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You don't associate David Mark with international espionage thrillers, but the author of the famed DS McAvoy series and other dark crime fiction works successfully across a number of genres including historical fiction ( Anatomy of a Heretic ) and even a mental health memoir ( Piece of Mind ). As a genre however, for me spy thrillers are something of a genre of the past, made almost redundant not just by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, but by the internet. Who needs to send agents into the field nowadays when you can employ hackers and deploy drones? There are exceptions to every rule and - again from a personal perspective - there are a few authors who keep the spy thriller relevant and exciting, managing to bring a contemporary feel to an old school of writing. In my limited reading in the genre, Mick Herron stands out with his Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, just about managing to keep one step ahead of the absurdity of modern day political and establishmen...

We usually know where Corto Maltese stands in terms of political allegiances, which is less to do with ideology than being in the side of the ordinary people against oppression, on the anti imperialist and anti-colonialist side of any conflict - but more often he remains romantically more than ideologically involved. That's the case when in Concerto in O' minore per arpa e nitroglierina he arrives in Ireland in 1917 just after the Easter Uprising to find trouble on the streets of Dublin. Soldiers patrolling in 'autoblindos' armoured cars come under attack from a group of IRA operatives led by Banshee O'Dannan. Corto's first objective is not to get involved in the struggle, but to visit the grave of the recently deceased Pat Finnucan. When he is asked what is is looking for, he replies in his usual wry manner ' La pentola d'oro del lepricano ' (The leprechaun's pot of gold). Finnucan had been the leader of Sinn Féin, hoping to take the revolution...

Well, I can't dispute the fact that The Skeleton Key  lives up to its title and the premise that is imprinted on the front cover as "One book. Two families. A Lifetime of Obsession". That comes through abundantly clearly in Erin Kelly's writing and its focus on Eleanor, the young woman caught up in a very unusual family situation. Fifty years ago, her artist father Frank Churcher hit upon an idea of creating a kind of treasure hunt puzzle in a children's book, 'The Golden Bones'. He had no idea of how it would capture the imagination of treasure seekers all over the world, and indeed cause no small amount of disruption to the lives of his and his friend Lal's family. The game, the wealth and the honours that came with it were welcome, but some controversy as well and even some deaths as the final key to the puzzle has remained undiscovered for decades. For Frank's daughter, Eleanor, it was a much more serious matter. Her name is close to her namesa...

There's not much that is typical about Junji Ito's manga work, but he certainly had his own style and methods for delving into the dark, the bizarre and the horrific, with no small amount of body horror. That's sounds like it might be somewhat formulaic, but within that genre he often manages to be very creative and surprising. Some of his works are episodic in nature, each chapter revealing a different type of horror that individually culminate in an explosive manner building up to an even more shocking conclusion, and that is very much the style of Black Paradox . Within that however, anything can happen... Four young people - Taburo, Pii-Tan, Baracchi and Maruso - gather together under unusual circumstances, meeting on the site Black Paradox and agreeing to form a suicide club. Without much preamble, they drive out to a location where they will realise their desire to exit this world. Each has their own motives but there is a common feeling that drives them in some way, ...

One of the characteristics that make Junji Ito a master of horror, aside from his own imagination and creativity, is the way his stories are often connected to Japanese folk character and tradition. It's something that all the best horror writers do, tapping into mythology and dark fears rooted in traditions that have an element of the eerie or bizarre about them. That's true about at least two of the stories in this new collection, but there are other deep concerns related to recent social and health issues that seem to have influenced and added to how Ito approaches the dark turns each of these stories take. In his afterword, Ito talks about how these stories may have only made it to the light of day because of the Covid lockdown. Developed from sketches of ideas that had been around for a long time, it seemed the right time to let his imagination and talent loose on them. The fevered aspect of the stories certainly reflects some of the concerns and fears going through his an...

We're more used to see Corto Maltese deal with mysticism in the context of African or Asian ceremonies and dark voodoo rituals. There's another stream of European mysticism to be found in (of all places) Switzerland in Le Elevetiche Rosa Alchemica . The manner in which Corto is drawn into this world is very much like that of a hallucinogenic trip, and it's a very trippy experience that takes up the majority of the album. Corto accompanies old friend Professor Jeremiah Steiner to Montagnola in the canton of Tessin, Switzerland. He's as interested as Steiner in a conference being held by Herman Hesse on esoterica and alchemy. Arriving at their destination, they are met by a strange ambiguous figure of indeterminate age, who looks 10 but claims to be either 4 or 730, who introduces themselves as Klingsor or Hermann Hesse. They are in a strange place all right, but it's about to get even stranger. Soon Corto is conversing with images of medieval sages on the wall about ...

Olivier Norek's Victor Coste/Banlieues Trilogy goes to some grim places where drugs and violent crime crime is rampant in Paris, but the third book in the series  Surtensions (published in English as  Breaking Point ) opens up in one of the grimmest of all: the penitentiary of Marveil. Overcrowded and with the worst criminals locked away, with fewer than one warden per 100 prisoners, the wisest thing to do is keep your head down and stay safe. That goes for the guards as much as the prisoners, but that's easier said than done, as detainee 4657, 22 year old of Corsican origin, Nunzio Mosconi, known as Nano, finds out when sharing a cell with a brute like Machine. The first part of Surtensions feels like it covers ground we've been over many times before. " Il n'existe pas d'endroit plus dangereux, inégal et injuste que la prison... La prison comme une école du crime. " It deals with the daily beatings, rapes and mistreatment of Nano, and it's not pre...