To The Last Page

Alan Parks has left his Glasgow detective Harry McCoy at his lowest point midway through the series in To Die in June . He's in a really bad place, the cumulative effects of his profession, the declining state of Glasgow to gangsters, drug dealers and all kinds of social problems in the 1970s. Combined with an alcohol problem, family and personal difficulties, it's not looking too good for Parks' detective. But while we wait for McCoy to pull himself out of a very dark hole, the author turns the clock back and turns his attention to Glasgow in an earlier period during the WWII bombing raids on the city and its shipyards where, frankly, it wasn't exactly a paradise then either. Nor is Joe Gunner in any better state than McCoy. Just returned from Dunkirk, partly shell shocked, leg and face ripped apart by shrapnel, he is met at St. Enoch train station by his old chief Drummond. Nether of them should be police officers, but due to the war Drummond has been pulled out of re...

Believing in an idea put forward in a science-fiction story is a matter of investment and putting aside preconceived ideas. Real life experience of a pandemic, the increasing evidence of climate change, lockdowns and some recent political events have certainly forced people to re-evaluate the possibility of a breakdown of society and adapting to life in a post-apocalyptic world. I initially found it difficult to put aside a sense of disbelief with the premise behind the disaster that has occurred in Awakened , but having seen how science, business and politics have twisted ideas of moral behaviour in the name of expedience, productivity and growth, it's perhaps not so far-fetched after all. The principle behind Awakened is that society has significantly "changed", or to put it another way, completely broken down due to an ill-advised experiment with sleeplessness. Considering that the scientific knowledge of the benefits and necessity of sleep is already out there and be...

Despite a few superficial similarities, David Mark's Sal Delaney series is a very different beast from his DS McAvoy series. Sure, both are police detectives and both have very close relationships with their families and are very protective of them. Above all both series usually involve some pretty gruesome killings. Hey, it's David Mark, what do you expect? Any similarities end there however, or at least if there are similarities they are explored from different angles. McAvoy deals with crime that comes from unexpected places, threats from new areas and corrupt dealings in a changing world. As far as the Sal Delaney series goes - which is not a series as such as much as a three-parter, I believe - she's a Collision Investigation Officer in a rural Cumbrian backwater and the focus is more on how families and individuals are affected in the present by the crimes and injustices of the past. Which means there are lots of dark family and community secrets that continue to re...

In some respects Ronald Malfi's Senseless is a standard thriller with familiar elements in place. The novel opens with a serial killer situation developing, the body of a young woman discovered in the desert outside Los Angeles a year after the similar horrific killing and mutilation (not necessarily in that order) of an actress in horror B-movies. The cop investigating the murder has been going through a difficult time after his wife's death from cancer, and this is a setback because he believed that he had found the killer after the first murder There is a little twist here - not really a spoiler, but certainly something that is essential to note since it adds another element of uncertainty and ambiguity to the case - in that it's suggested that Detective Bill Rennie had 'resolved' the previous case by helping the husband of the dead woman bury the body of the man they believed was her killer. The question that troubles him - aside from getting found out - is whe...

**First book spoiler warning** This is Nick Harkaway's second book in the Titanium Noir series, so while there are no spoilers here for Sleeper Beach , it does reveal at least one significant event that took place in the first book . ** Cal Sounder, in his capacity as a Private Investigator rather than as part of the important Tonfamecasca family, is called in to look into the death of a woman on Sleeper Beach in the costal town of Shearwater. A formerly thriving town, it's now something of a backwater, but still the centre of operations for the Erskine family who practically own the town. It's not uncommon to find dead bodies on Sleeper Beach. People often come there to lie on one of the many sunbeds laid out and stay there; those suffering from what the local police pathologist calls 'spontaneous dysphoric and psychogenic cognitive atrophy', a fancy way of saying that they feeling discarded by the world and have given up on life. The dead woman Alisa Lloyd doesn...

For a fantasy novel, The Raven Scholar starts out relatively low key. There is no epic battle, the land has been at peace for centuries, the only recent rebellion quickly put down before it even got started. There is a minor hangover from that rebellion still to be mopped up, but while even that seems relatively insignificant, you know how it goes with fantasy novels. This is just the beginning of a trilogy, so you can be sure there will be ramifications down the line, and sure enough these events already come back to bite before the end of book one.  So what kind of a fantasy world does Antonia Hodgson delve into in her Eternal Path Trilogy? It's close enough to a Game of Thrones style fantasy, where there are powerful rival families in Orrun and there are religious and militaristic powers. The difference here is that you can choose which 'family' or anat of the Eight Guardians you wish to follow. There is the Way of the Bear, the Ox, the Raven, the Monkey, the Hound, the...

Having come to Thilliez and Sharko via the more common route of the later Le Syndrome [E] and subsequent follow-ups with Lucie Hennebelle in  [Gataca] and Atom[ka] , I knew a little about what happened in Thilliez's first Sharko thriller Train d’enfer pour ange rouge , or at least one significant outcome. I also had a good idea of the dark tone that the book would take as that is characteristic of the author's writing and certainly the traumatic experience of this case in the first book has an outcome that marks Sharko deeply and is felt throughout the rest of the series. I'm not sure how much more of this I can say without giving away what might be considered a spoiler, but sure the book has been out for a number of years now and Thilliez has not yet had anything significant published in English, so it should be safe enough. I'll tiptoe around it just in case. So I had some idea what to expect in Train d’enfer pour ange rouge (literally, Hell Train for Red Angel). W...