To The Last Page

All the SF books I’ve read by Max Barry ( Jennifer Government , Lexicon ) have been very different in style and content, but at heart there always a distrust of higher authorities, particularly ones that are managed and influenced by big corporations. His latest novel Providence seems a little more of a traditional SF space adventure and his usual concerns lie mostly in the background, but they are ever-present in a variety of forms and – perhaps as reality starts to kick in – come very much to the fore as the novel progresses. It’s certainly not obvious at the beginning of Providence , which relates a first contact situation that humanity has with another intelligent alien race, creatures that they call salamander first discovered by scientists on the Coral Beach studying bacterial growth in space. Let’s just say that the salamander did not come in peace. The ship footage viewed back on Earth is quite shocking. Ever since then Earth has fighting a war in a far-off region of space wit...

Some might think that William Radford IV is a lucky man, aged 65 with a new 22 year old wife, but others might think that it’s Keisha who has hit the jackpot, a waitress from a Peckham high rise in a London nightclub, she’s married an old and very wealthy American businessman in Savannah, Georgia. She’s the fourth wife after the death of his William’s previous wife Eleanor. Whichever way you look at it, and believe me everyone in Savannah’s social circles are talking about it and have their own opinions, it tends to be the men who are drooling at William’s stunning new bride, while their wives aren’t quite as pleased. She’s young, she’s pretty and she’s black; she doesn’t belong there. That gender division of opinion applies to William’s business partner Jason Maddox and his wife Marcie, but it brings other complications. Jason has been hoping that William might spend a bit more time in Europe before coming back to retire with his new plaything and leave him in charge of the business. ...

“ When one man dreams alone, it is but a dream. When many dream together, it is the beginning of a new reality “. It’s funny how a reading of a book can take on a whole different perspective in the light of the times we are living in, and even act as a metaphor for our own times that might be different from what the author intended. The events that take place in The Colony takes on a whole new meaning and hit home all the harder in the light of present circumstances when – over a hundred years since the time of the events that take place here – the world again very much in a state of uncertainty on a scale that no one in has seen in their lifetime. The Colony deals with some real people and real-historical series of events in France (although repercussions were felt much wider in Europe) during an extraordinary period of upheaval following the industrial revolution. Increasingly disillusioned with how society was changing at the turn of the 20th century and how the ordinary working m...

If you’ve read any of his Eddie Flynn thrillers ( The Defence , The Plea , The Liar , Thirteen ), you probably don’t need anyone to convince you of Steve Cavanagh’s brilliance as a courtroom drama crime writer, but it’s going to be immediately apparent to anyone else who reads even the first 10 pages of his latest book Fifty Fifty . You can rely on Cavanagh to have you hooked from the get-go, and not just hooked but racing through the remainder of the 350 pages of this particular book with the added incentive that it looks like being a Eddie Flynn thriller like no other. The situation is clearly, concisely and grippingly laid out in those first 10 pages. Eddie Flynn, street con-artist turned high-flying but irreverent lawyer who nonetheless has considerably more integrity than the rest of his profession, is dealing with one of the most intriguing and difficult cases of his career. Or at least since the last one anyway, which was also the trial of the century, I believe. And yet the jur...

Seemingly unable to pace his writing to the requirements of a regular publisher’s schedule, it looks like David Mark has turned to other publishers and self-publishing in order to keep getting his books out there. By my reckoning, aside from the long running DS Aector McAvoy series (ninth book just published after Cold Bones , which I will definitely be getting to asap) and the occasional standalone book ( A Rush of Blood ), Mark now has two other series running; Blood Money , the first of a Nicolas Roe series that has just been published, and with Still Waters we have the beginning of a Lakeland Trilogy. And his output isn’t confined to just that. But let’s focus on the book in hand, Still Waters . The first of Mark’s independently published Lakeland Trilogy is based around Rowan Blake, a former journalist turned writer of a commercially failed but critically acclaimed true-crime investigative work. While he has the charm to get some people to open up to him with candid opinions and ...