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 seem right at home in the context of contemporary Belfast (or at least they do to American eyes). Millar's story line, too, will remind fans of the Marlowe stories; it's as convoluted as anything Chandler concocted by stitching together unrelated short stories. 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.--Glassman, Steve Copyright 2008 Booklist

At the start of this powerful first of a new crime series from Irish author Millar (Dark Souls), wild dogs finish off a battered gang-rape victim, left for dead in a unused quarry outside Belfast one summer day in 1978. Decades later, someone is picking off the men responsible for this outrage. At the behest of a shadowy employer, PI Karl Kane investigates the death of one of the rapists, whose body turns up in the city's Botanic Gardens. Flashbacks to the 1960s, when a young boy witnessed his mother's murder and narrowly escaped death at her killer's hands, help build suspense as their relevance to the present-day murders slowly and chillingly comes into focus. Millar adds police corruption to the mix to make Kane's search for the truth even more troublesome. While some minor plot elements may strike readers as contrived (e.g., the escape of some wild pigs leads to significant evidence), the consistently tough prose should help gain Millar fans in the U.S. with a taste for the hard-boiled. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved