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Although he is better known for writing contemporary crime thrillers in his DS McAvoy series, somehow David Mark appears to be quite at home in another century. As cold and corrupt as the modern world in the environs of Hull might seem, the dark recesses of human behaviour, corrupted flesh and descent into madness and violence are ideally suited to the dark, fetid seventeenth century prison cells, filthy alleys, backstreet brothels and foul living quarters of sailing ships of Anatomy of a Heretic . Mark doesn't need any excuse to depict such a world of horror, but given free reign to let his imagination run wild he definitely makes the most of it. The book's prologue indeed opens with just such a scene, one that lives up to the book's title and then some. We witness the dissection of the corpse of a woman for an anatomy lesson in the year 1628, only it's from the point of view of the woman lying on the table under the knife. Someone has gone to great pains to make it lo...

If you can get past the undisguised contempt for bourgeois family life and morals and the copious graphic descriptions of sex, you will find that Michel Houellebecq often has something pertinent, premonitory and usually pessimistic to say about the state of the world we are living in. For me he sometimes misses the mark, but when he gets it right - in Plateforme , in Sérotonine - he casts the rest of the conservative French literary world into shade. With its provocative title, his latest Anéantir (Annihilate) is in some respects typical of Houellebecq's cynical view of individuals, family and society, but there is a noticeable change of tone here and some kind of acceptance that the issues he grapples with are far more complicated  and important to deal with than just through his personally tainted perspective. It takes a while and a few dead-end plot developments for Anéantir to find its focus and purpose - which I guess is probably true to life itself. The story is set in the...

As a fiction writer of some very dark crime novels (the 7th DS McAvoy novel Scorched Earth is one of the bleakest I have read), you wouldn't think that David Mark is the ideal person to write a self-help book with an optimistic outlook on dealing with mental illness. But that's ok because Piece of Mind is not a self-help book but it is nonetheless a book that will certainly help some people (many people if it gets out there) gain a better understanding what a person with mental health issues is going through; whether you are dealing with it yourself or whether you live with someone suffering from depression, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder BPD, OCD or ADHD. That's more people than you might imagine and you wouldn't always know, so Piece of Mind can help you recognise the signs. I mean, you wouldn't think a talented bestselling and seemingly self-confident author like David Mark would suffer from low self-esteem,. depression or indeed such debilitating m...

Having published her first Commissaire Adamsberg novel in 1991,  L’homme aux cercles bleus  ( The Chalk Circle Man in English translation) but not yet ready to develop it into a series, Fred Vargas took her next break from archaeology to start a new murder-mystery series over her next three books.The first book  Debout les morts ('The Dead Arise') was published in English translation under the title that would become known as the title of the series, The Three Evangelists . Debout les morts is a fine introduction into the strange ways that Fred Vargas's crime books operate, with unconventional characters who have quirky mannerisms, but with something a little more traditional (although still far from conventional) in how the crime plot is laid out and resolved. Marc, Mathias and Luc are three impoverished academics down on their luck ( dans la merde ), who don't know each other that well, but come to share the expenses of renting a rundown dump in a nonetheless relat...

Before he became a successful bestselling writer of fiction and blockbuster film and TV series ( Westworld , Jurassic Park , ER ), Michael Crichton cut his teeth writing a series of pulp suspense novels under the pseudonym of John Lange. Written in 1967 while still a medical student, his second Lange book  Scratch One meets the remit of that sensationalist style well. It's an espionage thriller based around a case of mistaken identity that provides action and excitement glamour and perhaps a bit of tongue-in-cheek or knowing humorous play with the genre. There is a serious political deal that is taking place however that underlies the intrigue, an arms deal and shipment of Norwegian surplus weaponry that is being shipped to Israel. A middle Eastern terrorist group, known as The Associates, having got wind that Israel are building a nuclear reactor, want to prevent the deal taking place and have employed a number of assassins to target those agents who are setting it up. When one o...

Whether The Talented Mr Ripley is Highsmith's masterpiece or not is a matter of opinion, but the character of Tom Ripley (running to a further four sequels) certainly rates as one of the greatest creations from an author whose exploration of the criminal mindset is unparalleled in its psychological depth and insight. From the early pages of Tom skulking around the streets of New York expecting to be picked up by the police for petty fraud of an Income Tax office (where he hasn't even cashed any of the cheques he has embezzled) to his actions as a smooth murderer and impersonator in Italy and Europe, the becoming of Tom Ripley is fascinating in its progress. The person tracking Tom down in New York turns out to be Mr Greenleaf, who knows of Tom as an acquaintance of his son Dickie (he hardly knows him in reality). Greenleaf tasks him with travelling south of Naples to an Amalfi village of Mongibello (a fictional village using the ancient name for Mount Etna) to convince his son...

Despite the title, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All is not so much a philosophical crime novel as a gentle comic satire, one that doesn't just make fun of Swedish institutions and characteristics but wider subjects such as celebrity and religion. It certainly finds a unique way to do this through the three main characters of Per Persson, the receptionist at a cheap hotel that was formerly place of ill-repute, through the priest without a parish; Johanna Kjellander, who no longer believes in God and attempts to offer him a half-hearted prayer in return for a few coins; and of course in Hitman Anders, whose notoriety has the potential to make them millions, as long as they can harness his, ahem, talents. Unfortunately Hitman Anders, a resident at the hotel and not long out of prison after his last conviction, is not the reliable type. As far as a hitman goes, he's more of a heavy for hire when a few bones need to be broken. He has however let down the count and the counte...