To The Last Page

**First book spoiler warning** This is Nick Harkaway's second book in the Titanium Noir series, so while there are no spoilers here for Sleeper Beach , it does reveal at least one significant event that took place in the first book . ** Cal Sounder, in his capacity as a Private Investigator rather than as part of the important Tonfamecasca family, is called in to look into the death of a woman on Sleeper Beach in the costal town of Shearwater. A formerly thriving town, it's now something of a backwater, but still the centre of operations for the Erskine family who practically own the town. It's not uncommon to find dead bodies on Sleeper Beach. People often come there to lie on one of the many sunbeds laid out and stay there; those suffering from what the local police pathologist calls 'spontaneous dysphoric and psychogenic cognitive atrophy', a fancy way of saying that they feeling discarded by the world and have given up on life. The dead woman Alisa Lloyd doesn...

For a fantasy novel, The Raven Scholar starts out relatively low key. There is no epic battle, the land has been at peace for centuries, the only recent rebellion quickly put down before it even got started. There is a minor hangover from that rebellion still to be mopped up, but while even that seems relatively insignificant, you know how it goes with fantasy novels. This is just the beginning of a trilogy, so you can be sure there will be ramifications down the line, and sure enough these events already come back to bite before the end of book one.  So what kind of a fantasy world does Antonia Hodgson delve into in her Eternal Path Trilogy? It's close enough to a Game of Thrones style fantasy, where there are powerful rival families in Orrun and there are religious and militaristic powers. The difference here is that you can choose which 'family' or anat of the Eight Guardians you wish to follow. There is the Way of the Bear, the Ox, the Raven, the Monkey, the Hound, the...

Having come to Thilliez and Sharko via the more common route of the later Le Syndrome [E] and subsequent follow-ups with Lucie Hennebelle in  [Gataca] and Atom[ka] , I knew a little about what happened in Thilliez's first Sharko thriller Train d’enfer pour ange rouge , or at least one significant outcome. I also had a good idea of the dark tone that the book would take as that is characteristic of the author's writing and certainly the traumatic experience of this case in the first book has an outcome that marks Sharko deeply and is felt throughout the rest of the series. I'm not sure how much more of this I can say without giving away what might be considered a spoiler, but sure the book has been out for a number of years now and Thilliez has not yet had anything significant published in English, so it should be safe enough. I'll tiptoe around it just in case. So I had some idea what to expect in Train d’enfer pour ange rouge (literally, Hell Train for Red Angel). W...