To The Last Page

Paris has recently seen an increase in drug related executions. That's usually a matter for the Drug Squad, but Captain Victor Coste's Crime 1 team in SDPJ 93, (Saint-Denis Police Judiciare) have been called in when a victim is discovered in a parking garage of an apartment block in Malceny, a HLM high-rise complex in a district that the police usually keep well away from. The victim has been taped to a chair and tortured before being killed in a unit where drugs are usually stashed. Three killings in a week, all drug related, have taken out three quarters of the crime drug bosses in the region meaning Crime 1 have to work alongside the Drug Squad.  Bad news for Coste, and for a few unfortunate elderly people the gangs have pressed into minding drugs and weapons in their apartments, but bad news also for the mayor of Malceny-Bobigny, Andrea Vesperini. She relied on the drug lords to bring her in guaranteed voters in exchange favours, jobs in city hall, free holidays and money u...

I really enjoyed Lewis Tronheim’s Bourbon Island 1730 , the versatile writer of the Lapinot series, autobiographical strips and long-running Donjon/Dungeon unconventional heroic fantasy series turning his hand to longer-form historical fiction with wonderful results and still retaining his own blend of absurdist humour. His anthromorphised characters don’t suit every story that the prolific writer creates, so often he enlists or is teamed up with other artists, collaborating with the greats of the French indie scene like Blutch, Sfar, Blain and Larcenet among others on the various Donjon series spin-offs. The same principle applies to his work on lighter mainstream comedy series, and for the historical spy comedy Venezia created in 1999, Trondheim’s witty, twisty espionage plotting benefits from the elegant, dynamic cartoonish artwork of Fabrice Parme. The series appears to only have run to two standard French 48-page volumes – both are collected together for this eBook edition fro...

Well there’s one thing you can say for sure about Naomi Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories and it’s that the author is not going to be faced with any complaints about false advertising. Escape Routes with its tag line “Step into a world less ordinary” offers exactly that across in this wonderful, simple and accessible collection that elevates everyday situations into something more insightful and meaningful. The desire to escape a world less ordinary is very much what the characters in each one of the stories is looking for and Naomi Ishiguro expresses it in a wonderful variety of situations and ways, all of them potentially relatable to anyone who has found themselves searching for direction or overwhelmed by modern day life. Nature often plays a part in showing potential escape, but it’s never that straightforward or easy and not everyone successfully finds the kind of escape they are hoping to find. The opening story, Wizards is perhaps the most troubling and ambitious o...

After a middle-volume hiatus that involved little more than our reluctant space pirates arriving on a new world and getting off it again, there’s some hope that the third volume of Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger series might get back to resolving some of the mysteries and intrigues that have arisen over the previous two books ( Revenger , Shadow Captain ). And it does, but in a book that feels considerably longer than the previous two combined, Bone Silence takes us on a slow and not always gripping journey to an outcome that at least feels appropriately grand in scale. But first the fearsome bauble hunters turned space pirates the Ness sisters, Fura and Adrana, and their diminished crew need to find new bones: alien skulls from an ancient unknown civilisation long before the current Occupation of the system that can be used by those skilled and gifted enough to communicate across distances. They settle for Mulgracen, hoping to arrive incognito with no upsets, but there was never much c...

Never judge a book by its cover they say, and that’s doubly true when it comes to graphic novels, where the cover art might be promising but the interior artwork often never quite lives up to it. Not so in the case of Black Water Lilies , where the interior art by Didier Cassegrain surpasses the cover with stunning imagery and measures up to the somewhat high demand of capturing its picturesque Normandy village location of Giverny very much in the spirit of Monet. In the case of Black Water Lilies however, and it is a ‘case’ since it’s a crime thriller, the evocation of Monet is central to the mystery and the metaphor of not judging a book by its cover also applies to the three characters that Michel Bussi (author of the original novel that this graphic novel is based upon) introduces at the start of this intriguing mystery. There’s an almost Agatha Christie-like elegance combined with brutality in the staged planning and, ahem, execution of the crime indicated on the cover and on the...

David Mark assembles an eccentric bunch of characters for his latest standalone book outside of his DS Aector McAvoy series (which isn’t exactly conventional in its characterisation either). Actually A Rush of Blood is populated almost exclusively with characters who are not just eccentric, but rather all of them have to one degree or another an element that leans towards downright weird or disturbing. East End Londoners evidently, and Mark puts them all to good use in the cause of a suitably dark tale on streets once stalked by Jack the Ripper. Most of this bunch congregate around the Jolly Bonnet, a gin bar in the East End that is also a kind of museum of historical medical curiosities (and I’m not just speaking to the clientele). There’s the proprietor Molly Shackleton, an ex-police officer who fantasises about being a Victorian prostitute stalked by Jack the Ripper. Her 11 year old daughter Hilda is relatively normal, but she’s afraid that something terrible has happened to Mesa, ...