“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Monday, July 11, 2011

A Rum Do And No Mistake

Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …” The Somali pirates are popping up all over the place these days (although mostly off the coast of Somalia, it has to be said). Elmore Leonard and Stella Rimington are two authors to have set their novels against a backdrop of Somali piracy, and now sometime Dublin resident Stephen Leather is adding his pieces-of-eight’s worth with FAIR GAME. To wit:
Kidnapping is one of the cruellest crimes - lives are put at risk for cold, hard cash. But when Somali pirates seize the crew of a yacht off the coast of Africa, they bite off more than they can chew. One of the hostages has friends in high places and Spider Shepherd is put on the case. He goes deep undercover in an audacious plan to bring an end to the pirate gang’s reign of terror. But as Shepherd closes in on his quarry he realises that there’s much more at stake than the lives of the hostages and that the pirates are involved in a terrorist plot that will strike at the heart of London.
  FAIR GAME, by the way, is Leather’s eight Spider Shepherd novel, and his 25th in total, by my reckoning. Prolific stuff. “If I get any spare time I’ll be working on a new thriller set in the United States,” says Leather on his blog, “using Richard Yokely, who appears in several of the Spider Shepherd books. And I really want to do a sequel to PRIVATE DANCER. I just wish there were more hours in the day.”
  Settle down there, squire. Leave a little paper in the rain forest for the rest of us working chumps …

1 comment:

Richard L. Pangburn said...

Thanks for that. A wonderful anthology, all the way around. I was indeed fortunate to obtain a pre-publication copy here in the US. My review of it is here:

http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/2011/07/down-these-green-streets-edited-by.html