To The Last Page

There’s plenty of humour to be found and a great deal of potential for further development (and even a rumoured TV series) in Bateman’s creation of the Mystery Man . A small independent bookseller, the “hero” is the owner of Belfast’s premiere crime specialist bookstore No Alibis (‘Murder is our Business’), who gets mixed up in a series of misadventures when customers start turning up to the shop looking for him to solve small cases now that the Private Detective next door seems to have closed-up business. Stolen leather trousers and a missing person he can deal with - just about - but when he gets involved in the Case of the Dancing Jew - not to mention mixed up with the girl from the jewelry shop across the road - it takes more than a few Twix and Starbucks' coffees to get to shake him out of his closeted existence.  A genuine bookshop in Belfast on Botanic Avenue, No Alibis, its owner and its customers don’t get perhaps receive the most flattering of depictions, but this is Bate...

Drawn to the city by a young boy she has met, a young girl of a romantic nature renames herself Columbine and travels to Moscow from the provinces to create a new life for herself. Although her Harlequin turns out to be a disappointment, he introduces her into a secretive group that the whole of the capital is talking about - the Lovers of Death, a small group of sensitive poets, each of them eagerly waiting their turn to die a romantic fin-de-siècle death by suicide. The close proximity with Death inspires them to create fine poetry until the moment that Death judges them as being worthy of being called to be her lover. The sudden rise of incidents of suicide, the victims leaving behind a final flourish of a poem as a suicide note, hasn’t gone unnoticed by the newspapers or by the authorities, each of whom try to infiltrate the group, fearing that the epidemic will spread and inspire others to end their lives. Following the calling of another one of their number to the other side, the...

If it bleeds, it leads. That’s the old adage that the press live by and the death of one old-time London gangster Charlie Hook, a former associate of the Krays, gives Laurie Lane’s struggling crime reporter a brief reprieve from being consigned to the motoring supplement section of the newspaper, or worse, redundancy and an investigation into irregularities in his expense account. Crime reporting clearly isn’t what it used to be, and neither is crime come to that, reflects Laurie Lane throughout this very entertaining novel. In fact, everything seems rather more complicated to Duncan Campbell’s aging old-school journalist (Campbell himself a long-time correspondent for the Guardian) , facing up to the lack of perks in a workplace now dominated by instant news feeds, on-line blogs, free newspapers, laptops and Blackberry’s. And it’s not just work that isn’t what it once was, but Laurie also adjust to a new lifestyle now that his marriage is in trouble, his daughter isn’t taking her A-le...

The wonderful thing about A Madness of Angels is how it takes the concept of sorcerers and magicians and places it in a present day setting in familiar London locations, finding mystical powers can be drawn from the lights, neon and communication highways of the modern metropolis and that regulations, by-laws and even the conditions of sale on an underground ticket all have the powers of ancient spells. Somehow, through these means, sorcerer Matthew Swift, having been killed two years earlier in what seemingly was a purge of the community by a powerful group known as The Tower, is now back walking on the streets, his consciousness sustained by a collective entity known as the electric blue angels, seeking to find and destroy this growing and dangerous threat. This isn’t of course an entirely original idea - London urban fantasy has been explored by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere , Alan Moore in From Hell , in works by Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd - but Kate Griffin’s book seems to chann...