I’ve almost finished
Ghost Town by Michael Clifford, which has proved to be a very entertaining read. I’ll try and post a review tomorrow. The only thing that I’ve found a little unsettling is that it reads like another author's work. If I’d been given the tome minus the cover I would have sworn it had been written by Gene Kerrigan. It has the same voice, same style, the same locale, the same themes, and the same types of characters as Kerrigan’s books, especially
The Rage and
Dark Times in the City. This is no bad thing, per se. I’m a huge fan of Kerrigan’s writing and I’ll be buying the next Clifford book based on the quality of
Ghost Town. More just an observation. Both Kerrigan and Clifford are reporters and columnists working for Irish papers, both are writing about the present woes of the country. Perhaps the similarities are inevitable and coincidental. I got the same feeling reading one of
Robert Crais’ novels: it read like a Michael Connelly story and again had the same locale, same kinds of characters, same kind of storyline.
How about you, do you ever feel you are reading a book that might have been written by another author?
3 comments:
Interesting, I love Kerrigan's books so I may well read this. Brian McGilloway and Alan Glynn are also not dissimilar to Kerrigan in the coverage of social issues via a police procedural framework - as does Tana French in her new novel Broken Harbour. I do find them distinctive, but they do have a certain similarity in style & also the issues addressed overlap quite a bit.
Re Connelly and Crais - people often do get them muddled up or say that their books are similar. I can't understand the latter point - they don't seem at all similar to me, though they are mainly set in the same town, LA.
There are quite a lot of "identikit" thillers being written/published in the UK and again in the US (identikit in a US way rather than a UK way, that is). I'm not going to write down the authors' names here ;-) (google alert alert).
PS - maybe I won't read it. It is £7.19 on Kindle (UK)! And not published in PB until November, apparently, when it will also be priced at £7 and change.....
Ghost Town is a blend of Winterland and the The Rage, although lacks the political angle. I think all three books are very good and complement each other very well.
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