Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

The Blurb On The Back:

Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar live hard and lonely lives as ranch hands in the wild, unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. They are "country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered and tough-spoken", glad to have found one another's company where none had been expected.

But suddenly companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain: something not looked for, something deadly ...

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The Verdict:

It's well written but emotionally frigid. I felt nothing for the characters and nothing for their plight. There's an interesting story in there, but I don't feel as though it's been told to me.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

The Blurb On The Back:

Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief - a small, battered and bruised belief - that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.

Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance.

Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected ...

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

This has an interesting plot but it's stifled by stereotypical characterisation and some appalling dialogue. It's a well paced novel that would suit the beach for those too snobby to take an Ian Rankin or P. G. James or Karin Slaughter, but I'd suggest that those authors give you a more rounded detective experience.

Elephant And Other Stories by Raymond Carver

The Blurb On The Back:

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, 'Errand', in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.

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The Verdict:

Absorbing and thought provoking, this is definitely a must-read for anyone who reads or writes short stories as none of them leave you feeling robbed or incomplete.