To The Last Page

Having previously read Turton's fascinating puzzle mystery The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle , I was quite used to the idea that he proposes in his latest novel, another little enclosed world that is shrouded in mystery with no apparent means of escape other than death, or deaths in the case of Evelyn Hardcastle. Here in The Last Murder at the End of the World however things seem even more detached from any familiar real world situation, the small community here on an island apparently the only people left alive on the planet. And judging by the prologue, there is not even long left for humanity on the planet, unless Neima can pull off a daring scheme. Judging from the title however, someone is going to be murdered before then. There are only 93 hours left before the human race becomes extinct. The remaining population of 122 people are on an island, by chance the only place on earth that has escaped from a deadly fog that kills any living thing it touches. Ninety years ago fo...

Now 87 years old and retired for a few decades, Kazuo Umezz is considered one of the most important and influential of Japanese manga artists in the horror genre, a master recognised by current leading artists in the genre including Junji Ito , but until relatively recently little of his work has been translated into English. One feature that is becoming common now that more works are being published in the West, is the question of how children relate to the the world their parents have created for them, whether it's the apocalyptic landscapes of his masterpiece The Drifting Classroom or the legacy faced by a child twisted by her mother's complex with her appearance in Baptism . The first volume of My Name is Shingo , now being published by Viz, is another major Umezz work that points in the same direction. The subject that influences 12 year old Satoru Konma and sets him apart from his parents appears to be their relationship to new technology, but inevitably the situation is...

When I read Armand Delpierre's first novel Paris se lève last year it clearly looked like the opening shot fired on a new Paris police department series, but now that I reflect upon the title of that book and having read this second installment, it also appears to be a series that represents a kind of awakening for modern-day Paris connected with real-life incidents. Although the SRPJ 92 department cover the comparatively quiet business district of La Défence and suburban Courbeyvoie, Commissioner Lenfant's team soon found themselves caught up in the events that shocked everyone in Paris in January 2015. If that was a wake up call that the city's problems were becoming more extensive and creeping into all parts of the capital, the second book in the series Peine capitale (Capital Punishment) seems to bear that out. Peine capitale retains a structure and drive similar to the first book, following a sequence of days broken up into morning, afternoon, evening and night and ...