To The Last Page

There is a feeling that the crime investigation and the introduction of a new police detective team in Burned and Broken  feels a little too low-key to make much of an impact on a very crowded genre. It would be a shame if that were the case because - without wishing to make any pun on the title or the nature of one of the deaths here - Mark Hardie's debut is something of a slow burner. By the time you get to the end of the Burned and Broken , you will feel however that the author has methodically worked through a substantial and credible case with real impact, and in the process has established a series with much more potential. There are two separate cases or investigations in Burned and Broken , but you will not be surprised to find that they will eventually become linked. In one case a young girl Donna Freeman is trying to understand why her friend Alicia died and why the Essex police force are doing nothing to further the investigation. The case would appear to be tied to the

Kei Miller's Augustown is a rich and entertaining evocation of all the colour and life of Jamaica, but more than trawling through the surface diversity of the island, it uses storytelling, folklore and myth to delve much deeper into the history of its people, as well as examining the nature and power of storytelling itself. There's one story in Augustown that on its own aspires to the mythological and to religious revelation that is central to the people and their history and that's the story of the flying preacherman, Alexander Bedward. In 1920, the preacher announced that on the night of the 31st December he would ascend floating into the skies, walk around in heaven and return to save his people and bring them to Zion. It's a tale that will eventually inspire them towards revolution against the forces of evil but not for a while yet. The tale is related by blind Ma Taffy sixty-two years after the event and, having been present at it, it's a different version fro

Maybe it's because we're close to the same age, but I was won over to Sylvia Patterson's memoir of her days as a music journalist by a statement early in the book I'm not with the band ; " The post-punk era, roughly '78 to '83 ", she opines " was arguably the most richly dynamic of all musical time ". You don't need to take Patterson's word or mine to see the validity of this viewpoint, as the current BBC Four re-runs of Top of the Pops from this period at the very least highlight the contrast between what came before and what we now know followed. Unfortunately, Patterson's career as a music journalist starts out on Smash Hits in 1986, by which stage pop music was in terminal decline or had at least stagnated into manufactured pap of Stock Aiken Waterman, Bros and Brother Beyond. Or had it? Patterson's memoir presents a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a period of pop music neglected for the nostalgia for the boom years of

Alastair Reynolds' epic generational and universe spanning new trilogy, Poseidon's Children , is undoubtedly an ambitious one, but like the elephants that form such a part of Blue Remembered Earth , the first book in the trilogy is slow and ponderous as it sets about establishing a background for the far reaches to be explored later. There are some great ideas that make the journey worthwhile - as there often is with Reynolds - but the long-drawn out trail for answers makes it something of a slog to get through. Blue Remembered Earth introduces the Akinuya family, a wealthy family who in 2161 run a successful technology business, one that the mysterious adventurer Eunice has done much to establish. Two of the youngest members of the family have chosen a different direction however, Geoffrey in Tanzania working on research into elephant behaviour using mind-link technology, Sunday - his sister - an artist living on the Moon. Following the death of the matriarch Eunice, the busi