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David Mark doesn't do 'normal' or straightforward crime fiction, does he? That much is evident from the far from typical nature of his main characters and their location in the Humberside Police Force. There's Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, a red-headed Scotsman of formidable height and build, fiercely determined with a firm moral outlook, but he's also polite, unwilling to offend and a highly sensitive individual. He has the deepest respect and admiration for his tough and uncompromising boss, Trish Pharaoh, who - as we've most recently seen in Dead Pretty , Mark's previous DS McAvoy novel - has something of an unconventional background and complicated family life herself. McAvoy also dotes on his wife, Roisin - a tiny firebrand of Irish Traveller heritage - and his baby daughter. It's that deep, all-consuming love for his wife that gets McAvoy involved in another case that is far from conventional, but also one that turns out to be a challenge as de...

There have been many books 'inspired' by The War of the Worlds  and many film versions, but surprisingly there has up until now never been a true sequel to H.G. Wells' seminal alien invasion classic. It's surprising because the conclusion of the original almost invites a response, certainly at least on the part of the Martians. Their invasion having failed over an unforeseen minor detail that had catastrophic consequences - the Martians being vulnerable to common earth bacteria relatively harmless to humans - you would think they would be working on a vaccine while they plan a new conquest of Earth, their need and determination to succeed now surely even greater than it was before. " They learned the hard way, and next time will come prepared ", one clear-headed voice observes in The Massacre of Mankind  about the inevitability of another Martian attack, and activity on the red planet in 1920 just thirteen years after the First War indicates that just such an ...

There's a blend of historical and personal in Mark Mills' Where Dead Men Meet , the story opening in 1937 in Paris before expanding on to other major cities in Europe that are in a period of uncertainty and fear about war spreading. It starts out like an espionage thriller, and it manages to keep up a sense of escalating danger as deals and double-deals are exposed, but as the story moves towards the family revelations of one individual caught up in it all, the journey takes on the character of being more of a personal journey. The death of a nun at the orphanage that looked after him comes as a terrible shock to Luke Hamilton. a former pilot and now minor British intelligence official in Paris, but it's not long before it becomes clear that it might have something to do with Luke's unknown parentage and the mysterious circumstances of his arrival at the orphanage as a baby. It's only when he is rescued from an attempt on his life by a man he meets in front of Picas...

The predictability and familiarity of the serial killer plot of Saul Black's second Valerie Hart thriller is both its weakness and its strength. Its weakness is that it's very much a of cat-and-mouse thriller in the Manhunter  or Silence of the Lambs  mode, where an uneasy relationship and even grudging respect builds up between the detective and the killer. It's a dangerous relationship to form as it can be one that gets into your head, and there are some images and thoughts one doesn't want put there. The strength of this familiar scenario is that not only is it still thrilling, but it gives the author enough the opportunity to delve into some very uncomfortable places to explore deeper questions about human behaviour, and Black proves to be very capable indeed. Six years prior to the events of the current situation in Lovemurder  Valerie Hart was involved in the case of two particularly twisted killers who sexually humiliated, tortured and abused six female victims b...

It might not have the most original of plots, but Mark Hill's The Two O'Clock Boy is a no-nonsense police thriller that grips the reader from the word go. Whether you find that it has anything interesting to offer in the backgrounds and personalities of its main police detective characters that offer any further potential for it being a continuing London police series, is however less certain. In terms of the actual case that is covered in The Two O'Clock Boy , we aren't kept waiting long and don't need to spend too much time getting to know the characters. A family is brutally murdered in the North London district of Tottenham, not far from the offices of recently promoted DI Ray Drake and DS Flick Crowley. One of the family members however inadvertently missed the trap that had been set up for them and reveals that it could well be related to some research his father was doing for a book. Those investigations were around a series of mysterious deaths of staff and...

Oliver Serang is a rare kind of writer. A professor in Mathematics and Computer Science, Neurobiology and Genome science, a researcher and scientist at the Liebnitz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, you can see how those fields of study all feed into the rather unusual writing process, giving his fiction a unique and surreal character. His first novel, Stay Close, Little Ghost  (2013) had a simple enough premise on a human level, dealing with a broken relationship, but Serang's writing managed to refract this experience through mathematical patterns, dreams, surreal imagery and a host of other styles and ideas that have little in common with conventional writing techniques. It's terrific then to see that style developed further into the science-fiction field in his latest book, At Ocean . Again, the story and its underlying human connection appears simple enough on the surface. As the world is bracing itself for the impact of a threatening comet, E...

Sarah Pinborough is a versatile and imaginative writer, working through crime, horror and sci-fi (notably in her Dog-Faced Gods trilogy) and as a YA author under the name of Sarah Silverwood. A lot of what is great about Pinborough's writing comes through in her latest novel 13 Minutes , a YA crime thriller. There's no SF or horror here, but in other ways, namely in its depiction of the attitudes and behaviour of modern teenagers, it's a very scary place indeed. There are dangers enough for any 16-year old girl in the world, and Natasha Howland, the most popular and beautiful girl at school, has been lucky enough to survive what appears to have been an attempt on her life. Found in a freezing river, her body functions have slowed down enough for her to be revived after being technically dead for thirteen minutes. When she is revived however, Tasha doesn't remember how she ended up in the river, but her perspective on the world seems to have changed slightly. Her relati...