Zenosbooks

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1700

The Last Sanctuary by Craig Holden. New York. 1996. Delacorte Press. 372 pages. Cover design by Susan Koski Zucker. 0385312091. March 1976. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - At once a heart-pounding, chillingly realistic thriller and a dark plunge into the human psyche, THE LAST SANCTUARY is the tale of an innocent man accused of murder. When a killing is falsely blamed on Joe Curtis, a Gulf War veteran living on the edge of society, he hides in a dark underworld of armed militias and terrorist cults, running from the cops, federal agents, and from his own tortured soul. In a cat-and-mouse chase across soaring mountains and vast glaciers of Alaska, the complex relationship between the fugitive and his nemesis, a female Native American ATF agent, is rendered unpredictably and superbly.

Craig Holden is a professional writer, novelist, teacher, editor and fundraiser. He is currently the Associate Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the New Mexico State University Foundation. In 2015, he collaborated with Buddy Ritter on an award-winning non-fiction work about the history of Mesilla, New Mexico, called Mesilla Comes Alive. His sixth novel, Matala, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1986, and then worked for two literary agencies in New York City, eventually becoming a film rights agent himself. His first novel, The River Sorrow, sold in 1993 to Delacorte Press, and was subsequently translated into a dozen languages. His third novel, Four Corners of Night, received the Great Lakes Book Award for fiction in 1999, and hit the USA Today bestseller list. His other novels include The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), The Jazz Bird (Simon & Schuster, 2002) and The Narcissist's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2005). In 2004, he was a featured guest at the Festival International du Roman Noir in Frontignan, France. He has taught at the University of Toledo, the University of Michigan, and New Mexico State University. In addition to his work at the NMSU Foundation, he is the Executive Producer of a short film called Yochi (written and directed by Ilana Lapid) and is nearing completion of his 7th novel. He is the father of four children, two of whom still live with him and a pair of really old dogs.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1845

Four Corners of Night by Craig Holden. New York. 1999. Delacorte Press. 369 pages. Cover: Craig Holden/Phil Rose. 0385316259. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION -  A twelve-year-old girl is snatched from the street where she lives. And for two cops, Mack Steiner and Bank Arbaugh--partners, best friends, fathers themselves--the girl's disappearance will hurtle them back through layers of friendship, memory, and loss. Because seven years before, Bank's own daughter vanished without a trace. And now, as police descend on the small midwestern city, as witnesses are grilled and evidence mounts, one case begins to illuminate the other. And for two men, a harrowing journey has begun--one that will test their long, complicated friendship and uncover a chilling truth about two missing girls, two shattered families, and at least one heartbreaking lie.

Craig Holden is a professional writer, novelist, teacher, editor and fundraiser. He is currently the Associate Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the New Mexico State University Foundation. In 2015, he collaborated with Buddy Ritter on an award-winning non-fiction work about the history of Mesilla, New Mexico, called Mesilla Comes Alive. His sixth novel, Matala, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1986, and then worked for two literary agencies in New York City, eventually becoming a film rights agent himself. His first novel, The River Sorrow, sold in 1993 to Delacorte Press, and was subsequently translated into a dozen languages. His third novel, Four Corners of Night, received the Great Lakes Book Award for fiction in 1999, and hit the USA Today bestseller list. His other novels include The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), The Jazz Bird (Simon & Schuster, 2002) and The Narcissist's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2005). In 2004, he was a featured guest at the Festival International du Roman Noir in Frontignan, France. He has taught at the University of Toledo, the University of Michigan, and New Mexico State University. In addition to his work at the NMSU Foundation, he is the Executive Producer of a short film called Yochi (written and directed by Ilana Lapid) and is nearing completion of his 7th novel. He is the father of four children, two of whom still live with him and a pair of really old dogs.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1797

The River Sorrow by Craig Holden. New York. 1994. Delacorte Press. 387 pages. Cover photograph by S. Sakakibara. 0385312075. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In one of the most unique and powerfully realized debut novels of the decade, Craig Holden creates a page-turning drama that is both emotionally shattering and harrowingly plausible. When a fatally burned victim is brought into the Morgantown General Hospital emergency room, a young doctor's life is changed irrevocably. For Dr. Adrian Lancaster, the arrival of 'John Doe' is only the first of a bizarre and bloody series of events that will force him to relive his violent past and put him on the run. On the road and underground, accused and accuser, Lancaster's only hope for survival lies in facing the terrifying truth.

Craig Holden is a professional writer, novelist, teacher, editor and fundraiser. He is currently the Associate Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the New Mexico State University Foundation. In 2015, he collaborated with Buddy Ritter on an award-winning non-fiction work about the history of Mesilla, New Mexico, called Mesilla Comes Alive. His sixth novel, Matala, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1986, and then worked for two literary agencies in New York City, eventually becoming a film rights agent himself. His first novel, The River Sorrow, sold in 1993 to Delacorte Press, and was subsequently translated into a dozen languages. His third novel, Four Corners of Night, received the Great Lakes Book Award for fiction in 1999, and hit the USA Today bestseller list. His other novels include The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), The Jazz Bird (Simon & Schuster, 2002) and The Narcissist's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2005). In 2004, he was a featured guest at the Festival International du Roman Noir in Frontignan, France. He has taught at the University of Toledo, the University of Michigan, and New Mexico State University. In addition to his work at the NMSU Foundation, he is the Executive Producer of a short film called Yochi (written and directed by Ilana Lapid) and is nearing completion of his 7th novel. He is the father of four children, two of whom still live with him and a pair of really old dogs.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1889

Moog-Moog, Space Barber by Mark Teague. New York. 1990. Scholastic. Illustrated by Mark Teague. unpaginated. Cover art by Mark Teague. 0590433326. November 1990. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Elmo Freem has just gotten the worst haircut of his life. Not even a baseball cap can hide the mess on his head,and, worst of all, school starts tomorrow! Help arrives in the form of two space monsters, who suggest a visit to Moog-Moog, an amazing intergalactic barber. Elmo and his cat, Leon, travel through the galaxy for their appointment with the Great Moog-Moog, whose own changes color with every move he makes. But will Moog-Moog's scissors, clippers, X-ray blowgun, and outer space magic be enough to fix Elmo's hair disaster in time? Read this wacky romp to find out!

Mark Teague is an American author and illustrator of children's books. Teague has illustrated over 40 books including the Poppleton series, the First Graders from Mars series, The Great Gracie Chase, and other favorites.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1628

Docherty by William McIlvanney. London. 1975. George Allen & Unwin. 324 pages. hardcover. 0048231185. Jacket design by Craig Dodd.

DESCRIPTION - Tam Docherty was only five foot four - but wherever he stood he established a territory. The people who lived in High Street, Graithnock came there because of poverty, yet Tam moved as if he were there by choice. And his name was not a pleasant sound to more than one pit- manager in the south-west of Scotland. The Dochertys’ living-room had two set-in beds; Tam and Jenny slept in one, and in the other Conn, the youngest of the four children, born as Docherty opens in the early years of this century. Such were the bounds of his boyhood with its unchanging rhythm - his father coming back from the pit and his swooping affection, his mother, roughing his hair as she put him to bed, Angus bullying, Mick laughing, Kathleen bustling. Time was High Street. But High Street outside was also a sort of second mother, whose moods Conn learned like a favourite story: the Saturday morning muster of children; the time before tea when ‘the heavy squad’ came down from the forge and their boots sparked on the cobblestones; the men gathering each night at the street corner which became variously a pitch-and-toss school, a subdued male-voice choir and a parliament without powers. For where so little was owned, the great security they had was each other and their fight for responsibility for their own lives. William McIlvanney’s novel, celebrates that sense of community - strong, warm, and deeply tolerant - of people who strive to live with dignity where dignity has been denied them. At its centre stands Tam Docherty, a man too formidable to be patronised, a man we can watch hewing, almost day by day, a life of value out of his society’s massive indifference until, at the book’s close, that life stands out like a monument. William McIlvanney’s writing has passion and humour, tenderness and savagery, and a rare, deeply felt eloquence. His characters speak with the breath of life and in a Lallans of unexampled flavour, beautifully characterised by young Conn at school rebelling against the insipidity of English. For these qualities, and also because the kind of people in DOCHERTY are seldom written about except with patronising pity or condescending humour. William McIlvanney’s novel is an original and memorable achievement which brings him to the forefront of contemporary writers.

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1731

Remedy is None by William McIlvanney. London. 1966. Eyre & Spottiswoode. 244 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - ‘Father dying. Come home at once.’ Charlie Grant had only gone to University because his father had scrimped and saved, through years of shifting employment and with the Scottish belief in the value of education. Now he was left with the old man’s blessing - ‘You’ll be a’ right Charlie. Wi’ a University education. You’ll no’ be like me. The guid jobs. The big money.’ Was this all, then, that remained to his father? A few shibboleths and magical words which he had had to learn to bolster his failure. When Charlie thought of the man his father had been the injustice of it ‘cleft his mind like lightning’. He could think of nothing except setting the injustice right. William McIlvanney shows already, in this his first novel, that he has wit, a strong narrative gift and the ability to give his characters and story a meaning beyond their local Scottish setting. The death of Charlie’s father, which lies at the core of the book, is brilliantly portrayed, and the resolution of a tragic situation movingly described. For only too late does Charlie begin to realise that, blinded by his father’s suffering, he has been guilty of the very injustice he has blamed on others and on the world they all live in. REMEDY IS NONE is a powerful novel, showing both promise and achievement.

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 2153

These Words-Weddings & After: An Essay & Poetry by William McIlvanney. Edinburgh. 1984. Mainstream Publishing Company. 95 pages. hardcover. 090639161x. Jacket design by James Hutcheson. Jacket photograph by Robin Gillanders.

DESCRIPTION - THESE WORDS: WEDDINGS AND AFTER is the outcome of many years of work during which William McIlvanney has been writing poetry without offering it for publication. It is 14 years since his first book of poetry. THE LONGSHIPS IN HARBOUR appeared - of which one critic said it ‘out-Larkins Larkin’. During this time, he has been trying to find a new form of poetry. The result is this book - an exciting combination of lyrical intensity and thematic continuity. It is, in effect, a poetry of great vigour and perceptiveness full of varied rhythms. The ideas and thoughts it evokes are rooted in the experience of the lives he describes, not merely an intellectual imposition on them. Using the framework of a wedding, from marriage-ceremony to bedroom, he celebrates our attempts to marry our ideals to the realities of nature: the sometimes funny, sometimes painful condition of having ‘dreams that go where dreamers can’t.’ Lyric sequences occur like characters in a plot. The differing styles used (from rhyming couplets to free verse to Country and Western ‘songs’) try to remain accessible, in accordance with McIlvanney’s view cogently advanced in his introductory essay, The Sacred Wood Revisited’ that poetry should attempt to be a popular medium, a sharing of ‘experienced truth’ - a means whereby we may: See in each other’s eyes, but make no sound, / Where our own deep Atlantises lie drowned.’ THESE WORDS: WEDDINGS AND AFTER can be seen as an attempt to reclaim some of the territory poetry has ceded to prose — a kind of poetic novella. Most importantly, it is both enjoyable and illuminating to read.

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1736

Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney. London. 1989. Hodder & Stoughton. 189 pages. hardcover. 034026330x.

DESCRIPTION - William McIlvanney’s characters are ordinary people whose lives, no matter what pressures they are under retain ‘the stubborn resplendence of unfulfilled dreams’. They are the heart and the soul of the industrial town of Graithnock, where the author has set his previous distinguished books like DOCHERTY and THE BIG MAN; and, men and women both, and young people too, they are casualties of the struggle to live in defiance of defeat. Even when their dreams seem irretrievably diminished, they live on and battle on, with humour and resilience courage and wit, and understanding for themselves and their world. The title ’Walking Wounded’ says it all – in a book as astonishing for its perception and power as for its epic, eloquent economy, its ability to reveal a lifetime in an hour-glass.

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 2590

Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney. New York. 1992. Morrow. 281 pages. Jacket design & illustration by Lawrence Ratzkin. 068811413x. hardcover.

The third book in William McIlvanney's Laidlaw Scottish mystery series. As much a study of loss and guilt as a traditional mystery. McIlvanney's people are real and well drawn.

DESCRIPTION - Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw is back. It is a tribute to William McIlvanney that the occasion should be so eagerly anticipated. The normal mode for building an audience for a fictional detective is a large number of titles delivered in quick succession by contrast, LAIDLAW - the first novel of McIlvanney's sequence - appeared in 1977, and the second, THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH, only after a long interval in 1983. Now, eight years later, he makes his third appearance in STRANGE LOYALTIES. As in the earlier books, he is obsessed by an obscure death and is seen by his colleagues as a man near breaking point, driven by a private morality to work at the profession's outer edges. This time, however, the line between investigator and victim is blurred. The dead man is Laidlaw's younger brother, and the investigation takes him back to his roots in Ayrshire from which the not-so-grieving widow has departed and where Laidlaw learns from others of the breakdown of the marriage and his brother's increasing unpredictability in the months before his death under the wheels of a car. With a week's leave and a bottle of Antiquary, Laidlaw sets himself the task of finding out more. To this main plot is added a murder investigation being conducted back in Glasgow into the killing of drug pusher Meece Rooney. The linking of plot and subplot is achieved with the craft of an experienced novelist. The criminal Eddie Foley, for example, is seen in a similar light to the businessman Dave Lyons, who regards the law as 'a set of rules for those who get caught. ' Laidlaw himself is never more persuasively a policeman than when he is passing judgment: a drug dealer gets the thumbs down; an adulterous wife is convicted of lacking the courage of her sins; he scrutinizes himself constantly for lapses from his own standard of conduct. To live behind hedges, draw the curtains, shut out others, begins to seem like the humanist equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. Laidlaw's antecedents are an odd mixture of traditions. There is recognizably a strain of Chandler, the writer who gave crime back to the people who commit it and sent Marlowe down mean streets armed only with integrity and a wisecrack. But it is the unrelenting seriousness of his moral concern which makes Laidlaw different. As a crime novel, STRANGE LOYALTIES does not engage the Glasgow underworld with the ferocious infatuation of the earlier books. It contains instead some of McIlvanney's best set pieces on suburban values; and arguably the finest ending he has achieved. Crime fiction needs Laidlaw back before another eight years have passed.' - The Scotsman.

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 2664

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney. New York. 1977. Pantheon Books. 224 pages. Jacket illustration by Jack Tulling. 0394412532. June 1977.

The first in a series of crime novels set in Glasgow, Scotland featuring the angry yet compassionate police detective, Jack Laidlaw. Don't miss this series. The books are much more than crime novels and McIlvanney is a writer of great depth and psychological insight. Mcllvanney's earlier works were set in Glasgow, and he has not abandoned this regional setting in turning to crime. On the contrary, Glasgow itself becomes one of the protagonists of the book.

DESCRIPTION - In Laidlaw, the series’ progatonist Jack Laidlaw—a hard-drinking philosopher-detective whose tough exterior cloaks a rich humanity and keen intelligence—investigates the murder of a young woman, coming into conflict with Glasgow’s hard men, its gangland villains, and the moneyed thugs who control the city. As the gangsters running Glasgow race Laidlaw for the discovery of the young woman’s killer, a sense of dangerous betrayal infests the city that only Laidlaw can erase. Laidlaw is far from being a classic English police detective. Indeed, the relationship between the police and the criminals, and the alliance they ultimately form to find the villain of the book, seem far more American than British. In its toughness and realism, LAIDLAW is reminiscent of the Sjowall-Wahloo Martin Beck series. Yet Glasgow is a drearier and poorer city than Stockholm, its slums and underworld much more like our own.

 William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________