To The Last Page

There's a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from a well-constructed thriller, even if it follows a familiar pattern, one that draws you in and leads you by the nose through the steps of escalation from initial criminal act (usually murder) through the investigation, complications and twists to resolution. What I find even more thrilling is a book that presents you with a highly unusual circumstance from the outset that seems almost impossible, meaning that you have no way of guessing where it is going to go from one page to the next. That's great of course, as long of course as the author provides a suitable, credible and necessarily inventive resolution. I'm afraid that Will Dean just doesn't follow though on what he sets up at the start of The Last Passenger . The novel certainly delivers in the WTF stakes right from the start, as Caroline Ripley, after only one night aboard the transatlantic liner RMS Atlantica, wakes up to find that everyone else on the ship ...

Pulp fiction has the reputation of being designed for cheap thrills, and certainly that is a part of its attraction, but it has many often overlooked qualities, not least of which is the breaking of taboos and stretching boundaries of what is "acceptable" in writing. Often that is a side benefit of striving for those cheap thrills. The finest exponents of the art form - and it certainly rates as such as far as I'm concerned - also demonstrate a tremendous facility for plotting, structure and characterisation, all the components of good writing. It's not surprising then that many also rate as literary greats - Raymond Chandler certainly, Patricia Highsmith also - that manage to shine a light on dark motivations of crime in relation to society, taking them down paths that few mainstream writers would dare to venture. Written in 1960, The Woman Chaser by Charles Willeford has a deceptive title, but the path that it takes you down is also a deceptive one. It's clearl...

There is of course no such thing as a perfect crime, but Vigo and his friend Sylvain think they have managed it. Or perhaps they don't really think of what they have done as a crime but an unfortunate accident that works in their favour. It certainly wasn't premeditated to kill anyone while driving a car in an area of deserted warehouses in Dunkirk at 100kmh in the dark with no lights on, but when they hit a man and find that he has a suitcase containing €2 million euro, well, disposing of the body and holding onto the money certainly can't be treated as anything less than criminal. But what is no one was there, no one sees it and no one finds the body and they keep the 2 million, does that make it a perfect crime? What Vigo and Sylvain don't really think to ask themselves - until it is too late of course - is what a man was doing in that remote deserted place with such a huge sum of money, and did no-one really witness what happened? It sounds suspiciously like a ranso...

Born in Tehran in Iran but now living in Canada, Babak Lakghomi's writing seems to reflect personal experience that struggles to grasp the disparity of living under a repressive regime with the idea of a writer's ideal of personal freedom of expression. South , the author's second short novel, tried to put those ideas across in a more abstract fashion, establishing a mood that explores deeper, human concerns on a more universal level. The narrator of South , B, is a freelance journalist, planning to write an article about life on an oil rig in the South of an unnamed country. His intentions for choosing to write about this subject aren't entirely clear, especially as there are more immediate concerns and problems in the world. A drought, brought about by a climate crisis seems to have had a major impact on the country, particularly in the South. Arriving at a fishing village before being transported to the rig, strange rites take place that ominously foreshadow what lie...

Having finished the Victor Coste SDPJ 93 trilogy (The Banlieues trilogy in English translation), Olivier Norek has taken in several standalone books in a greater variety of situations. The first, Entre deux mondes  (Between Two Worlds), starts out in the complex contemporary real-world of global war, politics and espionage, and the impact it has on ordinary people. It's the kind of thing Gerard Seymour does so well, particularly in how what is happening in the Middle East connects with and touches on our shores. 'Our' meaning the UK but also as far as Norek is concerned and where he finds his own angle on the subject, with France. Where they often meet, in the dangerous crossing between one world and the next, is in the channel between Calais and the English coast. Entre deux mondes indeed opens with a situation that is turning for the worse in the Mediterranean, between Libya and the planned destination for 273 refugees on their way to Italy, before highlighting another t...

As we go into the fifth book in the DS Cross Thriller series, it wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder how much mileage there is left in a series featuring a police detective on the spectrum; a series that to some extent adopts some of the same characteristics. DS George Cross likes order and procedure to a far greater degree than even the most assiduous detective. He is not governed by gut feelings or intuition, has a habit of speaking his mind, sometimes in the most inappropriate manner considering the circumstances, with little sense of apparent sensitivity for the families of the victims. Well, the answer is there in the fact that each book so far has shown that DS Cross actually has more reserves of human empathy than you might think, while on the other hand the irrational, instinctive and adherence to social niceties can - certainly to DS Cross - appear even stranger and more disconcerting. Tim Sullivan, with characteristic skill, lays that out clearly in the critical but custo...

"Vos les ancêtres, m'avait dit Michée en me conduisant à mon arbre le soir de ma Mort, vous êtes des empêcheurs d'avenir." Zoonomia is the first volume of a proposed tetraology, La Dynastie des boiteux (The Dynasty of the Lame), already followed by Citizen Narcisse , the proposed Black Almanach (which appears to have been renamed as Vos les ancêtres , just published in France) and Le Livre de Michée (The Book of Micah), each a saga of a family line in a different period, inspired by real historical figures. Johann, the main figure of Zoonomia is based on Paul Bellini Du Chaillu, Franco-American explorer, adventurer and naturalist born in Réunion in 1831. The first book at least inhabits in places the same hallucinatory history of the world, race and colonialism as Steve Erickson ( Arc d'X ) or the Vorrh trilogy of Brian Catling. Not following any linear line across the tetraology, Zoonomia opens in 1846 with 15-year-old Johann, an illegitimate half-caste yo...