To The Last Page

Written in 1973, Los soldados de Cataluña was published in 1975 under the title La verdad sobre el caso Savolta on the recommendation of the Spanish censor. It was published then in the same year as the death of Franco, and although it doesn't directly address the events leading up to the dictatorship, there is an entwined history in how Eduardo Mendoza covers the social and political climate at the turn of the century. Mendoza's methods and style are unconventional, as capable of writing satirical comedies and SF adventures as political and social issues, but even in that wide range of writing, even while writing comedy, he remains for me a great chronicler of the history and people of Barcelona and the enormous upheavals it has experienced over the course of the 20th century. His first fictional novel sets the scene of that intriguing past at the beginning of the 20th century. On the 1st January 1918, businessman Enrique Savolta y Gallibos is assassinated during a high soci...

As far as origin stories go, Émile Bravo's take on Spirou and Fantasio has been one of the most surprising. It's surprising because these two aren't exactly Batman and Robin, and we don't really expect to have origin stories for Belgian children's comic book characters, or really even need them. We didn't need one for Tintin and created around the same time - in 1938 - Spirou and Fantasio have remained largely unchanged throughout their adventures even as they are taken over and adapted inevitably with variations of tone by other creators over the subsequent years. What is so impressive about Bravo's work on Spirou: The Diary of a Naive Young Man , to say little about the brilliance of the following four-part sequels collectively known as Hope Against All Odds , is that the artist/writer takes the pair back to the period of their creation in the years just prior to the start of WWII and the German invasion of Belgium. It makes perfect sense them to re-imagin...

Steve Cavanagh took his maverick New York lawyer Eddie Flynn out of his comfort zone in his previous book, The Devil's Advocate . Not everyone was convinced about the way he almost single-handedly dealt a blow to the institutionalised racism of a small Alabama community, but I thought it was still a thrilling edge-of-the-seat ride. With The Accomplice Eddie Flynn is back on familiar ground, in New York dealing with a criminal court case in his own irreverent fashion. Maybe a little too familiar ground is covered here, but with Steve Cavanagh you can be sure to expect plenty of surprises along the way. The current case he is involved with might not be the biggest case of his career - each respective case has certainly lived up to that billing so far - but it's only one step removed from it. An utterly fearsome serial killer known as the Sandman has been terrorising the city, mutilating bodies, removing the eyes from his victims and filling their empty sockets with sand. The pol...

" They had been on the island less than five hours and already the whole thing was falling apart ". For just for a brief moment at the start of The Cliff House I thought I caught a glimpse of something recognisable as the Chris Brookmyre of old. Opening with that ominous first line, it seemed like classic Brookmyre. Ok, a hen party on a remote island is a little different from those classic thrillers but who knows whether the island mightn't turn out to be the base for a terrorist group on manouvres, planning an assault on the Scottish parliament or at least a unit planning to kidnap and hold the entirely fictional leader of the Scottish Conservatives there for ransom. If only... But no, while there are flashes of humour and self-awareness in the characterisation, there is more than an air of Agatha Christie than Tartan terrorism to The Cliff House . Seven women in their 40s, two of whom have a longstanding grudge against each other, although an ex sister-in-law and a ne...

Right down to the title there is definitely something old school about Truly, Darkly, Deeply , but in some ways it's less for period character than to explore certain subjects back to their roots. At the heart of the story is a serial killer case, one that takes place during the early 1980s, at a time when the terminology was only becoming more widely used. That gives the story a certain resonance, but there are other aspects that pull the story one way and then another, and do so to such an extent that you know it's going to do exactly the same to the reader. What has happened has certainly pulled Sophie in several directions. Not only has she been uprooted from Massachusetts in America to London by her mother after her father left them, setting her up as an outsider in a way that makes her adolescent life difficult, but now as an adult she is torn when she looks back on her feelings for Matty Melgren, the man who was the closest thing she had to a real father. Matty is now in...

One isn't necessarily better than the other, and it's not always the case, but there is often something more urgent and frightening about a thriller that has some basis in real world events that involve human suffering. I'm thinking of something like Will Dean's The Last Thing to Burn , which had a case of people trafficking at the centre of it*, and there's a similar kind of crime and human exploitation in Alex Dahl's After She'd Gone . Human trafficking can take many forms however and not all are obvious, even to the victim until it is too late. For some, they appear to have landed in a fairy-tale only for it to descend into a living hell with no escape. That kind of crime may even be more frightening and contemporary in its concerns because it's dealing with young women being exploited and abused - and in some cases murdered - by members of a rich and exclusive set. Here we read about young beautiful women from Eastern countries who are being offered ...