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Books of the Year 2020 Like any personal best of list, the selections are inevitably limited by what one was able to have the time to read, watch or listen to, and it can in no way be definitive or comprehensive reflection of what was the best out there. As far as books go, there are plenty of literary awards with panels to choose from a wider selection, but for a single reader, the time invested means that you tend to stick with genres you are familiar with and writers who never let you down. Occasionally however, books come your way that are a delightful surprise precisely because you weren't expecting it. This year I read and reviewed 72 books for various places, of which 49 were English language novels, 6 were in French, 2 were in Spanish and 15 were graphic novels. My favourite 5 books (and one graphic novel) consequently consist of three favourite writers who didn't disappoint this year and two authors new to me in the literary genre that I wasn't expecting to impress...

Variations on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story are commonplace, or at least its theme about the duality of human nature and its capacity for evil is influential on much of crime fiction, but what can Craig Russell bring to the subject that is new? Well in some ways, Hyde is a companion piece or expansion of how Russell treated similar themes in his last book The Devil Aspect . That rip-roaring Gothic adventure managed to blend vampire mythology with East European folklore and hints of the dark side of Nazism in its 1935 setting. The “devil aspect” theory suggested that the potential for madness lies in all of us and with the right trigger applied, those most susceptible can be pushed towards acts of great evil. Hyde seems the obvious way to explore this issue further, but you can expect that Russell will similarly bring a new and thrilling twist to the classic story. What is immediately noticeable about the story is how Russell brings it back to the Scottish orig...

Animal certainly has an interesting premise, one that sets it out as a graphic novel of ideas and philosophical consideration of a fundamental question about what it means to be human. As something also of a character study, that might not immediately suggest a suitable subject for a graphic novel, and indeed there are more pages of talking heads than there are of any real action, not that there is much in the way of conventional ‘action’ as such, but the artwork and character detail provided make this a surprisingly more visual story than you might imagine. Since it’s trailed for a most of Part 1 before it gives you any real indication of the extraordinary action that one man takes, it might be considered a spoiler, but since it’s given up front in the synopsis for the book provided on the back cover, what is at the centre of Animal is a man’s determination to renounce his status as a human being. Since that revelation eventually comes close to the end of what is only the first part...

Slough House gets title billing in the seventh book of Mick Herron’s Slough House series, and with good reason, as Slough House, the nondescript building close to the Barbican in the East of London that is currently occupied by the dregs, failures and misfits of the British Intelligence Device, has been wiped from the map. Not literally, although the kill rate there seems to be higher than the average – Darwin’s Law in action – but rather wiped, deleted and expunged from the service records. It’s as if it didn’t exist, which of course officially it doesn’t. Something is going down however and it’s not going to be good for the physically and odorously repulsive but seemingly invulnerable Jackson Lamb and his crew of ‘slow horses’. It’s become difficult for writers to satirise UK and world politics these days when the government do a much better job of it themselves, and I thought the world was one step up the absurd ladder ahead of Herron in his last few Slough House books ( London R...

James M Cain's was still working through drafts of his final novel The Cocktail Waitress when he died in 1977. The book remained unpublished until Hard Case Crime went looking for this lost book. It was well worth the effort, as the book has a lot of the classic characteristics and features of Cain's greatest works, The Postman Always Rings Twice  and  Double Indemnity , featuring a femme fatale who is married to a man she doesn't love, who takes up with a younger lover. Joan Medford in The Cocktail Waitress in fact seems to be particularly careless when it comes to husbands and that's something that relentless police are aware of and won't let it go. Joan’s husband has recently been killed in a road accident after a drunken episode at home. She seems to be incapable also of looking after her 3 year old son Tad, who is left in the care of her sister-in-law. Se is intent on keeping the child for herself and attempts to blacken Jean's reputation with suspicions t...