To The Last Page

Promising an Agatha Christie in space situation, the tag line “Eight astronauts. One Killer. No Way Home” would be a good enough hook for me, but there turns out to be more to Simon Morden’s One Way than that, and more indeed than it just a murder-mystery version of Andy Weir’s The Martian . For a start, the first crew to land on Mars are not highly trained astronauts, but a small team of no-hope criminals. Frank Kitteridge is one such inmate currently languishing in prison for the shooting and killing of a dealer who was selling drugs to his son. He’s going to be in prison for a very long time, unless he agrees to take part in a team that is being gathered and trained to set up a base on Mars that will be ready for the NASA astronauts who will follow. Considering the alternative, it’s an opportunity that is surely worth grasping; the only problem is that the rest of the team are all criminals too and not the sort of guys you want to be in close quarters with in a hostile environment

A large proportion of The Western Wind takes place within the dark confines of a makeshift priest’s confessional in the small village of Oakham in Somerset in 1491. It’s surprising the kind of minor infractions of thought and behaviour that the poor working people of the village consider grave enough to have to confess to the local priest, John Reve, but what is rather more worrying is how many of them, in the lead-up to Lent, are prepared to confess to the killing of Thomas Newman, one of the more prominent and wealthy men in the district. Thomas Newman is or was a man of the world, educated, enlightened, well-travelled, steeped in other cultures and ideas, observant of Christian religion but aware of other ideas and belief systems, so it’s a shock to the whole community when it is reported that he has been seen washed down the river that borders Oakham. The implications are enormous for the village, as Newman had long been an instrumental force in efforts to have a bridge built to r

A circus is always a good setting for glamour and intrigue. More than any other show-business career, it has the reputation of wild and dangerous glamour, a group of misfits and outcasts from society living together in close contact and in competition for attention with one another. As much as they resort to more colourful and glittering costumes and pile on the make-up to enhance the illusion, there’s always a sense of disillusionment underneath, a sense that they still regard themselves as freak show exhibits, relying on their otherness to make a living. It would not be surprising then that occasionally professional competitiveness, personal weaknesses and romantic inclinations come together to spark off tensions, and even murder. Megan Rose Gedris’s graphic novel series Spectacle has all of the colourful drama and seedy glamour that you associate with circus life, but she also has a few other more unusual elements to throw into the mix that promises to keep the series entertaining

It sounds like a fairly generic title for a thriller, but Olivia Tiernan’s Too Close to Breathe perhaps tells us a little more about the nature of the book that you might think, and perhaps even more than the author realises. Set in Dublin, this pacy serial killer thriller introduces a new police detective, DCS Frankie Sheenan, a Garda police detective investigating serious crime in Dublin, where the cases she is involved with do seem to be rather close to home. In this first DCS Sheenan novel, Frankie has only just returned to duty after suffering a knife wound to the head while investigating another case involving a dangerous killer. That case is about to come to trial and Frankie will soon be called as a witness. Still suffering to some extent from pain and trauma from the injury, she is nonetheless deemed fit to return to work by her boss, who asks her to look into a new investigation. Eleanor Costello, a microbiologist and university lecturer has been found dead in her home, an a

All men are not created equal. History has shown that life is a survival of the fittest, and in the futuristic world of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising that fact is as true as it has ever been, the implications of which have been repeated in power struggles through human history. But is it a case that all men are not created equal or a case that there is just not a level playing field? Pierce Brown’s stunning SF Red Rising trilogy took mankind’s propensity for power to the stars, to the colonisation of the planets and moons of our solar system, where the inequalities between the social classes is even more apparent. In this society each individual belongs to a colour caste, with the Golds the ruling aristocracy at the top and the working class miners of the Reds on Mars at the bottom. One’s colour is built into one’s genetic make-up and there is no way of rising between colours. Everyone knows their place, and in case they don’t the rules are ruthlessly enforced. One man however, Darrow, a