To The Last Page

There is inevitably quite a bit of interest in retrospectively going further back into the career of an established crime thriller figure like Commissioner Franck Sharko. Franck Thilliez takes us back then to 1991 to the first murder case undertaken by Sharko as a inspector recently appointed to a post in Paris. Anyone familiar with Sharko knows what will happened a short time afterwards in the first written Sharko novel Train d'enfer pour Ange rouge  and knows how deeply he has been marked by his experiences personally and professionally, so it comes as little surprise that his first case is also a very unusual and disturbing one that also challenges him on a personal level. There are a couple of cases that land on the desk of the 30 year old inspector in December 1991. Sharko, who has been in the service for seven years in the provinces and in Lille, has only recently moved to Paris and is sent to look through the archives of a case that has remained open but unresolved for sever...

Fred Vargas has her own unique approach to the crime thriller, and in her Commissioner Adamsberg series at least (although it's there also to an extent in her Three Evangelists series) - there are two themes that both feature to one extent or another; one related to history and the other to the idea (if not necessarily reality) of something supernatural. Having finally arrived almost a decade after publication at Temps glaciaires , those two themes here seem to me so outlandish that they are almost wilfully self-referential to the extent of self-parody. Or perhaps the author sees it as something of a self-imposed challenge. It's almost as if she has come up with the two most outlandish stories she can imagine and attempts to connect them. One featuring an evil spirit that haunts a small Icelandic island and one where the descendants of French revolutionaries replay in costume the pronouncements, betrayals and executions of their rivals. Only Vargas could get away with it, and s...

Picking up the pace a little - the first Prefect Dreyfus novel The Prefect was published in 2008 and later repackaged as Aurora Rising in preparation for the continuation of the series in 2018 with the second book Elysium Fire . Machine Vendetta looks to be the third and final part of the series, and if it ends here, it wraps up the trilogy rather neatly, following through on some of the underlying issues and wider problems being dealt with by the law-enforcement service for the Glitter Band, the Panoply. The Panoply are not so much a law-enforcement authority however as a kind of federal agency that ensures that the democratic process of polling cores on each of the thousands of habitats in the Glitter Band around Yellowstone are not tampered with in any way. Outside of that, the habitats have their own autonomy and Panoply only intervene when there is a serious matter that violates the Common Articles and could impact on other habitats. Not everyone accepts their authority but mos...

In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...

Looking back at children growing up in a more innocent time half a century ago (how quickly things change!), it's hard not to draw comparisons, at least initially, between All the Colours of the Dark and works like Stand by Me or even Stranger Things without the dark fantasy and horror. Chris Whitaker certainly captures something of the warmth and magic of childhood around this mid-seventies period, a time when the world felt grander, was more diverse, exciting and unknown, where imagination replaced Instagram. But it's not an idealised depiction by any means, nor is it steeped in nostalgia. There is nothing innocent about what happens in the lives of a number of children growing up around this time in Monta Clare, Missouri. In fact, All the Colours of the Dark opens with hope dying. On a morning in 1975 the day that her bees went missing, 13-year-old Saint finds out that her friend Joseph 'Patch' Macauley has been stabbed, abducted and, as time passes, is now in al...

Essentially, Louise Mey's La deuxième femme ('The Second Wife', or 'The Second Woman' as the English language edition prefers to name it) appears to be one of those exploitative thrillers where a vulnerable woman begins to suspect that she doesn't really know the man she is living with, that he keeps secrets from her and that she may become a victim. That's not to say that the situation is not a very real one, or at least the underlying sentiment is real and relatable even if not every woman lives with a murderer or would-be murderer. The strength of this one however is in the level of detail, the writing conveying the whole complexity of feelings and realisations not just about the present situation, but to the backgrounds that give rise to how people behave and react. Moved by a television appeal by a man who she refers to for most of the book only as “ l’homme qui pleure ” (the crying man) Sandrine joins in the search for his missing wife. She sees in hi...

Have you ever wondered what would happen when when a cosy crime Miss Marple-style sleepy village murder mystery runs up against a gritty LA crime drama with a maverick police detective who plays it as hard as the criminals? No, me neither. That unlikely scenario however is what Chris Brookmyre proposes in his latest crime thriller. Obviously though with Brookmyre, there is going to be a postmodern twist on this and presumably some knowing humorous tongue-in-cheek playing with the conventions, but that doesn't entirely redeem the fact that you have to read what amounts substantially on both sides to a work of standard crime fiction by numbers. To be fair however, even if you have a good idea where it is headed, Brookmyre manages to keep this enormously entertaining throughout. It's always been joked about that you would never invite Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to your country home or go on holiday with Hercule Poirot, as you're practically certain of having a murder on you...