I don't talk about it much here, but I read a lot. Mostly fast-paced trash, and I say that as a compliment. Here is a bulleted list of books I've read lately and highly recommend to you:

• The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski. Thank God for the Internet, because I'd hate to walk into a bookstore and ask for this guy by name. Dude can write, though. This is a breakneck tale about one night in Philly with a hot blonde (duh), strange new biotech, a semi-suicidal secret agent, an evil plot to take over the world, and the average joe who stumbles into the whole mess by having a drink at an airport bar. It's kind of like if Neal Stephenson and James Ellroy had a baby, smacked its ass, shaved off all its facial hair, put it in a blonde wig, and sent it out into the world. Actually, it's not at all like that. You should read this book in spite of what I just said.

  My one pet peeve about this book: It needed another proofreading pass. Way too many typos and such. It's like, "Please just let me read my story."

• Already Dead and pretty much anything else by Charlie Huston. Already Dead is the first in a 5-book series about a vampire private eye... wait, come back! It's actually really good. It's crime-horror more than horror-crime. Huston has created an alternate modern-day New York where everybody is just struggling to get by day to day with as few hassles as possible, and a few of them just so happen to need a pint of blood a couple times a week or they'll die horribly. They don't go around biting people on the neck, because that would draw too much attention and they'd all be hunted down. So in order to survive, they need to band together into various clans and come up with secret ways to get the blood they need. And of course the clans don't all get along.

  The series follows one of these people, a guy who calls himself Joe Pitt and who would just as soon hang out in his apartment and watch old movies all the time. But he's gotta eat, so he takes odd jobs from the various clans without affiliating himself with any of them. He is also a sarcastic asshole. Pitt is a terrific character, and he'd be fun to read about even without all the vampire trappings.

  I also loved Huston's "Hank Thompson trilogy" -- Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. They're about what happens when bad things happen to a good person, and the good person discovers he's actually not all that good. Top notch.

  I read all of Huston's books in the space of about a week. Thanks again, Amazon Kindle.

I guess that wasn't much of a list, but now I'm tired and nobody has read this far anyway. So I won't recommend Donald Westlake's dozens of novels under his Richard Stark pseudonym, The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow, Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, Nothing to Lose by Lee Child, Old Man's War by John Scalzi, or anything else. I'm going to go jump in a lake now.