To The Last Page

The first book in Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal series provides a good introduction to a great character with lots of potential. Not all of it is realised in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer , but it still has all the trademark wit and humour in the original comic manner that Howard deals with the material.  It doesn't quite live up to the Gothic horror expectations that are laid out in the hilarious opening (and closing) sequences where the necromancer Cabal makes an unannounced visit to Hell. Not having completed the exhaustive paperwork and, worse, still living, which is very much against regulations, he proposes a wager with Satan for the return of the soul he willingly parted with in order to further his nefarious researches. Not many come out well from a wager with Satan, but Cabal is a tricky character. What you can't quite see however is Cabal as the owner and master of ceremonies of a old-fashioned travelling carnival with all its sideshows. It doesn't quit...

Hard Case Crime collect Max Allan Collins's first two Nolan crime thriller series here as a well-named Two for the Money . In fact this was never meant to be a series, but, as you can tell from the first book Bait Money , the character and the situations were too good to leave at that point. Collins even killed Nolan off at the end of the first book, but was encouraged to rewrite the ending. It was a good move, as the second book Blood Money is just as tense, thrilling and visceral as the first. Considering the time it was written in the early 70s, it has to be said that the attitudes can appear to be incredibly sexist and misogynist by today's standards, but this was a book pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, even then in the genre of pulp crime fiction. Nolan, for example, is not a good guy, or if he appears to be, it's only in relation to how ruthless and unprincipled the others are that he comes into contact with in his line of work. That work is putting tog...

Crime novels are not usually all that complicated or nuanced. In many cases someone is killing people, a police detective is called in to investigate, solve the mystery and try to prevent more deaths; there are good guys and bad guys. Things are never so simple in M.R. Mackenzie's Anna Scavolini series of books, which is appropriate as she is a lecturer in criminology at University of Glasgow and it's a vast subject. And she is a lecturer, not a police detective or investigator. Yet crime affects everyone and has a wider impact on society, and that is something we continually find in Mackenzie's writing. That and the guarantee of a rattling good crime thriller, and he provides that again, page after page, in The Shadow Men . Mackenzie certainly doesn't take any easy route in the crimes he covers in his work. In Cruel Summer , the second Anna Scavolini book, he hinted at crimes of corruption and abuse that extend beyond the traditional underground gangland...