To The Last Page

Eduardo Mendoza never disappoints with the comic possibilities of his protagonist of El misterio de la cripta embrujada , El laberinto de las acietunas and La aventura del tocador de señoras and with the peculiarities of Barcelona and its inhabitants, as it tries to keep up in its own unique way with modernisation, globalisation and, in the case of El enredo de la bolsa y la vida , with the economic downturn and international terrorism.  The unnamed and unfortunate former asylum inmate is trying to keep to the straight and narrow, but it's proving difficult during the global economic crisis. His ladies' hairdressing business in a less than salubrious part of Barcelona isn't doing as much business as the Chinese variety market across the street and the bank are taking all his money. A former fellow inmate and handsome Tony Curtis lookalike Rómulo el Guapo has a proposition for him but despite his current predicament, he knows enough about his friend's previous escapade...

Following his wonderfully life-affirming view of the apocalypse in the delightful Not Forgetting the Whale – a situation that we can much more readily identify with and a reassurance that is very much needed in these pandemic times – John Ironmonger returns to a similar theme of an individual with extraordinary memory abilities that was there in his first novel The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder . Here, in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild , it’s not just a catalogue of all the experiences gathered over 20 years of a life, but a far more expansive look at life and experience gathered across several tumultuous centuries. The experiences of eight lifetimes no less are all inherited by Katya Němcová, a young girl living on a farm in the Slovak mountains. It’s a ‘gift’ that has been passed down from mother to daughter across several generations, the memories stretching back to a French noblewoman Heloise Montbelliard born in 1759 during an appearance of Halley’s comet, who died duri...

Although I don’t need any convincing when it comes to Michael Robotham’s credentials as a great writer of crime fiction, I was quite impressed with the direction he had taken with Good Girl, Bad Girl and was looking forward to seeing where he would take new characters Cyrus and Evie. The murder mystery plot of the first book wasn’t Robotham’s most adventurous, owing a little to Twin Peaks , but it was clear that there were two intriguing damaged characters here that held great potential. When She Was Good however quickly shows that there is clear intent to delve further into their complicated backgrounds. Aside from the unusual talent for being able to tell when someone is lying to her, it was clear that there was a dark backstory to Evie’s Cormac’s experiences. Confined now to protective care in a children’s institution, there were indications of some kind of abuse in her past. Found in an empty house where a man had been tortured to death, Evie is clearly a damaged figure. Now appr...

What we think of as reality is overrated, and stories, dreams, fantasy and fairy-tales are very much a necessity and a part of our lives. That’s a theme that you will find in all of Robert Irwin’s fiction, and it’s a big enough theme to encompass an astonishing variety of situations, from the inescapable story-within-a story traps of The Arabian Nightmare , the hippy drug-tripping other realities sequences of Satan Wants Me , to the Surrealists of Exquisite Corpse and most recently in life/death blurring of reality and legend during the War of the Roses in Wonders Will Never Cease . In his latest masterpiece of fictional storytelling, Irwin considers the uneasy blend of reality with the fantastical in the form of classic German silent cinema of the 1920s, the early talkies and distortion of reality in the propaganda films of the Nazis. The variety of Irwin’s range is very much in keeping with his consistent worldview (one undoubtedly informed by his expertise and academic studies of T...

It’s a rare enough characteristic for a crime fiction police detective to be earnest and methodical rather than a world-weary wildcard maverick, but there are a few antecedents for the DS George Cross in the first book of Tim Sullivan’s new detective series, The Dentist . There’s a little bit of David Mark’s DS McAvoy in Cross’s diligence, his not fitting in with colleagues, working by the book with determination to see justice done and not being swayed by office politics or the convenient shortcuts taken by other officers in the Somerset and Avon Police Force in Bristol. There’s also evidently a bit of Saga Norén from the Swedish TV series The Bridge in Cross’s Asperger’s, with his lack of social skills, but an ability to see things differently, look past distractions and focus on details and look for patterns. More than anything though it’s perhaps the similar purposeful and determined way that the author draws you into his world that makes this opening Cross investigation so compel...