To The Last Page

Maggy Garrisson is going to take a bit of figuring out. In the first book of a new series by Lewis Trondheim and Stéphane Oiry,  Maggy Garrisson Volume 1. “Give us a Smile, Maggy’, we don’t really know much about her background, her family, her relationship status: even her age is difficult to determine. She’s early 30s maybe, single at the moment and looking for a date, but a friend will do. The one thing we know for certain is that Maggy needs to earn some money and is looking for a job. There’s one other characteristic about Maggy that you can work out fairly quickly: she’s no fool. Her neighbour Suzanne has suggested that there might be an opening working for a Mr Wight, a Private Investigator, but Maggy only needs to walk through the door to realise that this is not going to be one of those situations where a clever and organised temp secretary changes the fortunes of a struggling near-alcoholic PI and becomes his glamorous sidekick solving elaborate crimes and celebrity murd...

Living volcano monsters – that’s a new one on me. Seeing things differently, even if it is in the rarefied genre of Japanese kaiju monster movies, is however just what you can expect from artist and writer Zander Cannon in Kajumax , now up to volume three in its collected editions. The same problem that Cannon applies to other rampaging giant lizards also applies to living volcano monsters; not just how you stop them in their tracks (lava flows?), but what do you do with them once they’ve been ‘decommissioned’? Well, you put them in prison obviously, into holding craters on the maximum security prison island of Kaijumax. Season One and Season Two , collecting the first twelve issues of the series, introduced some of the main players – or former players – who are now adjusting to a life that doesn’t involve crushing cities and squishing their inhabitants. Life in prison is no walk in the park for its inmates, they’re an ugly bunch of violent offenders, as you can imagine. Many of the ...

The promise of a sequel to Andrew Caldecott’s previous novel Rotherweird certainly took away some of the disappointment of arriving at a conclusion; such were characters, imagination and the rich eccentricity of the fantasy world that had been created by the author that it would have been a shame to end it with just one book. There was still an element of doubt remaining however where Wyntertide could go, since a great many ancient mysteries had been resolved and a number of secret identities uncovered, and a number of the main players – like Sir Veronal Slickstone – had been ‘eliminated’. Considering the enclosed nature of the world of Rotherweird, it was hard to see how the material could be further expanded without going over old ground again. There is another difficulty that presents itself when you begin Wyntertide . Such is the peculiar nature of the work, the wealth of characters and the nature of the writing itself, that it is initially very difficult to enter that world agai...

Claire North scares me. She has a way of showing the world we are living in – or not far off living in – in a way that is truly terrifying. It’s no surprise then that she can write a book that, as the title suggests, is effectively a rewrite of George Orwell’s 1984 for the sometimes even more horrifying reality of the post-1984 age. It’s no surprise either that 84K turns out to an unnervingly realistic and timely account of a world where everything has a price, and anything or anyone whose price is deemed as being minimally contributory …well, what’s the point of them? Coming from a small town, a town wholly dependent on the sponsorship of BudgetFoods, the man called Theo Miller – it’s not his real name, but what it stands for is important – has managed to escape from the kind of life that his background and upbringing have marked out for him, working as a patty or a drone in a factory. His father’s criminal connections get him into Oxford where the prospects are considerably differe...

Considering some of the cases that Tom Thorne has covered in Mark Billingham’s series, you think he must have done something badly wrong this time to get landed with an investigation that involves interviewing old ladies about their dead cats. Leaving aside previous serious errors of judgement in Thorne’s past, one even resulting in a demotion, there does actually prove to be a good reason to take this investigation a little more seriously. For a start, we’re talking about over 300 cases of cats being poisoned and ritually mutilated, all within a relatively small area of north London. The implication and reason for Thorne being asked to return to his old stomping grounds north of the Thames are of course that the torture of animals is a behaviour that psychologists have recognised as potentially a precursor to serial killing. That’s something that DI Thorne is very familiar with, but he comes up here with an interesting new angle on an old theme. Having just met up with old colleague P...

Sarah Pinborough has a varied back catalogue in a number of genres, from YA fiction to horror, fantasy and science-fiction, but her recent move to HarperCollins has seen her work head in perhaps more of conventional mainstream psychological thriller direction. There were genre elements to her previous novel Behind Her Eyes however which didn’t please everyone, but the book proved to be a popular bestseller. Her latest novel Cross Her Heart however is very much on more conventional ground in the very popular female paranoia/male aggression thriller genre. Even within that however, Pinborough demonstrates familiar qualities that elevate this above the crowd, but there is also another Pinborough characteristic that is a little more problematic with Cross Her Heart , and that’s a tendency to go somewhat over the top with unconvincing twists, revelations and resolutions. Even if it does feel rather conventional in its three-part, three-act structure, Cross Her Heart at least starts out p...