Sam on the Lam - Another US Bloodstorm Review

Sam Millar continues to do us proud on the review front. Here's one that appeared in Booklist for the US release of Bloodstorm:

Irish crime writer, Sam Millar (The Redemption Factory) is back with a brand new anti-hero, Karl Kane…

Thirty years ago Robert Mitchum and Michael Winner reprised The Big Sleep, setting their version of Raymond Chandler’s classic California crime novel in modern-day London. Surprisingly, the change of venue worked. In Bloodstorm, Millar’s wisecracking PI Karl Kane, though navigating the cockeyed lanes of twenty-first-century Belfast, could just as well be rambling the mean streets of prewar L.A. in tandem with Philip Marlowe. Private-eye-novel conventions that no longer are believable in the U.S.—the presence of an admiring (and foxy) Girl Friday, who draws a paycheck and does nothing, for example, or the hero’s habit of spouting off for the heck of it to the police (in the age of Homeland Security)—somehow seems right at home in the context of Millar's contemporary Belfast...

Millar’s story line, too, will remind fans of the Marlowe stories; it’s as masterful as anything Chandler concocted by stitching together unrelated short stories. Crime noir doesn’t get much darker or grittier than this shocking tale of corruption and revenge...

Altogether, Bloodstorm is a real find for aficionados of the classic hard-boiled novel who would like to see the form updated without it smelling like an anachronism.

— Steve Glassman, Booklist

And at the weekend Sam dropped me a line to ask that I pass on a thank you to all those who attended the Take Two for Crime event in Dublin featuring Sam and Paul Charles and "special thanks to song master extraordinaire Paul Brady for his excellent contribution to the show," says Sam.

Happy days.