To The Last Page

The signs of what is to come are all there in Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle , although it ought to already be obvious from the suitably lurid cover on the Hard Case Crime paperback with the tagline 'She Went Looking For Thrills - AND FOUND MURDER'. To be fair, you don't even need to look beyond the author's name to know what to expect, but Block's 1961 crime thriller has plenty of lowlife pulp and seediness in the opening chapters to alert you to the nature of the trouble ahead. It's the counter-culture alternative living, hip drug taking community of Greenwich Village that houses characters like Joe Milani and his friend Shank. Right from the start Block describes them as being blissfully high in the middle of the day in a bar, neither of them with anything better to do but ponder their next move, or rather their next bout of inactivity. This day, Joe decides his confidence is running high enough to pick up a square chick who has come into the bar, but...

Tu rostro manaña  ("Your Face Tomorrow") consists of three books originally published separately as Fiebre y Lanza (2002), Baile y sueño (2004) and Veneno y sombra y adiós (2007). The books might not be primarily narrative driven, being more inclined to ponder themes and subjects - that's something I'll get into later - but there is nonetheless a consistent linear plot with a relatively small group of characters that means it has to be seen as a single novel. Taken as a trilogy or a single work, it is a quite extraordinary and ambitious achievement. Undoubtedly it may seem inconsequential, overlong and overindulgent to some, with rambling asides with no immediately evident purpose or dramatic tension, but Marías achieves an incredible depth through linguistic wordplay and in his exploration of human actions and sentiments. It's a kind of literary spy thriller that sidesteps any of the cliches of the genre, focussing (although 'focus' might not be the be...

As an idea for a science-fiction book, the theme of the planet going through a significant change related to a catastrophic event is a long-running theme and it's relevance certainly hasn't lessened in the light of recent developments. There is then perhaps nothing particularly new in Susannah's Wise's vision of the collapse of society in This Fragile Earth , but the author tries at least to show that it might not come in the way we expect, or be capable of being dealt with in ways that we might expect. What else it has to offer however is rather limited. More technology clearly isn't the solution to our problems in This Fragile Earth - at least not in a way we might expect. After beetles were introduced to eat the chemicals that were on crops, the beetles became a problem and a disease called Bovine Staph infected the water supplier, so technological solutions have been introduced in an attempt to correct the ecological balance of the world. Aside from pollen-dron...

There is not a lot of nuance in Steve Cavanagh's latest Eddie Flynn thriller, but it's true that as far as the law and morality are concerned, good and evil acts should be clearly defined. While it seems a little heavy-handed then, there's certainly no getting away from the fact that this makes for a rivetting good read, the opening chapters of The Devil's Advocate hitting with maximum impact. Beginning with a tense scene describing an Alabama DA getting off on a likely innocent man getting fried on the electric chair, there is no subtlety or ambiguity about the position of Randal Korn of Sunville County being anything less than pure evil. He even permeates a scent "as if the man was rotting from the inside out". On the other side of the coin we have New York lawyer Eddie Fynn, who if you haven't read the previous novels in the series, is a criminal lawyer who upholds the utmost standards of fairness in matters of justice and the law. As a former con man ...

As I think I mentioned in one of my previous two reviews of Tim Sullivan's DS Cross thrillers ( The Dentist , The Cyclist ), being somewhere on the spectrum might sound like a disability for a police officer, but it can actually be an advantage when you are an officer in the Mayor Crimes Unit (MCU) who needs to diligently pursue a line of suspicion and seek firm clear answers when something seems wrong or out of place. It can also be a distinct advantage for a writer following the lead character's way of being direct and getting straight to the point. That is also a boon to a reader as well and it's particularly evident in the opening of the third novel DS Cross thriller The Patient , as it draws you straight in, lays out the intrigue nicely and leaves you with just enough curiosity to want to follow every step of what follows. It's also fortunate in this case for Sandra Wilson that she brings her concerns to DS George Cross. She is convinced her daughter Flick didn...

Jo Spain has widened her range of crime thrillers beyond Ireland. It was the US last time in The Perfect Lie , and she now takes us to another extreme entirely, to the sparsely populated door to the Arctic that is Lapland, Finland. Sparsely populated perhaps but it attracts large numbers of tourists and not just in the Christmas season. People come there for expensive luxury holidays, for adventure holidays, just to get a sense of living life on the edge while enjoying the comforts of the warm hospitality. Like anywhere else however, there is no escape from crime and murder, and despite the location, the motivations aren't all that different to those we've seen in Jo Spain's Tom Reynolds series and standalone Irish thrillers. What is also not all that different is Spain's method of crime writing and investigation. She's not afraid of making figures a little more complex and less sympathetic than we are accustomed to: it's not just good people who die at the han...

Even in a collection as relatively slim as Sensor , Junji Ito manages to find plenty of imaginative new ways to depict a tale of terror. His 2019 graphic novel develops in a direction not even expected by the artist when he started out on the story, developing and expanding on ideas and horror, chapter by chapter in a number of episodes that extend out to the cosmos but also deep into inner fears. For some reason she isn't quite sure of, Kyoko Byakuya is drawn to visit Mount Segoku, an active volcano that is noted for the strange phenomenon of its volcanic hair. Rather than the more common hard black strands of volcanic material, the area around Segoku abounds in the golden light of glimmering "angel hair", known to locals as Divine Amagami. Kyoko is brought to the village of Kiyokami that is bathed in the light of this substance, where she learns the myth of its origin in the Edo era. The reason Kyoko has been drawn there is because she has been chosen by God for a speci...