Sweets and other stories by Andre Williams
Andre Williams is a 70-something blues musician who went into rehab and wrote this book for its therapeutic value. It contains a novella, a short story, and a couple of song-poem things. The title story is the novella, and it’s a raucous, bawdy affair that is just like an Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines tale. As per the usual for these street books, you have to be willing to overlook the lack of copy-editing, but you just fall right into the book’s rhythms soon enough. The title story, Sweets, is unlike any other crime story out there at the moment because of the central character. She gets thrown out of her mother’s house for being pregnant and then, in an effort to make money, becomes a drug kingpin. The gender switch on a rising to power crime tale is, quite frankly, a revelation. Williams did a hell of a thing here and it is more then worth your time.
Sweets is being published by a record company, and the only way to get it is from them.
The Creed of Violence by Boston Teran
The Creed of Violence is the 6th book by the John Twelve Hawks of the crime genre. This 20th-century western focuses on the binary opposites of a father and son who find themselves on the same path with a common goal. The complexities of their relationship (the father abandoned the mother and son) manifest themselves as an underlying current of violence and hostility that is always present and just below the service, waiting to erupt. Whether they can or will work through their history is almost never really an option, which lends a tone that is fraught with tension to the book. The Creed of Violence exudes an atmosphere that gets progressively more claustrophobic the deeper into Mexico the characters travel.
The Water’s Edge by Karin Fossum
This was my first Karen Fossum book and was a great introduction to her work. Finding out whodunit isn’t the point here, as Fossum casts a far wider net. The Water’s Edge is really about the ways that a community tries to deal with a horrific crime. Particularly in a country where violent crimes are not of the norm. All of the characters are nuanced and real as they try to come to grips with not only the act itself but also its close proximity to them.
The Water’s Edge is interesting, well written, and thoughtful, and I look forward to reading more of Fossum’s work.
The eye of the master does more than both his hands.