The Gosling Has Landed

It’s been something of a quiet week on Crime Always Pays, largely because I’ve bought a new computer and I’m currently engaged in a technological version of mutually assured destruction with Windows 8, to the victor the spoils, etc.
  Other than the minor mental breakdown, however, it’s been a pretty decent week for yours truly. SLAUGHTER’S HOUND was reviewed last weeked in the Sunday Independent, with the gist running thusly:

“[Harry Rigby] journeys through this twisting, turning yarn with a semi-concealed propensity for ultra-violence, like a more lippy, chain-smoking version of Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive. He shoots to kill, beats to a pulp and even gets imaginative with a lit cigar and an eyeball … Aside from the mischief and black humour, the dialogue is just as smoky … this is perfectly pitched, rhythmic crime speech that lounges about the page … The denouement may be mucky and rather fatalistic, but it could only be so. Angels are hard to come by in Burke’s noir wonderland.” – Hilary White, Sunday Independent

  With which, as you can imagine, I was very quietly pleased. For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Indeed, the last couple of weeks have been very good to my humble tomes, with SLAUGHTER’S HOUND and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL turning up in more than a few end-of-year Best Of … lists. I don’t have a link to the Sunday Times one, sadly, but the rest look like this:

http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.ie/2013/01/my-favourite-books-of-2012.html
http://www.elizabethawhite.com/category/top10-2012/#.UOvbpeTtTTo
http://januarymagazine.blogspot.ie/2012/12/best-books-of-2012-crime-fiction-part-i.html
http://danaking.blogspot.ie/

  So there you have it. All going well, I’ll have wrassled Windows 8 into a half-nelson submission in the next day or so, when normal-ish service will be resumed. Don’t say you weren’t warned …