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All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye is another typically explosive and humorous Brookmyre scenario where international terrorism and shady undercover agencies runs up against a couple of unlikely ordinary Glaswegians.  When Ross Fleming's top secret work on a device that will revolutionise the weapons industry is leaked, it places him in a vulnerable situation from a lot of wealthy and less than scrupulous businessmen in the arms industry. On the run, Ross turns to his parents for help, and finds an support in the unlikely place of his mother, who has been recruited by a secret, undercover organisation assigned to get him back. Brookmyre reins-in the usual linguistic acrobatics and trades in the usual irony and sarcasm this time for strong characterisation, letting the humour come out of the conflict between them. There is no shortage of thrilling action sequences and tense situations either - straining credibility certainly, but delightfully so.

I See You gets off to an intriguing start when a writer of detective fiction finds himself enmeshed in his own murder-mystery, accused of the murder of his ex-fiancée. The only problem is Drew Danner can’t remember killing her, since he was struck down by a brain tumour at the scene of the crime, and was found unconscious beside her dead body, up to his elbows in her blood. The court are unable to prove the case either, but when another copycat killing occurs shortly after his release from custody with evidence leading back to him, he’s dragged back in for questioning and doesn’t have the excuse of a brain tumour to save him this time. Suffering a blackout and memory loss on the scene of his ex-girlfriends murder isn’t the only improbable coincidence in the story, as Drew attempts to clear his name with the help of the inside sources and criminologists that he often turns to for research for his novels. Despite this, the occasional authorial delve into LA detective philosophising at t...

As the title suggests, this Maigret investigation is rather more high-profile than the usual crime cases that the P.J. have to deal with on a regular basis, cases that an unruffled and unhurried Maigret resolves with a few enquiries interspersed with a few drinks at the bar.Indeed, Maigret is initially perturbed when phoned at home by the Auguste Point, Minister of Public Works, and reluctant to become involved in a serious political scandal that also has the Sûreté breathing down his neck. He has every reason to be concerned, since the Minister has had an important document stolen, a confidential report on the affair of the faulty construction of a mountain Health Centre that resulted in the death of over a hundred children. Only recently uncovered and handed over to the Minister for it to then disappear, the scandal has the potential to seriously embarrass some senior public figures, if not bring down the current government. Nonetheless, despite the complications and uncertainty of t...

Set in smalltown USA and written while Simenon was living there, L'horloger d'Everton nevertheless has all the familiar characteristics of Simenon's unique approach to the crime novel.  The central crime incident takes place "off-screen", when Ben, the 16 year-old son of watch repair man Dave Galloway disappears with a car, a gun and the 15 year-old daughter of his neighbour and soon becomes a fugitive from the law. Simenon's focus however is on the factors underlying Ben's out of character behaviour, examining the background of Dave Galloway family background, his own broken marriage and his relationship with his son, and as well as the monotony and watchfulness of the small community in which they live and their own peculiar form of rebellion against social and bourgeois expectations. If it doesn't reveal anything significant or different from other Simenon novels with a similar subject matter, the novel's American setting brings in another in a...

Lost Boys starts out like a Lord of the Flies examination of adolescent mindset and the dynamic between groups of middle-class boys who have come into contact with a darker side of the world and deep primitive impulses. It’s superbly compelling and sinister, establishing a slightly unsettling supernatural tone when the boys, many of them sons of foreign diplomats and high-profile international businessmen, start to disappear, lured away from their comfortable lives by a recurrent common dream of a young foreign boy. An investigator soon identifies the connections between the disappearances but the conclusions and the scale of the problem are too disturbing to contemplate. Lost Boys then takes on a J.G. Ballard tone, examining and relating the destruction of the middle-class Western family values and a generation exposed to increasing levels of violence, terrorism and wars, not only in video-games and on television, but in the whole nature of the turbulent state of world affairs. Thes...

Republished, reworked and expanded on from its original scarcely distributed 1970 publication Santana Morning , Mike Dolan's stories in this new edition are more classical in form than most of the modern slipstream publications from Elastic Press, but the connections are evident, and beneath the borderline horror and science fiction conventions lie real human concerns about love, communication, relationships and the impact of a changing world on people.  Each story is perfectly formed and standalone, but certain themes stand out, expanded on or examined from new angles, some showing traces of their origins over the book's long genesis into its current form, a testament to the author's determination to present them in whatever format necessary to see their publication. Hence there are racy adult stories, pulp fiction and conventional ventures into time travel, but above all what stands out is the belief in the power of ideas, imagination, dreams and storytelling itself to tr...

I don’t know about eternal damnation, but terminal boredom is certainly a possibility for anyone reading these pages. Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas is written entirely as a series of dialogues between two men – and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a method often used by Puig, extensively and effectively in Kiss of the Spiderwoman , and like that novel there is an intriguing relationship that develops between two men of different walks of life. In Maldición eterna , an old man in exile from political persecution in Argentina, Ramirez, recuperating in a New York hospital with shattered memories of the past, encounters and forms a friendship with a New York carriage driver, Larry, who has been hired to show him around the city. Although a driver, Larry is an educated man, but he also keeps his troubled past hidden or wrapped in a web of falsification. After the initial set-up however, the novel’s dialogues become rather baffling, some of them hallucinated by the sick ol...