To The Last Page

One of Mark Billingham's great strengths as a writer of crime fiction has always been his ability to create and describe realistic characters from all walks of British life. Sometimes it feels like there are a few tokenisms thrown in there and a lot of unnecessary casual racist and sexist banter - particularly among the team in his Tom Thorne novels - but even if they are often unpleasant, there are realistic and identifiable character traits being played upon here and it's often for a definite purpose. It's through the use of some very specific English traits that Billingham often finds a propensity towards hatred, intolerance, bad behaviour that in some extreme cases can lead to criminal activity. It's a pity then that Billingham's signature DI Tom Thorne novels have been so inconsistent of late. Perhaps it's over-familiarity with characters that have overstayed their welcome, but the usually reliable characterisation seems to be increasingly let down by some

I have to admit that Hemingway's Fiesta (or 'The Sun Also Rises') is one of my favourite novels. It's a work that - along with Hemingway's lifestyle - has inspired many people to set out to live life to the full and experience life as an adventure. Andy Rumbold's The Last Fiesta  could be seen as a tribute to Fiesta  - even the synopsis reads like a virtual updated rewrite of Hemingway's masterpiece - but it's clear that the author and his characters are well aware of that fact. And perhaps that's the intention. Rumbold's version of The Sun Also Rises  is set in 1995. Dan has been living in Santander in self-imposed exile from England, running away from a failed relationship with a girl who has since married his brother. Fully aware of his own failings, recognising that there's nothing glamorous about living in shabby accommodation and teaching at a school in the north of Spain, Dan doesn't romanticise his situation. There is perhaps a m

As far as Carter Blake's work at finding people goes, his latest assignment in The Time to Kill seems to be relatively straightforward and doesn't necessarily have to lead to someone dying in the process. For the former secret ops CIA agent operating 'freelance', that's not always something you could count on in Mason Cross's two previous Carter Blake novels, but what harm can there be tracking down a regular person, a mere amateur who thinks it's easy to steal computer secrets and then go into hiding without leaving any trace? Obviously things don't turn out to be all that simple and it doesn't take too long to find out why things might become a bit more complicated. It doesn't actually take long for a man of Carter Blake's experience to track down Scott Bryant, a software developer who has absconded with a flash drive containing the next big thing since Facebook. Bryant plans to sell MeTime to a competitor and 'disappear' with a ni

The impending collapse of America (who cares about the rest of the world?) has been speculated on quite a lot in recent fiction, whether it's from viral, environmental or meteorological catastrophe, global warming resulting in the melting of icecaps and flooding, or in the drying up of scarce water resources. Sometimes it's a double or triple-whammy of one or more of these factors combining in quick succession. Whatever the reason, it soon becomes clear that the social balance that supports civilisation is a fragile one and what lies on the other side of it is frightening. The pending collapse of the world (read: American) economy might seem like it's a much less interesting prospect for a novel, albeit the one most likely to happen in the immediate future, but it has the potential to be just as devastating. It might be hard to really care however that those who will be hit hardest are those with the most to lose - the richest one percent. Initially then, Lionel Shriver'

"Twin Peaks in the 1800s" is the hookline for David Sanger's debut novel All Their Minds in Tandem , and it promises intrigue, mystery, family secrets and hidden affairs, all with a supernatural element of horror associated with them, all done in period costume. Inevitably, it doesn't quite live up to this promise, and it's not just because it's unlikely that the author would top the wild imagination of David Lynch. Once any preconceptions are put aside however, the novel largely succeeds on its own terms. The similarities with Twin Peaks are there, but only if you want to look for them and establish vague parallel connections that aren't really intended. If you want, you could see the stranger who arrives in New Georgetown, West Virginia as a kind of Dale Cooper figure. Emerson, who advertises his services as 'The Maker', has mysterious abilities that allow him to see into the lives and dreams of people, manipulating or uncovering lost memories.