To The Last Page

On the one hand, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a classic English country manor murder-mystery, but there’s a clue in the title that there’s perhaps a little more than this being a little different from the usual Agatha Christie pastiche. In as far as the murder-mystery question of who killed Evelyn Hardcastle at Blackheath manor, the usual suspects that can be found in a select group of notable society figures each with dark secrets are all in place. Explaining how Evelyn Hardcastle dies seven times however is a little more complicated. The fact that everything is not entirely what it seems is evident in the way that the reader is rather jarringly and unsettlingly thrown straight into a troubling and intriguing situation. Sebastian Bell finds himself inexplicably in the middle of the woods, screaming the name of a woman who appears to be being pursued by an attacker. He doesn’t know how he got there, and for a while can’t even remember his own name. It’s a bit like being ha...

Divided into four short parts, Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea appears to be a relatively simple and straightforward character study of three different people who we are led to believe will come together and connect in some way in the final part of the book. If that sounds like the novel is in reality three short stories that are tenuously linked together for the sake of novelistic purposes, in reality the technique actually captures something deeper about the nature of human experience, about life and the things that connect us all. The stories of Farouk, Lampy and John do however all appear to take place in complete isolation from one another. Certainly Farouk’s experience as a Syrian refugee is at least very different from the other two who live in the same part of the world around Limerick in Ireland, but the society and even the time period that Laurence (Lampy) and John don’t make it seem that they are likely to connect. Come together in a tragic situation they do however,...

It involves space travel to a distant habitable planet and a colony attempting to overcome the difficulties of creating a society on a new planet, so there are quite a few science-fiction areas of interest in Emma Newman’s Planetfall . For a while too there are several intriguing threads relating to the nature of the organic structure of God’s city that the travellers find on this strange world, as well as some guilty secrets, strange behaviour and unusual practices that seem to have developed in the short 22 year span that the new arrivals have spent on this new world. It’s soon apparent however that the SF elements are going to take second place to the exploration of human behaviour, which itself can be an interesting SF theme, but you are still left with a feeling that Planetfall has gone off course two-thirds of the way through. Certainly, the science that has permitted the Pathfinder Lee Suh-Mi and her team of acolytes to set out for some distant world is not particularly well de...