Five Hachette Books To Love

By Steve Weddle

Lost in much of the Amazon vs. Hachette discussion has been the number of good books and cool authors publishing under the Hachette name.

If you're looking for some good reads, check out these Hachette titles -- past, present, and future.

Feel free to add your own favorite Hachette authors and books in the comments.

Also, shopping indie is a swell idea, while you're at it. My favorites are Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Mysterious Bookshop in NYC, and One More Page in Arlington. You can find your locals at Indiebound.org or order from one of my favorites.

Hugs,

Me

The Fever by Megan Abbott

The Nash family is close-knit. Tom is a popular teacher, father of two teens: Eli, a hockey star and girl magnet, and his sister Deenie, a diligent student. Their seeming stability, however, is thrown into chaos when Deenie's best friend is struck by a terrifying, unexplained seizure in class. Rumors of a hazardous outbreak spread through the family, school and community.

As hysteria and contagion swell, a series of tightly held secrets emerges, threatening to unravel friendships, families and the town's fragile idea of security.

A chilling story about guilt, family secrets and the lethal power of desire,The Fever affirms Megan Abbot's reputation as "one of the most exciting and original voices of her generation" (Laura Lippman).

**

Fun & Games by Duane Swierczynski

We picked this one for our DoSomeDamage Book Group a while back.

The first of three explosive pulp thrillers arriving back-to-back from cult crime fiction sensation and Marvel Comics scribe Duane Swierczynski.

Charlie Hardie, an ex-cop still reeling from the revenge killing of his former partner's entire family, fears one thing above all else: that he'll suffer the same fate.

Languishing in self-imposed exile, Hardie has become a glorified house sitter. His latest gig comes replete with an illegally squatting B-movie actress who rants about hit men who specialize in making deaths look like accidents. Unfortunately, it's the real deal. Hardie finds himself squared off against a small army of the most lethal men in the world: The Accident People.

It's nothing personal-the girl just happens to be the next name on their list. For Hardie, though, it's intensely personal. He's not about to let more innocent people die. Not on his watch.

**

Alpha by Greg Rucka

For the visitors to Wilsonville, the largest theme park in the world, the day began with a smile. By the end, they wonder-will they be able to escape with their lives?

Retired Delta Force operator, Master Sergeant Jonathan "Jad" Bell, is Wilsonville's lead undercover security officer. The threat begins with the announcement of a hidden dirty bomb, but quickly becomes something far, far worse.

Trained since the age of seventeen to save innocent victims from impossible hostage situations, Jad scrambles to assess the threat and protect the visitors. He will come face to face with a villain whose training matches his in every way-and presents a threat Jad may not be able to stop.

**

Skinner by Charlie Huston

Skinner founded his career in "asset protection" on fear. To touch anyone under his protection was to invite destruction. A savagely effective methodology, until Skinner's CIA handlers began to fear him as much as his enemies did and banished him to the hinterlands of the intelligence community.

Now, an ornate and evolving cyber-terrorist attack is about to end that long exile. His asset is Jae, a roboticist with a gift for seeing the underlying systems violently shaping a new era of global guerrilla warfare.

At the root of it all is a young boy, the innocent seed of a plot grown in the slums of Mumbai. Brought to flower, that plot will tip the balance of world power in a perilous new direction.

A combination of Le Carre spycraft with Stephenson techno-philosophy from the novelist hailed by theWashington Post as "the voice of twenty-first century crime fiction," SKINNER is Charlie Huston's masterpiece--a new kind of thriller for a new kind of world.

**

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Thomas Pynchon: On Tour in the USA

By Steve Weddle

As Scott and Joelle mentioned this weekend, the DSD blog is now a year old, which means we oughta stop crapping our pants this year.  (It’s Monday, folks. You expected we’d start being classy on Mondays now?)

We plan to have our collection for you this month. It’s called TERMINAL DAMAGE, a series of eight, linked stories that touch each other. (Haha-hoho-heehee. Oh, and don’t get like that with me, now. Bryon’s story has a stripper, so don’t you go starting with me. Jay’s has a wrestler. I can’t remember whether those two stories collide, but I should probably go back and re-look.) Right now we’re negotiating a mountain of cash for the collection, with all proceeds to benefit The Human Fund. 

This last week of the DSD first-year has been batcrap crazy. Have you seen these Kindles? Seems you can now buy machines that allow to read books. Weird, huh? All this time I had all these books in my house and no way to read them. Now, for $189 I have a machine that allows me to read them.

Also, newspapers and magazines. What? You know all about this? I’m behind? Well, fine.

So I’m sitting out back of the bakery waiting for them to throw out the day-old bagels and I’m reading The New Yorker on my Kindle. (Hooray for birthday money.) I’m reading an article about this dandy of an entertainer called Brad Paisley. Nice looking fella. Sings all pretty the way the women in the suburbs like. And every time I make a joke about him, he’s probably made another ten million dollars. And not so much from his recordings. Sure, people download “[Insert some joke title here to see if anyone notices]” for a dollar online or buy his CDs in WalMart, but that isn’t where most of his money comes from. The dude makes serious bank by flying around the country, waking up at some coliseum and singing those same songs to tens of thousands of people who’ve paid hundreds of dollars to see him. To sing the song you listened to on the way to the concert. That you’ve already heard fifty times on the radio.

Let me try to explain. You fire up the 8-track and listen over and over again to “Cluster Pluck” (which I think is a play on the term “Cluster Fuck.” I have not heard the song, so I cannot in good conscience comment on the aptness of the title. I assume the word-play “Pluck” for “Fuck” is some sort of show of Paisley’s cleverness.) or “What a Friend We Have In Jesus” (a traditional song off the same album, undoubtedly as much a testament to Paisley’s Christianity as the “Cluster Fuck” song is to his cleverness).

Anyway, people pay money – much money – to hear Paisley perform LIVE the songs they’ve heard him perform on the album. Now, I’ve never knowingly heard any of his songs. I’m sort of loopy at the dentist’s where they do play the suburban country station, so it’s possible something from "Sleepin' on the Foldout" has seeped into my brain. I don’t have anything against Paisley and from The New Yorker article (which wasn’t written by Sasha Frere-Jones, so might well be trustworthy) he seemed like a nice young man.

I would not pay to see Brad Paisley perform because I’m not a fan of his work. Keep that in your head for a second. Now add in the idea that Paisley makes a ton of money from his concerts, as most big-name performers do. Their albums are meant to kick off their national tours, where they make the real money.

And they’re supposed to play the songs just as they sound on the albums. God forbid Dylan should plug in or Bruce Springsteen should go a cappella for “Thunder Road.”

With all the craziness in the book world, what would it take for authors to make bank on book tours? Brad Paisley makes money touring. Why can’t a best-selling author?

Can you imagine if BLOOD’S A ROVER was used to propel James Ellroy on his big national tour? Sure, twenty bucks for the book, but it’s two hundred to see him read from it. Would you pay for that? To see him perform the same chapters you’ve read? You know full well that the show will include Mr. Ellroy’s discussion about the size of his penis and insults aimed at Bill Clinton. As entertaining as a Brad Paisley concert? Would you have to have a light show included?

Why does Brad Paisley get serious buckage for performing while Charlie Huston doesn’t?

Heck, how many times have you heard about a writer you like having a hard time putting butts in chairs at the Barnes and Noble. And that’s probably about 30 seats to fill.

I guess David Sedaris can sell tickets to his readings. Who else? Can Laura Lippman or Michael Connelly?

Janet Evanovich just signed a four-book deal in which she was promised $50 million. Plus, she gets a million-dollar bonus for each home run she hits once she passes 30 in a season. And Eddie Van Halen has to come to her house and take out all the green M&Ms from her bowl. Could she get twenty-thousand people paying $200-per to hear her read?

I turn on CSPAN-2 and see historians at book festivals talking to half-empty (half-full, for you hippies) tents and wonder how many books they’re going to sell from that.

I paid good money to see Hank Williams, Jr. play. I’d pay more to see Hank3 play. I’ve paid for PIL, Deadeye Dick, Violent Femmes, Sonny Rollins, and many more. Heck, I even paid to see the Smithereens. Many, many other people did, too.

Why can’t Charlie Huston or JT Ellison make their livings by flying around the country giving readings to sold-out coliseums?

Who would you pay $200 to see read?

The Devil Is In The Lack of Details

By Steve Weddle

Ever since that jerk John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, everybody has had to fight with the idea of the villains being more interesting than the heroes.

In noir, of course, ain’t nobody wearing a white hat. This guy is less bad than that guy, so he’s the hero. Or, as readers, we have a better understanding of this character, so we identify with her better. Or we have seen more background for this person, so we know where he is “coming from” and root for him.

In Allan Guthrie’s Two-Way Split everyone is a bad guy in some sense. But we follow along with Robin, Eddie, Pearce and some others understanding why they make their choices. Sure they’re bad guys, but they’re our bad guys.

In Charlie Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy, the former baseball player turned bad guy does plenty of nasty things, but he takes care of his neighbor’s cat. So how bad could he be, really?

But these aren’t the villains. They’re bad guys. The villains are the ones who keep the main character from getting what he wants or the folks who take something away from her. The villains work as obstacle, as conflict.

In one of the dozen or so James Lee Burke books I’ve read, there’s a villain who drips evil the way my stumbling Uncle Danny drips Jim Beam, in huge, unmanageable stains. The guy gets to Dave Robicheaux’s family, threatening and finally hurting his loved ones. If you’re charting this stuff out at home, this is on the other side of Hank Thompson, Huston’s bad guy who takes care of a cat.

You can rob a bank, but if you stop during the getaway to help an old lady cross the street, you’re a good guy who is doing some bad stuff. If you’re the villain and you kill a couple of tellers in the shoot-out, well, that’s what villains do. But if you move beyond the job into something personal, maybe you see a family photo behind the teller and threaten his newborn child if he doesn’t hand over the cash, then you’re an evil bastard. You’ve crossed a line. Your “badness” isn’t contained to your job. Your badness has extended, like a stain that keeps spreading, the edges that keep creeping to the walls. An evil that threatens to take over. Something beyond our understanding. An evil that is bigger than we can contain.

And I think that’s part of what makes a villain different from a bad guy, that terror we can’t see, that evil we can’t quite hold.

We don’t need to know all the answers to what makes the villain a bad guy. We don’t need to understand him. We need to fear him. The monsters in the movie Alien are scarier when we can’t see them, when they are just teeth in the shadows.

When we understand the devil we can identify with him. And when we can’t understand him, when there’s something dark and twisted and evil that keeps him chasing us through the hallways of our house at three in the morning, all we can do is run.