The Books We Want for the Holidays: Angelmaker

The paperback
is available now.

So sometimes you want to read a book that's just bad ass in the best ways.  You want some adventure, you want some sexy times, you want some gangsters, and you want, say, a doomsday machine that a hapless hero accidentally activates and must figure out how to destroy before it destroys the world.  If you can throw in some killer elephants, a serial killer, a geriatric granny spy, and an army of militant monks standing in the hero's path, all the better.

The hardcover jacket
has a hidden code to
decipher, because it's
cool like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway.  Nick is spy novel master John LeCarre's son (daddy wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among many other books), and his exposure to great thriller plotting is evident.  What I love about Harkaway's writing, though, is that he's hilarious, he's outrageous, and yet he's completely engrossing.  Sometimes I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Choke, and sometimes I'm reminded of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and sometimes I'm reminded of the new wave of snarky movie heroes like Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man.  But really, Nick Harkaway is a riot, and an original.  No one is writing books quite so entertaining right now.  

Come on--clockwork bees are going to destroy the world?  How can you resist?