To The Last Page

You shouldn’t ever confuse an author with his characters, otherwise I imagine you would find Stephen King a very disturbed individual and, judging by how many serial killers operate in the crime fiction genre, you’d need to be wary about attending too many writing festivals, conventions and book signings. I’d even give J K Rowling a wide berth, just to be on the safe side. I’m fairly sure however that Roger Keen is a nice guy, but you can never know for certain. I mean, how can you really know what goes on in the mind of a writer who imagines indulging in the stalking and brutal murder of critics, so-called friends and literary associates who he believes have ignored and slighted him over the years? Someone who not only imagines killing people in meticulous detail, but who seems to have put an awful lot of research into it. All for the sake of literature of course. Nick Chatterton (or should that be Roger Keen) not only indulges in such fantasies in Literary Stalker but he also sets a...

Jane Harper’s debut suspense thriller The Dry was a good way of delving into the personal background of her Australian police detective Aaron Falk, even if it didn’t really relate to his area of expertise in an AFP agent investigating financial crime and tended to fall back on some unconvincing crime thriller conventions at its conclusion. Force of Nature , Harper’s follow-up to The Dry , integrates much better the crime angle, the financial investigation, Falk’s local knowledge and family background and the nature of the challenges faced in conducting a crime investigation in the remote and dangerous areas of the Australian bushland. And more besides. Force of Nature is a much more confident and assured piece of writing from an author who is establishing her own very distinctive field here. Tourists and hikers often get lost in the Giralang Ranges bushland, and even ‘Corporate Retreat’ team-building exercises can run into problems, but something goes very wrong with one such expedit...

Ann Leckie made a big splash with her galaxy spanning Imperial Radch trilogy of books, the first of the series, Ancilliary Justice , winning Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Provenance , the author’s first standalone book outside the series is nonetheless set in the same Radchaai universe, but although political matters, conspiracies and diplomatic incidents related to the Radch and other the alien races play an important part in what occurs, the new book is not an expansive space opera, but something more of a science-fiction murder-mystery comedy. The person who inadvertently finds themselves at the centre of a potentially major diplomatic incident is Ingray Aughskold, the foster-daughter of Netano Aughskold, a District Representative in the Third Assembly on Hwae with ambitions to rise higher to Prolocutor. Ingray is in competition with her foster-brother Danach to win the favour of her mother and be appointed her heir, but she knows her intelligent, devious brother has a m...

With his second novel Stephen Burke’s subject of interest appears to be more readily identified, but The Reluctant Contact expands on and shows greater refinement of the historical and political content seen in his debut novel The Good Italian . Even though they come at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the common theme of both novels seems to be around the incompatibility of adapting a political or ideological utopia to real human sentiments. It’s the human element however that is more tightly focussed in The Reluctant Contact , but the espionage side is also convincingly handled in the novel’s Cold War thriller situation. In contrast to The Good Italian , where the subject was love in the time of fascism, set in 1935 in Mussolini-era Italian occupied Eritrea, The Reluctant Contact is about love in a colder climate; in 1977 in a Soviet mining post on the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago. Pyramiden is a model outpost that operates very much to the ideals of communism, and despit...

In some respects Sleeping Beauties is a fairly run-of-the-mill serial-killer case that doesn’t have anything new or imaginative to add to the text-book psychology and psychopathology of the killer or to the police investigation methods used to track him down. There is however one crucial difference that sets Jo Spain’s book apart from the rest and it’s a feature that is really the dominant theme in a her DI Tom Reynolds books; it’s another means of exploring deeper, hidden aspects of Irish society that many would prefer remained unacknowledged and forgotten. In Sleeping Beauties , Spain’s third DI Tom Reynolds book, five bodies have been discovered buried in the beauty spot of Glendalough in Co. Wicklow. It’s soon apparent that the bodies are of young single women who have been abducted as year apart, kept alive for some time and then strangled. That in itself makes the killer quite dangerous, but what is even more disturbing is that he appears to be targeting vulnerable women of a c...

It’s difficult to imagine a book without a single human character, but it is indeed the case that the entire human population of Earth has already been wiped out by the start of C.Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust , leaving only robot Artificial Intelligence behind. In fact, it was robots who managed to override their programming who were responsible for the wars that have led to the total extinction of humanity. Humans were overrated anyway, their organic structures and emotional inhibitors preventing them from matching what could be achieved by an AI’s huge processing power, superhuman memory and superior intelligence, but what has followed is by no means a robot utopia. AI simulacrum HS8795-73, otherwise known as Brittle, was a Caregiver unit before the wars, designed to assist and provide company for aged and ailing humans. None of this however prevented Brittle from playing her role in the extinction of humanity when it came to the crunch and it’s hard to say she has any regrets, but t...

Rene Denfeld writes about what she knows, and what she is passionate about is people who have been unjustly subjected to terrible and inhumane treatment. That much was clear from her first novel The Enchanted , which drew on her experience as an investigator on Death Row cases. The author however has also worked on cases of child abductions and sex trafficking victims, so you can imagine that she knows and cares about the subject of The Child Finder . This time however, in her second novel, Denfeld’s writing doesn’t quite live up to the demands of the subject. In The Child Finder , the investigator is Naomi Cottle, a young woman who works in an unofficial capacity on child abductions when the police authorities have given up and the press have lost interest and moved on to another news story. The parents never give up however and neither does Naomi if she believes that something can be found - good or bad - to put the minds of the distraught parents to rest. Naomi is good and gets resu...