crime writer now is determining what secrets people will still go to great lengths to keep.The Color of Blood is a straight homage to Ross Macdonald set in modern Ireland, a family story that goes back 30 years." Mmmmm, lovely ... Not so lovely is the Sacramento Bee's description of fair Adrian McKinty (left): "McKinty - whose publicity photo looks like a mug shot taken at a police booking - is an Irish author who immigrated to the United States in the 1990s and knocked around New York City before landing in Colorado." A mug shot? No call for that, missus ... Finally, Gene Kerrigan gets the velvet treatment from the New York Times for The Midnight Choir. "Maverick cops who write their own rules out of frustration with the criminal justice system are hardly unknown in detective fiction, but it’s rare to find one whose decline and fall is as tragic as that of Detective Inspector Harry Synnott, the Dublin police officer who loses his soul in Gene Kerrigan’s gripping procedural," says Marilyn Stasio. Which is nice ...

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