Hell and Gone an apt title, Hell for a place comparable to hell, and Gone as in gone of the Grid a ghost vanished. Think in the lines of a rendition a removal of a subject/person and gone as-well as dead. There is a lot out there that we don’t know about, Ghost planes and Ghost prisons to name a few, locations unknown to but of few pen pushing top executives. Charlie Hardie the man who is the best at guarding Homes possessions and people now finds himself in the tightest jam to date prison guard...

Picking up directly after the events of Fun and Games, we find Charlie Hardie in the clutches of The Industry or The Accident People or Secret America, or whatever you want to call them. While Hardie's former colleague is on the lookout for him, finding him proves difficult. "They" don't screw around when they have a task to accomplish and burying the whereabouts of Hardie is their number one objective.Upon awakening, Hardie finds himself deep underground in a prison somewhere on Earth. I know t...

Bruised, beaten, and broken Charlie Hardie is a glutton for punishment - a human pin cushion of pain and violent provocation - a modern day Bruce Willis in Die Hard whose nine lives seem to regenerate much like a genie gifted him a curse by which the nightmare never ends and the line of pain inflicting suitors lengthens by the hour. In Swierczynski's follow-up to 'Fun and Games', part 2 of the Hardie saga introduces a whole new kind of hell in the form of a subterranean prison, home to dangerous...

Duane Swierczynski is a master plot writer. It's so deliciously convoluted that it's hard to write a review. This is book 2 in the continuing saga of Charlie Hardy agaisnt the immense insane shenanigans of The Accident people. Part crime fiction, part thriller, part omg wtf. I'm on to book 3 soon.

If you didn't jump whole heartedly in to the insanity of the first Charlie Hardie thriller then you may be forgiven for thinking that Duane Swierczynski well and truly jumped the shark with this middle entry in his trilogy. That's before I even mention the stunt he pulls in the denouement to set up the otherwise wholly unbelievable third instalment.Last year Hard Case Crime published The Twenty Year Death an epic novel in three parts from Ariel S. Winter, each section was in partial homage to a

Sigh. This book was no where near as good as its predecessor. I mean, it takes some doing to be even less realistic than Fun and GamesFun and Games but here you have it. In summary (some mild spoilers for Fun and Games): After royally pissing off The Accident People, Charlie Hardie is abducted and sent to a bizzaro kafka-esque prison. There he interacts with the various guards the prisoners and plots his escape.* So, one of the things that made Fun and Games so engaging was the claustrophobia in...

Charlie Hardie is the functional equivalent of a comic book hero, and I mean that in the best possible way. This is the second of the three (so far?) books chronicling Hardie's war against the secret group who actually controls the United States. Hardie takes an amazing amount of punishment, as usual, and dishes out even more. Though these books aren't, in my opinion, up to the usual plotting and prose standards of some earlier Swierczynski books (notably The Wheelman and The Blonde), they are c...

Blew through in a day. I loved "Fun and Games" and this was much of the same.

What happens when a comic book writer drives his bombastic imagination onto the gravelly driveway of neo-noir? The Charlie Hardie series, that's what- the first book was a four-alarm fire that exploded and kept exploding until... well, it didn't ever stop, because the second book picks up where the first left off.. But "Hell & Gone" is also a different kind of book, turning a different kind of direction: deep in its goings, rather than horizontally frantic. And somehow, although I might not have...

After the events of Fun & Games, Charlie Hardie has disappeared. The country thinks he murdered Lane Madden and is on the run, but really, he's been taken by the Accident People. In this book, he learns that he's the new warden of a prison they run. Since he's in charge, he can technically try and escape but it's pretty much impossible. And if he does find a way, a "death mechanism" will be tripped and everyone will die---prisoners, guards, everyone. There's also the fact that if he gets away, h...

Duane Swierczynski has ideas so brilliant and brutal that one day the rest of us will have to tool up and kill him. - Warren EllisSwierczynski seems to be making the transition from cult favorite to getting more main stream attention, so Ellis will probably try to make good on this threat in the near future. Since I’m enjoying the hell out of his work, I am volunteering my services as a bodyguard. What I lack in training, experience and competence, I make up for in my utter willingness to pepper...

If you read the first book in the Charlie Hardie trilogy, Fun & Games , and think you know the way this series is going to continue, trust me, you have no idea.Hell & Gone takes our favorite ex-cop-turned-house-sitter Charlie Hardie deeper into another level of the conspiracy that he found himself violently thrust into in the first novel, where he'll be challenged even more than before. It's pretty cool that this sequel feels completely different than it's predecessor, but yet totally fits. S...

I blame erotica. My natural response is to proceed with a whips and chains and between-the-pages sexual binge until this burning desire extricates itself from my system, and the world turns itself right-side up. What does that have to do with HELL AND GONE? Probably not a whole hell of a lot. But here we are you and I. With that being said, I cannot be held accountable for my actions during this review.Fun And Games had Mann in all of her infinite glory, with her nipples sticking straight up in

You know why so many people came to my funeral?They wanted to make sure I was dead. - Larry Tucker, Shock Corridor Charlie Hardie should have been dead and buried early in the first novel of the series. He's a stubborn guy and refused to comply, so the author continues to pile up the odds against his chosen protagonist in a veritable avalanche of troubles and pissed-off bad guys. I wish Bruce Willis was twenty years younger so he could play in the movie adaptation of these books. I also believe

H&G is book number two in the trilogy of the Charlie Hardie series by Duane Swierczynski who I had never heard of until recently. DS is quite an interesting guy...comic book creator, writer for Marvel comics and magazine editor among other things. My GR friends "harped" (in a good way) that I must read him so I did and book one, just blew me away. Fast reading and fast paced, and a solid four stars teetering towards five. I'm chintzy with five stars, ask my good friend Jackson Burnett GR author

Duane Swierczynski's debut into a three part series detective thriller comes across like a fine cabernet (and I went into it with only one bottle left). What happens is you savor the taste. In this case, I read Fun and Games and the second installment Hell and Gone in the Charlie Hardy mystery series knowing I'd have to wait until 2013 for the third installment.For fans of Donovan Creed (by John Locke) you'll likely enjoy Swierczynski's Charlie Hardy series, whose books by the way are better tha...

I may have liked the first book more, but the ending/setup for book 3 has me reeling! No way!?

Frantic action and more twists than a misshaped pretzel!This book would be perfect to easily plough through on a short-medium haul flight. On to the conclusion!

a continuation of book one that starts literally the minute after. and just as fabulous.what's not fabulous? that i have to wait until 2013 for the next one. WTF? there's even a preview of it at the end of this book. so what's the story? building up suspense is fine, and i'm sure a great business model. but not when it irritates ME. and it does. because i want to keep hardie in my life. right now. not 12 months from now. grrr.