To The Last Page

David Mark can come up with some nasty characters involved in some gruesome dark crime situations in his DS McAvoy series, and some even more horrific scenarios in his standalone books, but he outdoes himself with the premise behind The Guest House , a dark tale involving the illicit dealing in body parts from unwilling and unwitting donors on a remote part of the Scottish west coast. The police and special services have mounted a covert operation however including one agent deep undercover, Nicholas Roe. Unfortunately there are a number of innocent people involved, Ronnie, the owner of a little guest house in the area and her estranged husband Callum. Things aren't working out well not just in their marriage but with three kids to manage and anger issues to control over a cheating husband, Ronnie is finding it a struggle to keep the business going. Some of the current guests are a bit on the dodgy side too. In some respect this is typical David Mark, on the one hand creating some ...

If you’ve read any of Patrick McGrath’s work before you’ll be aware and expect his book to deal with madness, but madness takes many forms. While in books with evocative titles like Asylum , Trauma and Dr. Haggard’s Disease  it is often related to acts of madness in fictional doctors and damaged artists in Gothic asylums, McGrath has extended its range to take in wider dysfunction in American society, as well as the trauma inflicted by historical events, from 9/11 in Ghost Town to the American Revolution years of Martha Peake . What greater collective social madness can there be then than a country involved in a civil war? Last Days in Cleaver Square has quite a few of McGrath’s familiar elements, not least of which is a narrator who appears to be gradually losing his mind, which can only be a good thing for fans of his deliciously delirious fiction, and it is indeed again an artist who is afflicted with the onset of madness here. Francis McNulty is an aging poet who in his yout...

Soho in London is famous for its colourful character and Fiona Mozley certainly manages to show a good cross-section of that in her latest novel Hot Stew . It follows the fortunes of a very diverse selection of characters who interact only peripherally with one another, which is perhaps a fairly accurate way of describing how those of different classes, races and sexual orientation all interact in the real world. They are however all part of the complex ecosystem of life interaction as it operates in Soho. Or perhaps fails to operate as, like anywhere in London, population shifts and business ventures change quickly and often and the old ways of operating might no longer be fit for purpose. Certainly “the oldest profession” is struggling to maintain its traditional presence in the district. One of the central characters, Precious, a young black woman who work in the sex industry there, decides to put up a fight against the rent increases that are being imposed as a way to force her and...

I will make exceptions, but it would take something special for me to want to read any more books with titles that are variations on The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle or The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild , but we are talking about Max Barry here. Barry, in my experience ( Jennifer Government , Lexicon , Providence ), has always been creative within the conventions of the science fiction genre, so when he comes in with a book entitled The 22 Murders of Madison May , I don’t even need to read the blurb or synopsis to know he’s going to come up with an entertaining and distinctive variation on a theme that is often difficult to work with. Those who haven’t read Barry however it might take a little more convincing, so to summarise the concept (which is admittedly is a little easier than trying to describe The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle ) it’s about a 22 year old woman, Madison May, an estate agent, an actress or whatever she happens to be in 22 different realities in which sh...

Code 93 , the first book in Olivier Norek's 'Banlieues Trilogy', a policier  series dealing with the modern day realities of violent drug crime in the suburbs of Paris, gets off to an intriguing start with two separate, but inevitably connected, strange and inexplicable deaths. It's 2011, and although Camille has been reported missing for a long time, when her family are invited to morgue to identify the body of a dead young woman who has clearly suffered drugs and sexual abuse, they refuse to recognise that the woman is Camille. Soon after, the body of a large man is found by security guard in an abandoned warehouse near the canal with three bullet wounds and no pulse. When the autopsy is carried out however, it is discovered that he hasn't actually been shot at all, it's just he is wearing the shirt of a man who has been shot three times. He may not have been shot, but he has been castrated while alive. And speaking of alive it turns out that the 'corpse...

The first book in Sylvain Repos's Yojimbot opens in a spectacular if unsurprising way. The imagery is at least familiar, the comic book opening with a silent and swift moving samurai standoff sequence straight out of a Kurosawa film or Kazuo Koike's Lone Wolf and Cub or closer perhaps in artwork style to Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo . The clue to where this differs and yet plays out unsurprisingly exactly as you might imagine is there in the title; the Yojimbo samurai warriors duelling here are robots. There's an anachronistic surrealism to the setting that initially makes you also think of this taking place in some Moebius reality, not least in its clear line art, colouration and movement language. Yojimbot however is not going to leave you in some abstract surreal world where clearly advanced technology exists, so there must be some reason for two robots facing off and using archaic swords. A "Eastworld" theme park perhaps? If so, there this amusement park ...

One science-fiction theme that is becoming more relevant in contemporary society is the paranoia thriller. One of the best exponents of this in the 1970s was the author Philip K Dick, most dramatically in his novel A Scanner Darkly , and that idea of being constantly watched and observed by powers and authorities was updated in the movie The Truman Show to reflect the growing interest in reality TV. Even since then, reality TV and the omnipresence of security cameras, phone cameras, the growth of the internet and the ability to observe and share almost every aspect of our lives has gone to new levels that would shock even PKD. Like all great science-fiction in this field (and indeed in reality TV), there is an uncomfortable place where a fun and entertainment sit alongside a rather troubling aspect to society and personal freedoms. The amusing and slightly disturbing twist that Omni-Visibilis places on this idea is that it extends the nature of The Truman Show to consider an even mo...