To The Last Page

The initial set up of La Reine Noire is a little low key at first when two strangers turn up in Chanterelle, a small village in Lorraine region.  The village has seen better days, but since the decline of the Durand sugar refinery, its operations moved to Indonesia, it's been in terminal decline.  With the arrival of the two strangers however Chanterelle is suddenly a place of interest again with talk of the La Reine Noire (The Black Queen) factory stack that dominates the local landscape being put back into action by Spātz, the owner who originally closed the factory, now the mayor of Chanterelle. The two recent arrivals however aren't exactly strangers, but they do have identities that they want to keep hidden. One is a man dressed completely in black, his eyes always covered by dark sunglasses.  He's now known as Mata, an assassin who works for a Chinese gangster in Indonesia, but in the village he is recognised as Toto Wotjeck, the son of a Polish immigrant worker, ...

Although he’s very well known for his young adult Artemis Fowl books, Highfire is not Eoin Colfer’s first work for older readership, that being his wonderfully amusing and violent noir crime novel Plugged , with its follow-up Screwed . Having nailed, plugged and screwed that genre, you can be fairly sure that Eoin Colfer is capable of bringing the same irreverent and amusing character with his own personal stamp on the science-fiction genre. I’m not sure what I expected from Eoin Colfer when I heard that he was bringing out a science-fiction novel – somehow I imagined something in space – but I certainly wasn’t expecting Highfire to be about the last known dragon in the world, laying low in a Louisiana bayou on a La-Z-Boy, wearing a Flashdance t-shirt, watching Netflix on cable. Since that image occurs briefly in the prelude, I imagined it must be a metaphor or something, because immediately after that we are in a more familiar – but not particularly SF – Eoin Colfer Plugged world o...