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Despair and Denial on Death Row Despite the impression the title might give, The Enchanted is potentially a very despairing novel based on a very dispiriting subject - the lives and the fate of criminals on death row in a US penitentiary. There is a glimmer of hope there however, and usually when you go to the darkest places that the smallest light shines brighter. Rene Denfeld paints the subject so black that it almost obscures everything else, so it's a testament to her writing (and her experience) that she nonetheless finds that small measure of hope that makes all the difference. Rene Denfeld is in real-life a death penalty investigator and has written several non-fiction books based on the subject, so there's no doubting her credentials. There's no doubt either that her account of prison life is accurate and without exaggeration, which is however not much comfort. Death, despair, rape, murder, corruption, drugs, the dregs of humanity are kept in abominable conditions,...

I was certain I wasn't going to like That Part Was True and not just because I have a prejudice against novels that have an appendix of recipes at the end. It's more however that the premise seems very old-fashioned - a 84 Charing Cross Road -like written correspondence between a lonely rich lady living in the English countryside and an American author that develops into something special. But then the characters are of that generation, both of them approaching 50, both reaching a point in their lives where it's time to look at where they are and re-evaluate if it's where they hoped to be. That's not really much of a recommendation either. What makes you keep reading however it that it is realistic, deals with real-life issues, and the author's handling of the subject keenly recognises this and never lets it slip into idealism or sentimentality. That's what keeps you reading even if you don't find you particularly relate to the characters or their circu...

Denton Wyle – investigative reporter for ‘Mysterious World’, a magazine on paranormal occurrences is investigating mysterious disappearances. He follows up a lead about a Rabbi Yosef Kobinski, a Kabbalah scholar who vanished in a flash of light at Auschwitz.  Kobinski left behind a manuscript, “The Book of Torment” which Denton tries to acquire from various sources, feeling it holds a key to the mystery. Aharon Handalman – a Rabbi in Jerusalem, studying the Torah for arrays, hidden occurrences of significant names in the holy book. Kobinski’s name features prominently and the more he investigates, the more concerned he is by the apocalyptic events it seems to presage. Calder Ferris – Lieutenant in the US Marines, Department of Defense.  Interested in unusual physic phenomena and theories with potential military application. His dying former partner leaves him documentation on discoveries he has made on wave theory – the power to disrupt particles of matter. Jill Talbot – Resea...

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It may be a coincidence, but Max Barry's Lexicon bears a remarkable resemblance to one of Monty Python's best comedy routines, 'The World's Deadliest Joke', collected in the feature And Now For Something Completely Different . In the Python sketch, a writer stumbles upon a joke that is so funny that the writer himself dies laughing. Recognising the potentital of the joke as a weapon, it's employed by the military, translated into German under controlled laboratory conditions (" one translator saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital "), and used to bring about an end to the war, although the casualties on the German side apparently were " appalling ". Max Barry's Lexicon however is no laughing matter. If the resemblance to the Monty Python sketch is just a coincidence, it's probably more to do with the recognition that words have much more power than we think. Barr...

At the very least, the title and author’s curious name should attract attention, but The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder also has a rather good hook. Max Ponder is dead and he has left behind one thousand and six hundred or so volumes of his Catalogue, in which he has meticulously documented the experiences of his life. More than an autobiography, and covering only the first 20 years of his life (he has gone to considerable effort to ensure that he has experienced nothing new in the thirty years it has taken to compile the work), the Catalogue is an attempt to fully document the content of all the combined experience and knowledge contained within one human brain. As if that’s not a strange enough hook to keep you reading, his close friend Adam Last is about to rather messily remove Max’s head from his body, before informing the authorities of his death. The hook is good enough then to grab you right from the start and, fortunately, the rest of the novel lives up to this intriguing...

The one that is out of this world The slow build-up of Destination Moon , slightly overburdened with technological background details taking precedence over the spy thriller elements, proves to be justified by the sheer brilliance, imagination, thrills and entertainment provided in the second part of the story which takes Tintin and his friends into genuinely new territory. Explorers on the Moon , in many ways, is Hergé at his very best. Consequently, having established the scientific principles of space flight in the opening book, there's little time wasted here in getting the rocket ship to the Moon. The story still has time before then however to explore some of the strange phenomenon of space flight, and it has considerable fun with weightlessness and extravehicular activity, mostly at the expense of Captain Haddock and his attempts to imbibe some contraband whiskey. There is some licence taken here, as there is with the eventual exploration of conditions on the moon, but it ha...

The one where Calculus acts the goat The problem with Destination Moon is that it's really just a scene-setter for Explorers on the Moon . While the opening books of the other two double-length Tintin adventures,   The Secret of the Unicorn and The Seven Crystal Balls , are essentially just the opening acts for the main adventures in their respective storylines, they each have their own strengths as standalone books and, arguably, the build-up in each even surpasses the follow-up. That certainly isn't the case with Destination Moon , which necessarily takes a rather long time to go into the preparations for Tintin and his pals making the first manned journey to the Moon. Preparation for Destination Moon began in 1946 one must remember, and it was published fifteen years before the first moon landing, so this is quite a leap of imagination all the same. Hergé would research the subject thoroughly for all the latest post-war technical advances in nuclear technology and rocket ...