STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Though it is set during World War II, it would be somewhat disingenuous to refer to  The Hill  as a war novel. Written by Ray Rigby, a veteran of British television of the 50s and 60s,  The Hill  deals not with enemies on the battlefield but instead focuses on the escalating battles of will between disgraced British soldiers held prisoner in a Libyan wartime prison, and the authorities who lord over them within these barracks.  The title refers to a manmade structure, 60’ high and 200’ long hill of sand, that has been built in the middle of the grounds in order to provide a grueling challenge for the prisoners who are forced to march up and down its sides under the intense blaze of the desert sun. Our main character is Joe Roberts, a warrant officer imprisoned for insubordination for refusing orders that he felt would get him and others killed. Our protagonists consist of the other 4 prisoners in Roberts’ prison cell.  The true villain of the piece is Sergeant Williams, an ambitious st

I bought this book on a whim but was slightly reluctant about starting a noir crime thriller with a length of over 400 pages. Noir crime thrillers in my experience are best when they are lean and stripped of padding (like the Parker thrillers by Donald Westlake or the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins). The mistake was mine though in assuming that  Five Decembers  was just a crime thriller, as it is far more than simply that. Five Decembers  is simultaneously an action-packed period-set noir crime thriller, a murder mystery police procedural, a hard-edged unflinching view of war, a tragic love story, a multi-cultural adventure, and an espionage-infused cat and mouse chase around the globe. In a word, this book is genuinely EPIC! It’s 1941 and Honolulu cop Joe McGrady is getting his first big case after five years in the police department, investigating a particularly brutal double murder in which one of the victims is the nephew of the commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet at P

Andrew J. Offut was a prolific writer in many genres, including   science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, and even erotica. In fact, he   authored some   420+ published works of erotica under a variety of different   pen-names. But his real passion as a writer under his own name was in creating   fantasy   tales and writing books for the sword and sorcery brands originally   created by Robert E. Howard, with 3 Conan books, and a total of 6 books   featuring the   Gaelic Viking, Cormac mac Art.  Cormac is a contemporary to King   Arthur, though the British king never makes an appearance.  The Sign of the   Moonbow  is a direct sequel to  The Undying Wizard  and picks up immediately after that novel’s   resolution with Cormac and his crew having imprisoned   the powerful wizard,   Thulsa Doom, whom they keep impaled by swords to their ship’s mast to impede   his shape-shifting abilities. This imagery is vivid and serves to paint an effective eeriness to the powers of the evil wizard

If an author were to set out with the intention of creating the anti-Conan, one couldn’t do a much better job of it than Michael Moorcock did in penning these first tales of Elric, albino ruler of the ancient island empire of Melniboné in the distant past of an alternate Earth. Physically weak and requiring the use of drugs, herbs, and sorcery to maintain his strength, Elric is a tragic figure made even more so by his symbiotic relationship to the sword, Stormbringer, a supernatural living weapon that feeds on the souls of those whom it kills. The sword is hated by Elric as it can cause him do things against his will, such as killing his beloved cousin out of drunken bloodlust in the early pages of the first of five stories contained in this volume. Melnibonéans are elf-like beings that are not fully human and have a long history rich in sorcery and divination with allegiances and pacts with many dark beings on multiple planes of reality. These tales all contain a non-stop forward mome