To The Last Page

Isabel Ashdown's Little Sister is a thriller that pushes all the right buttons of suspicion and paranoia, but for a long time you can't help thinking that it is missing some important detail.  hat of course can be a positive in a thriller, withholding some information until new facts, new revelations, resurfaced memories and characters come to light or are seen in a different light as the drama develops. The sense of order that has been maintained up until now no longer feels right, something has knocked the world off-kilter and anything that hasn't been built on a solid foundation is going to show cracks and fracture.  Little Sister  certainly demonstrates just how true that is as we get to know its characters and their family backgrounds. What Little Sister  seems to lack however is a sense of urgency over what you would think is the central drama of the crisis: a baby has been abducted, and yet everyone seems to be more concerned with covering up their own failin...

There's one person you don't want to target with if you're a criminal and thinking about kidnapping a child and ransoming her for 10 million bucks. Well, one person apart from former hustler turned lawyer and all-round action hero Eddie Flynn, who rescued his own daughter from the hands of the Russian mafia in Steve Cavanagh's first novel The Defence . Apart from Eddie Flynn though, there's one other person whose child it would be better not to try to kidnap and that's the guy who runs a multinational business operation that specalises in dealing with kidnap and ransom negotiations with everyone from from Somalian pirates to Al Quaeda terrorists and South American crime cartels. Any yet in The Liar , Cavanagh's third Eddie Flynn case, someone has indeed kidnapped the daughter of security businessman Lenny Howell. Something clearly doesn't add up here. But then if you've read any of Steve Cavanagh's Eddie Flynn books , you'll come across a lot...

The nature of a post-apocalyptic world is one that we are becoming increasingly familiar with from numerous recent books and movies. Everyone should be prepared for it and you'll all know by now just what it takes to survive; carry a gun, keep to yourself, keep moving and trust no-one. The question of what causes the disaster that is coming any day now won't make much of a difference. Whether it's a virus, an environmental catastrophe, an economic collapse or a nuclear holocaust (the most likely candidate at the moment), you're safer off alone. Inevitably however, people are drawn together to seek extra protection or share resources, and when groups get together, that's when the trouble really starts. G X Todd's Defender , the first in a four-part Voices series, doesn't stray too far away from a fantasy/horror template that has been largely defined by Stephen King's The Stand . The nature of the disaster here isn't immediately clear, but it has resul...

The writing is as elegant in its creation of mood, and that mood remains quite sinister in John Connolly's 15th Charlie Parker thriller, but it does initially feel like not much has progressed this time in A Game of Ghosts . There certainly don't seem to be any great leaps towards a final endgame that seemed to be drawing closer in some of the previous books and the changes that do occur here seem to be more subtle and personal than apocalyptic in nature, but they could prove to be significant in the long run, or indeed in the near future. The immediately preceding books established a significant change in the world that Connolly's PI Charlie Parker is operating in. It's one where the boundaries between supernatural evil entities and the real world are now a little more fluid. Evil is at large in the world, its presence becoming more pervasive, with the traffic running both ways and blurring the usual strict demarcations. The escalating horrors are starting to suggest s...