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As with the previous two Ana and Din mysteries in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, they are called upon in A Taste of Blood to deal with a serious case that threatens the security and stability of the Empire, which as we are starting to realise, has more than giant sea beasts to contend with. Despite being a loyal and skilled Iudex officer of the Empire, Immunis Ana Dolabra is less than pleased with being sent out in charge of what appears on the surface to be nothing more than a tawdry murder investigation of the young daughter of the head of a high gentry family. When they visit the scene of the murder in Lacanthim in the canton of Sapirad in the third ring of the Empire, they find much that is strange in the nature of the killing and in the family history that surrounds it. The young woman is Zansay, daughter of Buritis Butav, the prime father of the Burav gentryclan, and the accused is a young man called Castus Armenta, the prime son of the equally important Armenta family, se...

The second Ana and Din mystery in Robert Jackson Bennett's Shadow of the Leviathan series, as you would hope, extends our view and understanding of how the Empire of Khanum works, revealing more about its realms and about the dark corruption that takes place there - corruption of the human kind as well as that caused by the extracts taken from the vast sea monsters that threaten its outer edges. Not that there was anything lacking in the first book The Tainted Cup , but you could see there was potential for further development. There are a few interesting developments that come up early here in A Drop of Corruption . As is part of their procedure now, Assistant Iudex Investigator Signum Dinios Koi arrives ahead of his chief Immunis Anagosa Dolabra to do an initial investigation. Their latest case takes him to Yarrow, to probe a report of the murder of a Treasury Officer there. Yarrow is a unique and unusual realm in the Empire; it's not officially part of the Empire, but actua...

Maybe I just haven't read enough fantasy novels - I know I haven't - but other than one book I've come across (Justin Somper's Allies and Assassins ), it strikes me that no-one has really exploited the idea of an investigative team within a fantasy realm. It's all the more surprising as Robert Jackson Bennett shows how much fun this can be when you have to imagine the kind of crimes that can take place in a world that doesn't conform to the one we are familiar with. There are endless possibilities that are laid out well in the first of his Shadow of the Leviathan  series, one that will be built upon in subsequent books.  The Tainted Cup , book one of the series, introduces us to the Empire of Khanum. It's a dangerous place, constantly under threat from leviathans, unimaginably huge sea creatures that in the wet season approach the Outer Rim of the Empire and threaten to breach the sea walls built for protection. There is another immediate and unusual problem...

Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir certainly presents an upbringing that is very unusual and uncommon in Northern Ireland, growing up in a family with middle-class parents who are diehard North Belfast Communists, but it reflects a more universal experience that I'm sure many have had. On the one hand there's the embarrassment of being different and wishing that you belonged to a 'normal' family who did normal family activities like holidays (and even meals) rather than being taken to the Fête de l’Humanité event where a prominent Soviet official is making a guest appearance. On the other hand there's nonetheless a recognition that there is something special about being part of a close-knit family who have real values and believe in something meaningful, something that they truly believe is about making the world a better place. Having read Anna Burns’s Milkman (not memoir but as close to lived (un)reality here as it gets) and having grown up in Belfast myself in the period...

We all have our odd individual quirks and daily rituals, some we probably aren't even aware of or consider as anything out of the ordinary. Some routines around the home are comforting, reassuring, even precautionary, making sure things are switched off, closed, locked up. Some habits however are just strange and don't mean anything to anyone except ourselves. It's only when something changes, like another person coming in and upsetting the routine, that you might realise that they aren't always rational or easily explained to outsiders, but also bring an awareness that the motivations behind the behaviours might have deeper implications than you might think. Since it's entitled Rituals , and since Joan's little quirks, customs and habits are detailed at the outset, you expect that to be a significant and interesting theme to explore in this short novel, but there is a lot more to derive from this simple domestic situation that Joan finds herself in when as a si...

Absent from the second book in the series while Élise Duromain undertook a solo adventure - definitely going out on her own in À bout de souffle  - Lucas Lievens returns for his own solo investigation in the third book in Alex Sol's series, but going solo is the only option for Lievens. Already retired from the police even before the start of the series, he is still unable to shake off his own personal loss, Lucas now operates a Private Investigator service with only one real purpose; to find missing children. Yes, it seems like the missing person theme is continuing after the previous two books in the series, but as you would expect there is a subtle difference in each investigation that expands into something entirely different. Lucas Lievens operates to his own rules then, and in the case of his investigations, he only helps find abducted children: hopefully alive but it's more often the case that after several days of police investigation without result, he is searching fo...

Jérémie Claes makes very clear - even brutally clear - the source and nature of the conflict at the heart of his second novel, Commandant Solane ; immigration. The scene is set by the shock opening section detailing the brutal killing of a Muslim shop owner in Belgium, but it's the border between Italy and France that is to become the centre of attention when forty-two bodies are washed up on a French Mediterranean shore. Former police officer Bernard Solane, who has retired to the Provence region, is shocked at the state of the carbonised dead bodies, many of them children, washing up on La Bocca beach in Cannes. Solane's instinct is to fish the bodies out of the sea, but the inaction of the horrified holidaymakers sunning themselves on the the beach is just as shocking. Despite a similar unusual reticence on the part of the local politicians and police force to investigate, he is determined to find out what happened. The conflict that arises out of this incident then is not d...

Frédéric Paulin is a French writer of romans noirs , a different kind of policier from the more common police-detective crime thriller, one more involved in current affairs and geopolitics. I'm not familiar with this genre, the only other one I can think of that I've read in French is Jean-Patrick Manchette whose works date back to the 1970s and the world has moved on since then ...and not necessarily for the better. I'm not aware of many notable authors writing in this genre in English. The closest I can think of - and he is a writer I greatly admire for his knowledge and insights into the human within state affairs - is Gerald Seymour.  La nuit tombée sur nos âmes (literally 'The Fallen Night on Our Souls' or perhaps 'Dark Night of the Soul'?) deals with the events surrounding the protests and riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, a blend of real life political figures on the fringes and fictional characters involved in the central conflict betwe...

One thing you will have noticed about the writing of Seichi Matsumoto if you've read any of his work before, is his attention to detail. Character traits and intuitions are interesting but can not always be trusted when it comes to investigating crime. Exploring the fine details of the process is more revealing, and my goodness in Tokyo Express the author's attention to detail is never more meticulous as his lead police detective investigator probes the smallest details of railway timetables in the most precise detail, certain that the answer to the mystery he faces lies somewhere in them. Tokyo Express opens with the death of a couple found on Kashii beach in the Kyushu region in what - despite the unusual choice of location and the unseasonable weather - has all the characteristic appearances of double suicide. Veteran Hakata police officer at Hakata, Jutaro Torigai finds a few unusual features at the scene however that lead him to investigate further. None of them really a...

Alan Parks' first crime thriller Bloody January started out inspired by a real life incident and extended into a much wider view of criminality (and associated social deprivation) in his Harry McCoy series set in Glasgow in the 70s. It looks like true historical events connected to the bombing raids on Glasgow during WWII were also the inspiration for Park's Gunner , the first book in his Joseph Gunner series. Inevitably, with Deception coming as the second book in the series, that world is also going to be similarly expanded; and it is - just not in the way I might have expected. It's no great surprise that a second Gunner book has surfaced while Parks takes a sabbatical mid-way through his Harry McCoy series (much as I was hoping for a quicker return to the 70s Glasgow police thriller), as it clearly had the potential to be a series and the sub heading 'A Joseph Gunner Thriller' suggested as much. What is a surprise however is that in Deception Parks has locat...

Cool Machine is the third book in Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy, a series that in its second installment was already shaping up to have as important a place in the author's depiction of the experience of the black community in America as his other Pulitzer Prize winning works. Perhaps even more so for the manner in which it extends that vision across the decades of the 60s in Harlem Shuffle and the 70s in Crook Manifesto . through to the 80s now in Cool Machine . The central figure who is witness to the changes and challenges that the years bring is principally Ray Carney in his efforts to become a legitimate businessman selling furniture in his own Harlem store despite the tug of the criminal underworld coming to his door seeking his services as a fence for stolen goods. It's not just underworld connections that Ray has to navigate his way though, some of them genuine friends that he is helping give a leg up through the challenges of trying to survive as a black pers...

The directness of the title ('Mathilde has disappeared' or 'Mathilde is missing') is reflected in the style of the opening chapters of Leno Solveig's Mathilde a disparu , even in the chapter titles which lay out which person's testimony we are getting, the time and the place. Everything is clearly outlined. Apart from the opening chapter ' Fin de l'histoire ', which sets up the conclusion (see what I mean?), the narrative in the main takes a direct procedural approach of the 26-year-old Mathilde being reported missing and the police investigation as it interviews friends, family and co-workers trying to find out what has happened to the young woman. The frantic phone call to the police station in Carvin (north France) comes from Mathilde's worried parents, and as brigadier-chef Rémy interviews the young woman's neighbours, work colleagues and former boyfriend Théo, it quickly becomes apparent that there is indeed good reason for concern. Abdu...

I have to say I was surprised that Alex Sol chose to follow up the epic disappearance-on-a-subway-train mystery of her first Les enquêtes d'Elise Duromain et Lucas Lievens thriller À la vue de tous with the mystery of another disappearance on a moving train. There's no Lucas Lievens this time and Police Commissioner Élise Duromain is actually off-duty when she is witness to what appears to be a live abduction on the train she is on travelling back to Paris. She is even actually sitting in the seat in front of the lady Barbara, who is distraught when her 6 year-old son Gabriel disappears within a matter of minutes while she looked for an unoccupied toilet. No, you think, it can't be another case like the last one, and even Duromain tries to convince herself, but it does sound more like a case of trying to convince the reader that this one is different. While it might be related to an extent in terms of the author having another thought or variation on a theme, as the case d...

There is a lot of anthropomorphism in the world of cartoons and comics, and it's a style we are familiar with now from Disney and Pixar movies. That's not surprising, as Jim Steranko notes in the introduction, since long before Disney there has been a tendency to associate humans with animals behaviours and characteristics. It seems less of a cliché or shortcut then than natural for a comic like Blacksad to lean on those stereotypical characteristics, a silverback gorilla as a bodyguard, a lithe lizard as a silent cold blooded assassin. You're going to find weasels and rats in the expected places too. In Blacksad it seems natural also that a private Investigator who snoops around and has lightning reflexes is portrayed as a cat. A pretty tough cat in a trenchcoat. That's because Blacksad - initially at least  - is set in the 1950s period also draws heavily in its style from classic detective cinematic noir. Not so much in the artwork of Juanjo Guarnido, which is less ...

We've arrived at book three-of-three in David Mark’s Sal Delaney series and there is one issue that surely every reader is eagerly looking to see resolved in Vale of Tears . Not will Wulf Hagman finally have his name cleared and his reputation restored in the realm of public opinion; not will Sal patch things up with her former lover who is still recovering from injury but maybe not recovered from his fling with Magda Quinn; not will we find out where Sal's twin brother Jarod has disappeared to and why; not even what is the story and his connection with Dagmara, who appears to be back to her old tricks as trailed at the end of book two ( Don't Say a Word ). Well, we expect answers to all those questions obviously, but paramount for me at least is will Magda Quinn get her comeuppance? So there are a few things to tie up, and obviously the concluding episode in a trilogy is not a good place to start reading the series - so reading a review of it makes even less sense - but an...