Book Box: Stories on thrills and spills
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at four books that set your pulse racing. Buy the books at Amazon
Book review: Conspiracy theory and Wagner group spice up latest Jack Carr thriller
The idea of a state-trained elite soldier with a licence to kill is a well-worn trope in a thriving sub-genre of testosterone-driven, action-thriller fiction. So Jack Carr’s James Reece can claim a straight line of descent from Ian Fleming’s James Bond through Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne to Mark Greaney’s Court Gentry.
Like all these predecessors that have been adapted for film, Reece has been picked up for Prime Video’s The Terminal List (2022 to present; the first of the Reece book series), with Chris Pratt in the lead.
As the genre has evolved, so, too, has the violence quotient been upped and, more intriguingly, the political subtext cranked to a distinctly conservative timbre.
Fans of this series will know that Carr does not flinch from detailed descriptions of violence. Over the past five books, Reece has carved a bloody swathe through countless nameless henchmen and assorted corrupt politicians. This latest book is no different, with a particularly bloody episode in a health club as well as a Gulag torture throwback.
Book Review: Peter Hanington’s deftly plotted The Burning Time a propulsive read
BBC radio journalist Peter Hanington returns with this fourth thriller starring old-school investigative journalist William Carver.
Where in the previous instalment he dissected big tech company Public Square and its sinister omniscience, his latest takes aim at the $7½ trillion fossil fuel industry and the lengths shadow actors will go to prevent a real tipping of the scales in humanity’s struggle for the planet.
Book review: English crime writer M.W. Craven thrills with a Fearless man in new series
Ben Koenig knows four ways to escape from the locked trunk of a kidnapper’s car. When none of them work, he gets comfortable first and goes to sleep.
English crime writer M.W. Craven’s new crime and mystery series focuses on a man – a former head of the United States Marshals’ Special Operations Group – who is built differently. Diagnosed with a rare recessive genetic disorder known as Urbach-Wiethe disease, Koenig has no capacity for fear.
A thrilling and page-turning examination of what boundless bravado can help a man achieve, the first book in Craven’s new series also pushes the reader to question if fearlessness has its limits, even as the quality is widely lauded in the world of crime investigators.
Book review: Adorah Nworah’s House Woman an unsatisfying thriller
Young dancer Ikemefuna travels from her home in Lagos, Nigeria, to Texas in the United States in search of the American dream.
She is hosted by her parents’ former neighbours from Lagos, Eke and Agbala, in their house in the wealthy Houston suburb of Sugar Land for what is meant to be a short stay. The story that unfolds, however, is far from sweet.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers July 29
Romance author Ali Hazelwood’s debut novel The Love Hypothesis is back in the top spot for fiction in this week’s bestsellers.
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