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Life isn't always fair. Life also has a way of repeating itself, but that's perhaps because we never entirely are able to break away from the past. But there are lessons that can be learned from the unfairness of life and from past mistakes in the case of Zoe Maisey, the 'Perfect Girl' of Gilly MacMillan's second novel. It's a strong theme and it's one that the author impressively builds into the very foundation and structural framework of this terrific little thriller in such a way that the characterisation and the crime elements form an inseparable bond. The past and the present are interwoven then into a book that is almost equally divided into two parts.  The first half itself is split across a significant Sunday night and Monday morning that results in a death within Zoe's family, but it's the past that lies heavily upon those events and determines how each of the characters responds to the situation. The past is one where 17 year-old Zoe is try

There's so much backstory to catch up with at the start of Redemption Road  that you might think it is the latest in a long running series featuring North Carolina police detective Elizabeth Black. John Hart however doesn't write books frequently enough to develop a long running series, but he makes up for it by bunging in a career's worth of cases and personal drama for Liz Black into just one book. You can't help think however that, as exciting a crime novel as this makes Redemption Road , it's stretching things to try to take it all in one go, even if the history extends back a number of years. Redemption Road  begins then with the hangover from at least two cases that to all intents and purposes have been already "solved". One of them involves Adrian Wall, a former police detective who was once a partner of Elizabeth Black on the force, as well as being the inspiration for her career in the police. He has just served 13 years in prison for the murder o

There's an element of fanboy excitement in Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds taking up the challenge of continuing the adventures of Arthur C. Clarke's space explorer Howard Falcon in The Medusa Chronicles , but there's another relevant reason for doing it. The hero of Clarke's 1971 novella A Meeting With Medusa was cybernetically rebuilt after an accident piloting a balloon, the mechanical enhancements permitting him to take part in the first manned mission to Jupiter. The spirit of the novella was partly boy's own SF adventure, but like most of Arthur C. Clarke's work, it dealt with the need to continue with the advancement of scientific investigation and exploration, and through it to better understand and develop the capacity of mankind. Science, technology, cybernetics and biological enhancements have advanced considerably in the time since Clarke's original novella, and a lot more is known about the planets in the solar system and about what lies b

Stephen Leather's latest novel comes at a time of heightened tensions following the terrorist attacks in Paris. Surely it's only a matter of time before something similar happens in London? Leather has come up with a worst-case scenario in First Response  that ought to be a nightmare for anyone in the UK to read, but particularly anyone living or working in London. Nine suicide bombers have taken hostages in various locations across the city demanding the release of six ISIS prisoners from Belmarsh high security prison. It's almost inconceivable then, given that kind of situation and real-life parallels, that the novel could be anything but tense and frightening, but somehow Leather manages to completely mishandle it at every step. First of all, there are doubts about the likelihood of the situation described here. It's surely stretching credibility to believe that nine suicide bombers could slip under the radar of the security forces and almost simultaneously set thems