Axel Hollmann – Benzin. Ein Fall für Julia Wagner

Hier habe ich bereits den zweiten Roman von Axel Hollmann, vor fast drei Jahren schrieb ich an dieser Stelle über Rissiges Eis. Mit Benzin hatte ich nun den ersten Band der Reihe um die Journalistin Julia Wagner vor meinen Augen. Auch Rissiges Eis hatte eine weibliche Heldin, eine gewisse Vorliebe des Autors scheint sich abzuzeichnen.

Zentrale Figur ist also Julia, eine Ex-Kriminalkommissarin, die sich nun als Foto-Journalistin durchschlägt. In Benzin ermittelt sie in einer Brandanschlagserie, die augenscheinlich mit einem Aktionsbündnis gegen Gentrifizierung in Verbindung steht. Es bilden sich so einige Verdächtige aus den handelnden Personen heraus, schönerweise erfolgt die Auflösung tatsächlich ziemlich nahe des Romanendes. Der Handlungsbogen wird gut gespannt, einige geschickte Wendungen halten die Spannung auch bis zum Ende aufrecht.

Interessanterweise habe ich mit Deep Down Dead gerade zuvor einen Roman mit einer Frau als Heldin beendet. Lori Anderson und Julia Wagner haben dabei so einige Gemeinsamkeiten. Insbesondere eine gewisse Dummheit, die sie in ihren Handlungen so an den Tag legen. Denn auch für Julia Wagner fragte ich mich: wie hat sie bislang bloß überlebt?

Das dreihundert Seiten umfassende Werk ließ sich schnell und flüssig lesen. Ein paar hakelige Sätze gab es zwar und auch die Namenswahl erscheint mir nicht optimal. Insgesamt jedoch ein solider Roman mit ansprechender Story und gut dargestellten Charakteren.

Benzin auf LovelyBooks

Birth of Coke

Besides new real life scenes, I also followed up on the Zero Art, where I put the bottle, the cow and the glass into art (which needs not to be a painting). I’ll have those in this series as well.

Steph Broadribb – Deep Down Dead

Did you ever get the urge to shake a book’s protagonist for acting stupid? Well, in Deep Down Dead I did. Multiple times. I am quite sure that I do not understand how women think, but for Lori Anderson, a female bounty hunter, I actually wondered how she survived that long. Maybe as a mother one headlessly throws yourself in danger, as soon as your child is threatened. If so, this is an excellent character study on such a mother.

Now, I know this starting paragraph sounds deeply negative. Fact is, that I still enjoyed the book. It’s written full of action and has a quite constant pace. Lori and her mate Tate being hunted by criminals and hunting criminals, trying to save their daughter. They do stack quite a pile of luck to find their way out, but overall the story is very entertaining. The writing is splendid, sceneries turn right into images when reading.

There are a couple of follow up stories to this rather rough start. Interesting characters, so more books may be added to my reading list.

Cokewalk

Coke on the Water

End of last year, when I picked up re-posting the Daily Zero series on my blog, I thought about some additional scenes. As we moved offices, the setting has changed a bit, but I tried to recover most of the accessoires including the teapot, the cow on the envelope, and the letter tray. I also bought the beer mats having the same design as the ones I had back then. Well, the plant is a different one, the office looks different, too. But it was fun revisiting these days.

If you have ideas on Coca Cola Zero scenes I could recreate, let me know.

The Davinci Coke

At the end of the Daily Zero series, I thought about taking the art angle under the label “Zero Art”. The one and only image at the time was The Davinci Coke, inspired by Dan Browns novel and the movie. Well, there was a second one as depicted on the first post of the series: Ceci n’est pa une coke, inspired by René Magritte’s famous painting.

Acocalypse

The final photo of my original Daily Zero series. Fittingly named Acocalypse.

Zero Gravity

I always wanted to do some magic. So here comes a hoverying bottle to play. No photo manipulation, just a matter of perspective. Unfortunately, I did not take a photo of the setting to reveal the tricky part.

And I tried different approaches to reach this effect. Here comes the first take on it, where I still thought I would erase the stand later on using a graphics software. Not so cool. But the clamp played an important part in the final version.