To The Last Page

Comment va la douleur? , the most celebrated of Pascal Garnier's books, is an exquisite example of literary crime fiction. Every chapter, particularly the first two chapters before you really know where it's going, are like perfect little short stories on their own. They combine however and connect in unexpected ways. The first chapter introduces us to Simon Marechall and Bernard Ferrand, without it being clear what the relationship is between the two men. We subsequently discover that they have met by chance at Vals-les-bains, a spa town not far from Lyon. Marechall is on a journey to complete a business arrangement in "pest control", but his health is suffering. Bernard, a young man with two missing fingers who lives with his mother there, seems an ideal and somewhat naive companion to drive him to his destination at the seaside resort Cap d'Adge on the south coast, for which he will be well paid. With the promise of seeing the sea, Bernard is happy to be chauff...

Always seeking to find a distinctive and original way of presenting crime fiction, just before she embarked on a series of novels featuring the "three evangelists", Fred Vargas came up with a triumvirate of Roman emperors as figures in her earlier 1994 novel  (as yet still unpublished in English) Ceux qui vont mourir te saluent ('Those who are about to die salute you'). The book also has several other prototypical elements that would become part of her style, even though that style is yet to fully develop and this book is a little more conventional as a crime thriller. Being Vargas of course, that means it's still not all that conventional. The crime and murder element is about as close as it gets to standard murder mystery, the characterisation is much less so. Henri Valhubert, a French art historian, has been presented with a rare unseen Michelangelo sketch and suspects that it might be part of a trafficking of items from the archives of the Vatican. He makes t...

A few chapters into Eversion and I had to double check that I hadn't downloaded the wrong book. At first I assumed that the ship that Dr Silas Coade is on would turn out to be the usual kind of ship you find in Alastair Reynolds books: a spaceship. The old-fashioned accoutrements and surgical implements didn't necessarily suggest anything different; after all, the Revenger series plays with piracy in a similar steampunk space adventure level. But no, the longer you read, the more it does seem like Reynolds has turned his hand - quite successfully - to historical fiction. All however is surely not what it seems... For a while however, the journey remains on the high seas. Silas Coade is an assistant surgeon aboard a fifth rate schooner, The Demeter, a private enterprise travelling into the frozen north in search of a mysterious Edifice. A previous expedition, the Europa, has discovered the construction that is reportedly to be found in a lagoon concealed behind a fissure in a ...

You should probably have a good idea what to expect from a novel by Frankie Boyle, which is something that might dismay as many people as it excites, and sure enough Meantime doesn't overturn any prior expectations you might have. You might not have expected a neo-noir crime thriller maybe, but this fiction debut is nonetheless filled with amusing and often laugh-out-loud one-liners and observations that often border - or, depending on your viewpoint, overstep - boundaries of good taste. Boyle's take on a Glaswegian version of noir crime thriller inevitably has his very own characteristic spin on the genre. His detective Felix McVeety is not just the hard-bitten, hard-drinking type, but also one who indulges in - or perhaps more accurately is unable to function without - vast quantities of drugs. Hey, it did Sherlock Holmes no harm, as his friend and downstairs neighbour Donnie observes, so Felix reckons that while they are two people least likely to be investigating anything...

Marthe, the 70 year old former prostitute, was introduced in passing in Vargas's previous 'Three Evangelists' book  Un peu plus loin sur la droite , but she is such a figure with a long background hinted at that it is no surprise that she reappears in Sans feu ni lieu ( The Accordianist in English translation). It's more of a surprise that Louis Kehlweiler has a key role again, as it seemed his work and larger purpose had been achieved in the previous book. Both figures however were clearly too good to let go, particularly when Vargas can make so much more of them before she moves on to Adamsberg and other things. For Louis, the long years of examining reports in newspapers and looking for clues means that he can't easily avoid looking into the latest crime that currently has everyone's attention in Paris; the shocking murder of two young women. Marthe, one of Louis' old observation team, is now a bouquiniste , running a book stall on the banks of the Sein...

E.V. Kelly opens her debut psychological thriller in an intriguing fashion, where the witness to a shocking incident isn't even sure what she is has just seen. Cassandra Hogan has just arrived early to pick her husband Jeff from his early morning therapeutic swim on the beach when she sees a woman running towards him, stripping off clothes only to collapse to the ground after embracing him, apparently dead. She is so stunned by what she has seen and by her husband's lack of open reaction or acknowledgement of what has happened, that she says nothing. As their young son is in the car with them, she is unsure how to bring the matter up. Who was that woman? Why was she there? What even happened? She is perhaps unsure of what she saw, and unsure how to ask about it, but the longer she remains silent, we begin to suspect that on some level she doesn't really want to know or confront this. The reasons for her hesitancy and uncertainty become clearer as we find out more about Jeff...