To The Last Page

" Innocent or guilty. Either way Eddie Flynn is a dead man " - the fate of Steve Cavanagh's conman-hustler turned lawyer is emblazoned on the cover of the advance proof copy of The Plea . The prologue even describes how dire the situation is for Flynn as a bullet rips through his body from an unidentified killer. There's no way out surely, and it looks like it's going to be a short run for Steve Cavanagh's quick-thinking court-storming lawyer in only his second outing. Or so you would think if you hadn't seen Flynn escape from even more impossible situations in Cavanagh's debut Flynn case, The Defence . The question - as it tends to be at the end of just about every short chapter of The Plea - is how is he going to get out of the latest impossible situation this time? Cavanagh is a master of the dangling cliffhanger, and undoubtedly a good poker player. He'll know when he can bluff the reader and get away with it - a client will say " I kille...

For an author whose crime fiction involves the supernatural to a large degree, John Connolly does a very disturbing line in exploring real world horrors in his Charlie Parker series. Each Charlie Parker novel contributes to build up a darker picture of sinister forces of evil at large in the world and becoming increasing influential, but the question of whether the atrocities are committed to serve these supernatural agencies or whether it is a build-up of human evil that creates such forces is a distinction that is less clear. What is shocking however is that no matter how horrific the crimes of some of Parker's dark adversaries are, they all lie within the capacity of humans to inflict upon others. It would seem that there is no limit to the amount of suffering, torment and death that some are capable of inflicting on on other human beings. A Time of Torment  is the author's 14th Charlie Parker case, while it largely sees the investigator involved on a self-contained investig...

Scott K. Andrews' ambitious and hugely enjoyable jaunt through the paradoxes of time travel continue impressively in the second book of his YA TimeBomb trilogy , Second Lives . Having established the main characters and shown something of the nature of their ability to move through time in the first book TimeBomb - if not exactly giving away all the answers just yet - the matter of timelines becomes, as you might expect, a little more complicated. The author's winning idea in the first book was to bring together three young people from very different backgrounds and periods of history. 17 year-old Jana is plucked form New York in the year 2141 along with 18 year-old Polish-born Kaz from the present in 2014 and Dora, a 14 year old maid from Cornwall in the year 1640. Without quite knowing how or why they have been brought together, it's clear they have a destiny to play some part in attempting to prevent an apocalyptic event that is going to take place/has already taken pla...

**Spoiler warning** **Long Dark Dusk is the second book of J P Smythe's Australia Trilogy, so although there should be no spoilers about what happens in this book, it would not be possible to review this book without mentioning significant events that took place in the first book of the trilogy, Way Down Dark.** Towards the end of Way Down Dark , the first part of J P Smythe's Australia Trilogy, there was a major revelation for the inhabitants of 'Australia', an interstellar spaceship several generations into their journey to discover new habitable worlds as Earth struggles with over-population and ecological disaster. Over the years social order on the ship has broken down and the ship is overrun with violent gangs and strange cults in a battle for control that eventually threatens the integrity of the ship itself. Among those struggling to simply survive is Chan, a 17 year old young woman who does her best to help the vulnerable against some of the most violent aggres...

Girls on Fire is a book about boundaries, about testing where those boundaries lie when you are an adolescent and exploring how far you are willing to push your own. Occasionally, if you're daring enough or have someone to nudge you on further, you might stray beyond what society deems acceptable, and then ...well then things become interesting, or perhaps dangerous. Every generation has its own role models that inspire the youth of their day to challenge the boundaries of what society has deemed "safe" and through them find a way to discover and better express their own identity. For the purposes of Robin Wasserman's novel, set in 1992, that person is Kurt Cobain, but for some fans in Girls on Fire  whose personalities are a little more extreme, there would appear to be no boundaries whatsoever. Hannah Dexter however is a good girl from a respectable family in the small town of Battle Creek in a remote corner of Pennsylvania. After an embarrassing run-in with Nikki,...

One of Mark Billingham's great strengths as a writer of crime fiction has always been his ability to create and describe realistic characters from all walks of British life. Sometimes it feels like there are a few tokenisms thrown in there and a lot of unnecessary casual racist and sexist banter - particularly among the team in his Tom Thorne novels - but even if they are often unpleasant, there are realistic and identifiable character traits being played upon here and it's often for a definite purpose. It's through the use of some very specific English traits that Billingham often finds a propensity towards hatred, intolerance, bad behaviour that in some extreme cases can lead to criminal activity. It's a pity then that Billingham's signature DI Tom Thorne novels have been so inconsistent of late. Perhaps it's over-familiarity with characters that have overstayed their welcome, but the usually reliable characterisation seems to be increasingly let down by some...

I have to admit that Hemingway's Fiesta (or 'The Sun Also Rises') is one of my favourite novels. It's a work that - along with Hemingway's lifestyle - has inspired many people to set out to live life to the full and experience life as an adventure. Andy Rumbold's The Last Fiesta  could be seen as a tribute to Fiesta  - even the synopsis reads like a virtual updated rewrite of Hemingway's masterpiece - but it's clear that the author and his characters are well aware of that fact. And perhaps that's the intention. Rumbold's version of The Sun Also Rises  is set in 1995. Dan has been living in Santander in self-imposed exile from England, running away from a failed relationship with a girl who has since married his brother. Fully aware of his own failings, recognising that there's nothing glamorous about living in shabby accommodation and teaching at a school in the north of Spain, Dan doesn't romanticise his situation. There is perhaps a m...