To The Last Page

The first two volumes of the Great God's War have been, you could say, slow burners. Not that there was a lack of anything developing, but there was a sense that all the little details, the power plays and the ominous skirmish attacks were all signs of heading towards an event on an even bigger scale. If that scale can be measured by the length of time that it has taken to publish the concluding volume of the trilogy and by the page count, The Killing God is clearly aiming to meet those expectations. Well, it does and it doesn't. The scale of the war that has been anticipated when it hits the shores of Belleger is every bit as vast as expected, but unfortunately it doesn't leave room for much else. Given it has taken that long, you could be forgiven if you didn't remember the bigger picture never mind the finer details of the story. Stephen Donaldson manages to refresh your memory without seeming to need to do a standard recap. With a couple of incidents and assassina...

Having got out of the business of being a professional hitman in the first thriller Quarry and clearing up some loose ends in Quarry's List (that's two novels worth of plotting, killing and screwing summed up in a few words), Quarry has a few ideas for a new career in Quarry's Deal . Unsurprisingly, it involves more killing and screwing. A lot more. Admittedly, there aren't too many career path options for a Vietnam veteran and professional killer. You can put a lot of distance and money between your past and future, but if you have the list of contacts - as Quarry does - you can take over as the new Broker and run the business. Quarry however has found another interesting new angle to pursue. He's planning to use the list to find out who the hitmen are, find out who they are going to hit, and get the potential targets to pay him to protect them from the killers who are now working for new brokers. His first job takes him to a Florida beach resort filled with weal...

Quarry's List was originally published in 1976 as The Broker's Wife, as a follow up to Quarry . It was never intended to be a series, but at least Max Allan Collins didn't kill him off like Nolan ( Two for the Money ) and then have to rewrite the ending to continue the series. He still had a problem though, as Quarry had more or less retired as a professional hit man in the first standalone book, or to be more accurate, he has "retired" his agent the Broker. When asked by his publisher to follow up, Collins was faced with the question of what is Quarry going to do next? Quarry, as we know for being introduced to him in first book, can be ruthless in his methods, in killing as much as in taking care of his own security. Despite the arrangement with his Broker as a killer for hire coming to an unfortunate end, and despite taking every precaution to leave the professional hitman business behind him, he know he needs to still be careful. He expects that eventually so...

If it's setting out to be a continuing new police force series, which clearly seems to be the intention by the time we get to the end of this one, Paris se lève certainly gets things off to a good start. Armand Deplierre takes a little time early on to introduce a team and set up a nominal lead person, but there is a good range of characters here put through a variety of situations - some seemingly banal, others rather more dangerous - that brings out their strengths and weaknesses. Those will certainly be tested as this book and the series as a whole develops. Being situated in La Défence however, the business district of Paris, you would think that Commissioner Philippe Lenfant's SRPJ 92 team is not exactly going to be caught up in the same kind of suburban murder, drugs and violent crime that you find in the SRPJ 93 neighbourhood of Olivier Norek's Captain Coste series but there is nonetheless a high concentration of people in a relatively small area and in a city like...

The wayward police investigator with alcohol and family or relationship problems may seem like a cliché, but there is of course a reality to how dealing with crime and criminals every day inevitably has an impact on your personal life. What must it do to you when and how do you cope when you are a criminal profiler tracking down serial killers and you lose your own family? The job spilling over into personal life might be a cliché too, but nonetheless if you want to be convincing in crime fiction, you have to take the personal toll on individuals into account. They are not superhuman, but they certainly have to deal with a lot more than most ordinary people. And so it is with Franck Thilliez's Commissioner Franck Sharko, who at the start of Le Syndrome [E] is on forced leave and under treatment for schizophrenic episodes. Haunted by the loss of his wife and daughter, he converses with Eugènie, a hallucination who is often a very real presence beside him. Despite still undergoing t...