To The Last Page

Time-travel is always a fascinating idea to play with; a utopian ideal that we can control our destinies, the future altered by reshaping the past, fixing all the mistakes we’ve made individually and as a species. There are pitfalls of course, and somehow in almost all fiction and movies it never seems to turn out quite as planned. So fascinating an idea is it however that you can’t help but feel excited right from the start of Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes when you discover that Polly Nader is contemplating a jump into the future, even though it’s only from 1981 to 1993. We’ve already been in 1993 and as I recall it wasn’t that big a deal making the journey in real time. This 1993 and 1981 that An Ocean of Minutes deals with however are slightly different from the ones we’ve lived through, and for Polly it’s a leap into the unknown but a necessary leap. In 1981, a flu pandemic has gripped not just the USA, but much of the world. Polly and Frank had been hoping to get married at the...

As is often the case with Fred Vargas and her Commissioner Adamsberg cases, strange things happen, sometimes an almost supernatural side tapping into dark myths, but always something bizarre, something never encountered before. It's only Adamsberg for example who would have strangeness follow him across the English channel at the start of Un lieu incertain , attending a conference in London on the Flow of Migration, and be greeted with the sight of 17 shoes arranged facing the gates of Highgate Cemetery, each of them still containing the severed feet of their owners. Despite being very obviously an Adamsberg kind of problem, he tries to keep away from this one, finding himself occupied with another extreme case of his own back home. Pierre Vaudel, a retired journalist, 78, independently wealthy, has been found dead in his home. Or not so much found as obliterated, someone taking great care to cut up and hammer the pieces of his body into small fragments that are scattered across hi...

Without even having to read the biographical information, you can tell that Peter Heller has experience of outdoor activities: climbing, canoeing, fishing, camping, surviving in the wilds. It’s not just that a love for nature that comes through in the writing, but an understanding of its rhythms, a respect for its power, its danger. That was evident in his most successful book to date The Dog Stars , a wonderfully refreshing humanist addition to the otherwise quite pessimistic post-apocalypse genre, focussing as it did on a Hemingway-esque exploration of man and nature, people in their surroundings, surviving, alert to danger; danger coming most often from other people. You get a sense of similar unease very quickly in Heller’s latest book, The River . Two friends, Jack and Wynn are on a canoeing trip along a Canadian river through a series of lakes that takes them out into Hudson Bay. The two young men share a love for the outdoor life, for self-sufficiency, but perhaps also because o...

Consigned to Slough House, the dumping ground for the British Intelligence service, the intention is to keep those agents who have screwed up in the past out of harm's way. And yet, Jackson Lamb's sorry little unit can't seem to keep out of trouble. Even more improbably in Dead Lions , someone back at headquarter in Regents Park has decided to involve them in an operation, taking them away from their tedious administrative tasks and actually set them loose in the field. You'd think that Min Harper and Louisa Guy might be just a bit suspicious, particularly as their previous dealings have shown that James 'Spider' Webb is not someone to be trusted, but an op is an op, and it beats rotting away doing mundane time-wasting tasks in Slough House. All Webb wants is for them to 'vet' and look out for a Russian Oligarch and oil businessman Arkady Pashkin, who is due to visit London. Webb has his own reasons for the meeting, and by involving Slough House he obvio...

It takes a little while before you know where it is going, but if you think no crime has taken place at the start of Cruel Summer , you haven’t been paying attention. And in some ways that’s the point of M.R. Mackenzie’s writing here; some crimes are more or less invisible to the general public. There’s no blood-soaked body lying in the snow of Kelvingrove Park, as there was in the author’s first novel In The Silence , but you can be sure that the focus on a Scottish MSP and his ambition to become the leader of the Scottish Conservative party disguises any number of sins against the community, with policies that have undoubtedly killed more than just one person. As it happens though Dominic Ryland has another uglier side to his personality, as Zoe Callahan discovers when she is out on a bender one night in Glasgow. Coming around in a guest house, she overhears two men talking about clearing up the rape of a woman in the room next to her, a woman who happens to be Zoe’s neighbour Jasmin...