To The Last Page

A Wreath of Stars features Gilbert Snook, a man thinks of himself as a human neutrino, keeping to himself, avoiding society and any kind of involvement with people if he can help it, but ironically, it's the discovery of an anti-neutrino planet that puts him at the centre of a grand scientific discovery. Unhappy with having to flee the previous African nation where he was employed as an aircraft engineer against his will, Snook finds himself in a difficult position working as a teacher in the state of Barandi for workers in the diamond mines that are the lifeblood of the nation. His world is turned upside down by the discovery of ghosts in the mine who have been made visible through the use of special glasses devised to work in darkness. It turns out to be a whole world in another dimension inside the earth who have been shifted out of their normal orbit by the approach of Thornton's Planet, a recently discovered anti-neutrino mass that has passed close by Earth. With the assi...

Although it opens in a scene and setting familiar to his Code 93 series (and there is a brief cameo of one of Captain Coste's SDPJ 93 team), Surface is a very different style and pace from Olivier Norek, out of the crime and drug murders of the high rise suburbs of Paris and out in the country. It starts off in familiar territory however, with drug squad officer Noémie Chastain shot in the face attempting the arrest of a drug dealer in just such a location. She is left with life-changing injuries, suffering nightmares and PTSD in the aftermath. Even after a long recovery period and psychological treatment, she finds that she is still not ready to return to duties in the city and is offered a temporary transfer to a station in a small village in the south of France, Decazeville in the Aveyron region. It's not a straightforward transfer, Noémi is expected to write a report on the possible closure of the station due to budget cutbacks and a notable lack of any serious crime in t...

As he demonstrated in his previous novel  Literary Stalker , Roger Keen is a master of the metafiction, using a complex narrative structure to delve more deeply into underlying and often troubling mental processes that can be otherwise difficult to unravel. He employs that device again to remarkable effect in The Empty Chair , blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction in a similar way to his first novel The Mad Artist , exploring individual hopes and aspirations running up against social conventions, artistic conservatism and impossible family expectations. Keen takes that one or two steps further here, merging reality with fantasy in an ambitious unconventional approach to narrative that is the only way of encompassing the range and depth of a subject that has very real and meaningful human concerns. It's certainly a clever idea to filter the majority of those concerns though the semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical character of Steve Penhaligon, working in the 1980s fo...