To The Last Page

Digging up the duke The Dead Duke, his Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse  is another fascinating entry into the growing genre of real-life Victorian and historical murder-mystery investigations, but there are a few unusual features that distinguish Piu Marie Eatwell's study of the strange case of William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland. It all begins when a woman appears before the court with the absurd claim that the duke lived a double life as a furniture salesman Thomas Charles Druce, running a successful department store in the Baker Street Baazar. And not only that, but he also fathered three illegitimate children and a further three after he was married to a woman called Annie May. The woman claims that one of these children - her husband - consequently has claim to the Portland millions. This however proves to be only the starting point for a complex investigation that has huge repercussions and a number of startling twists and turns over the decades...

Queer as folk'd This is a nice little bonus for anyone who has been waiting patiently/impatiently (depends if you've been reading it since its ebook original publication or not, but I guess it also depends on whether you're an impatient person or not) for the concluding book of Laurence Donaghy's Folk'd trilogy. If you haven't read any of the Folk'd books before, this small but substantial untold episode will also serve as a good standalone example of the author's work, although it's not the best place to start, revealing as it does the 'special' nature of the Morrigan family. Otherwise it's business as usual, this time with Danny's father Tony Morrigan as the unlikely successor to Cú Chulainn in the on-going struggle between the mortals of modern-day Ireland and the world of ancient Irish legends, fairies, demons and spiders. Oh yes, giant spiders too - hundreds and thousands of the unthinkably oversized monsters. This is not a tale...

There's no doubt that Dorothy Tse's stories exhibit a  wonderful degree of colourful ideas and imagery if they are viewed simply as poetic surrealism. The dream-like quality of the writing is reminiscent of Kafka and Murakami, but there's a specific Chinese perspective and sensibility in their content and their cultural references. If you scratch beneath the surface however and divest the stories of the self-consciously imposed imagery that they have been dressed up in, the technique doesn't really provide any great depth of insight into their situations. Take ' The Love between Leaf and Knife ' for example. That's an evocative title, but essentially all the author has done is dress up what in reality is a dull domestic tale of a couple attempting to gain the moral ground and the upper hand in their relationship by renaming the husband and wife Leaf and Knife, and pushing the lengths they take their animosity to extremes. It doesn't alter the fact the un...