To The Last Page

Welcome to the shadowy nether regions of the British secret service. No, not the high-flying, glamorous licenced to kill types, but rather the drones who do all the basic administration, cataloguing, storing, retrieving and crunching data. There's low and there's low however and if you're a 'slow horse' working in Slough House, as you might know from Mick Herron's previous two novels in the Slough House series , your career has taken a turn for the worst and is unlikely to see any improvement. Can't be the most exciting job to have in MI5, you'd think, but you'd be surprised how dangerous office politics can be in such a place. Misfits, losers, recovering alcoholics, agents whose operations have taken an unfortunate turn of events that they haven't recovered from; all of them seem to end up in Slough House. But they are still intelligence and they aren't stupid, even if they act like it sometimes. Take Catherine Standish for instance in Real ...

M R Carey's Fellside isn't a novel that fits any easy category, yet somehow it manages to be an outstanding work on every level. It's part prison drama, it's part crime-thriller, it's part courtroom drama, and it's part fantasy. Mainly however - and possibly the reason it's successful on everyone of those levels, is that it's a great human drama, achieved just as much through the secondary characterisation as through the lead character whose life story spans all these genres. It wasn't a great life in the first place. At the start of Fellside , Jess Moulson wakes up in a hospital, unsure how she got there, her badly burnt face having undergone extensive reconstruction grafts. This is where her heroin addiction has taken her, the cheap run down flat that she shared with her boyfriend John Street destroyed in a fire, both of them scarcely making it out of the building, leaving Jess with a face destroyed beyond recognition. Worse than that, the fire th...

Sitting somewhere between regular crime fiction and urban fantasy Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts  might not sit entirely satisfactorily in either camp. It has other peculiarities in its characterisation that also suggest being neither one thing nor another, but the ambiguity could be seen to actually work in its favour. At the very least, the nature of the crimes in its London setting and the implications they have for a wider view of the world (and other planes of existence) are fairly ambitious. There are two strands to the crime investigation undertaken by London police detective DI Jonathan Dark here. In one of them, a blind woman is being stalked and threatened by a dangerous psychopath. Maria is a mudlark, searching for objects on the banks of the Thames and one of her digs has turned up a grisly find; an engagement ring left by Maria's stalker, still attached to the removed finger of its previous owner. Rather sinister in its own right, DI Dark however discovers tha...

Don't let the simple ordinariness of the title fool you; there's nothing mundane about the occupation the situation that nurse Harper Willows finds herself in when she first meets the fireman of Joe Hill's latest novel. Any semblance of familiarity for the reality of the world as we know it disappears after the first couple of pages in The Fireman , Hill throwing us into a terrifying situation where not only the whole social structure of the USA collapses rapidly right in front of your eyes, but it would appear most of the world goes to hell with it. It's not pleasant reading, and I mean that in more ways than one. Tapping into a growing trend of works imagining environmental or viral devastation leaving the remaining population struggling for survival in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, Joe Hill describes a dire situation where the world has been overrun by a deadly virus of uncertain origin known as Dragonscale. People are spontaneously igniting in the streets, consume...