To The Last Page

Mick Herron often bases his Slough House stories on some form of real-world political and intelligence activity. Not just for realism but partly because it's hard to make something up for satire when the real world these days is going to come up with something even more absurd and unbelievable than you can make up. Besides, the plot and its believability aren't really the point of the books, or at least not for me, but rather just a framework to hang his characters, the humour and style on. (A lot of which I'm sure must be lost in the hit TV series adaptations). Sometimes the real world can be too awful to satirise and the prologue for Herron's latest, Clown Town is horribly gruesome, but a reminder - we shall see - that there is a price to be paid for acts of bad faith and unknown consequences down the line. For a while at least, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly troublesome arising out of the historic prologue, and instead in the novel proper we f...

I've reviewed a lot of David Mark's books:  twenty on this blog in fact. That fact alone should say something about what I think about the quality of his writing, but the flipside of that is that you worry that it becomes more difficult to find the words to do him justice, as he is not yet near as famous, rich and celebrated bestseller writer of crime thrillers as he deserves to be. It’s almost as if I am a powerless blogger who has little influence over the tastes of the genre and literary world! David Mark on the other hand never stops or repeats himself, so there is  no reason for me to give up either, particularly as his latest book, The Drowned Girl , demonstrates all of the qualities that make his writing so thrilling; so let's try again and hope that maybe just a few more people will take notice. The qualities that are evident in all aspects of his writing are right from the outset in The Drowned Girl , which as principally a literary thriller writer (I think I migh...

At the start of Blood Crazy Book 4, there is a warning to the reader from one of the principal characters in the series that "what happens to Nick Aten during his journey may well have a powerful effect on you". That might sound a little like hyperbole, but as soon as you find yourself reacquainted with Nick Aten just a few pages later in Aten Unbound , you feel the sheer weight of the memory of the horror of the what has come before suddenly hit you. There is no immediate shock event to provoke this feeling, just Nick packing to undertake the next stage of his journey "the first step of a journey I did not want to make", but the accumulation of events that have taken us here seems to re-emerge in a frightening flashback. There are a lot of scenes from those first three books that remain vividly etched in my mind. Not least the shock opening of the original book that started it all off (and there are spoilers here only if you haven't read the first three books)...

Better known as a fantasy writer, Garth Nix's first science fiction novel initially feels a little tentative in its approach to what appears to be the space opera field. Rather than take the time to build up to how the people of Earth find a means to travel in space and explore other planets, the author explains it all in the brief prologue before seeming to settle down into rather more mundane aspects of military life aboard one of these spaceships that gets caught up in a skirmish with an enemy fleet. For quite a while you have no idea where it's going, but there is a larger scheme building in the background around the mystery of the Massif. The origins of the Massif are laid out in that prologue, so I'm going to do the same. The first Massif appeared on Earth in 2097, arising into orbit out of the Marojejy massif in Madagascar, leading to the discovery of otherspace travelling Massifs, each with an enigmatic avatar entity. Visits and investigations to the MirinahRakoto M...

" Okay, this just got interesting ". Yep, you have to agree with that statement when it comes through just on page 21 of the 263 page graphic novel Alva in the Dark . It's been beautifully illustrated up to now in dark shadowy black and white, introducing a pair of burglars, Mini and Morten who have been given a tip where to find an apartment owned by a old man with a supply of gold. They are going to need Alva for this job, the young woman something of an acrobatic cat burglar, and she duly obliges for a cut. Maybe they should have thought more about it when a page earlier Alva says " Morten, I have a bad feeling about this place ", and you wonder why they haven't questioned earlier why an old man lives in a dump of a place when he apparently has a substantial hoard of gold. Realistically though, the lure of gold means a sign on the door of a concealed room saying LEAVE NOW is unlikely to be taken as a warning and more as a sign of ...well, isn't that i...

As you might expect, or hope, fantasy written with a Chinese cultural background and setting has a completely different feel and approach to the genre than the usual medieval settling of wizards, dragons, warring empires, ancient prophesies and long quests. That's a huge generalisation of course but it's an intentional comparison to reflect just how far away from the familiar we are in An Empire in the Clouds. Chinese-Canadian Ai Jiang's first novel-length work very much has its own interests and purpose. It's not quite as ambitious to stretch to a trilogy for a start, so without all the scene setting, you are thrown into the deep end (literally) of a water-based world with little preparation or time for adjustment, and no time wasted on information dumping. I was going to say 'grounding', but that would be a clash of metaphors as well as one too many. Still, there is time to get accustomed to the world and the principal character because, well, there's not ...