To The Last Page

Mark Billingham, in case you don’t already know it, likes to mess with the reader’s head a little. It’s not just for the sake of a neat little twist at the end of one of his thrillers, although he’s often quite effective at that, but it’s more in the way that he lays the ground for what develops. Their Little Secret starts out like a relatively straightforward investigation for DI Tom Thorne, but he suspects that there something strange lurking behind what seems like a common case of suicide, and since it’s a Mark Billingham thriller, you can be sure he’s not wrong about that. The seemingly ‘relatively straightforward’ and ‘common’ case of course turns out to be anything but relatively straightforward or common. It starts with the death of a woman throwing herself in front of an Underground train. Reviewing camera footage, there’s nothing to suggest that there is anything more to this than it seems, but Thorne has a bad feeling about it and attempts to look into what might have driven...

If you’ve been reading John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series you’ll have noticed a pattern forming around the different forms of evil that the private investigator has had to deal with over the course of the last sixteen books. With A Book of Bones , the seventeenth book in an exceptional and consistently brilliant series, events finally seem to be moving towards and coalescing around an apocalyptic conclusion, and it looks like everything is in place to bring about the total destruction of the world. So far you would have to say that Parker has always come out on top in his various encounters with evil entities, but it’s often been at a great personal cost and there have been serious consequences for Parker’s friends and family. There’s always remains a sense of unfinished business along the way however, and some of that carries over from the previous Charlie Parker book The Woman in the Woods into A Book of Bones . On his way to testify at a trial in Houston, Texas, Parker is divert...

Alastair Reynolds’s short stories and novellas can be seen as a testing ground for other ideas that lie outside the author’s varied space opera, space adventure universes of the Revelation Space, Revenger, Inspector Dreyfus or Poseidon’s Children series. A testing ground however doesn’t necessarily mean experimental since if anything Reynolds tends to turn to the shorter works in order to try his hand at other traditional SF tropes, some inspired by pulp science-fiction, and some inevitably work better than others. Permafrost is Alastair Reynolds’ latest novella-length story and it’s very much within a science-fiction field that Reynolds has only touched on before; time travel. To make a time-travel adventure credible requires some hard-science work on quantum physics, and Reynolds is bang up-to-date on recent developments on sending electrons back from the future in that field. It also requires some measure of creativity to explain the complexities and paradoxes that will inevitably ...

The first book in the latest Stephen Donaldson epic The Great God’s War played out along familiar fantasy fiction lines with little in the way of surprises, but there were signs – not least from the relative slimness of the book – that Seventh Decimate was just a prelude or pretext for a larger story to unfold. The War Within is indeed a rather more substantial book, or at least considerably longer than Seventh Decimate , and it does expand on there being more to this world than a long running war between the Amika and the Belleger, but it’s still very serious and slow moving and not in any real hurry to get to any major developments. In the first book, Seventh Decimate , the reason for the war between the Belleger and the Amika has long been forgotten or at least subject to very differing accounts. A crisis point however had been reached when the traditional means of sorcery or theurgy, the power of the Decimates used by Magisters to unleash lightning, earthquakes, famine etc. had m...

As she demonstrated with her previous last novel, the phenomenally successful He Said/She Said , Erin Kelly is a master of sinister throwaway lines, little phrases and nuances dropped into seemingly everyday situations. The intentionally misleading opening scene in Stone Mothers of a blindfolded woman being driven in a car is quickly resolved when it turns out to be a surprise trip organised by her husband Sam, but an air of suspense and concern carries over. It’s not just that the surprise turns out to be an expensive apartment or that it was converted from an old asylum, but Marianne’s reaction suggests that the there is something else that is massively disturbing about Marianne’s return to the Nazareth Pauper Lunatic Asylum. You can quickly discount the idea that Marianne might once have been an inmate at Nazareth hospital, as the Victorian asylum has been closed down for a quite a while, the methods of such ‘stone mothers’ long ago called into question, government reforms and poli...