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Nicci Cloke's Her Many Faces takes a little time to get its murder mystery drama going, but ultimately that's because it has other factors and relevant contemporary issues to raise that are to prove to have a significant impact on the case. Those issues feel just a little 'manufactured' in terms of the plotting, and it all seems a bit too neatly and novelistically constructed. Those are minor reservations however, and once you get past that, the courtroom drama that follows really takes on a momentum this makes this a hard book to put down. An initial difficulty, for me, is its choice of perspective. What we have are five different viewpoints, all of them men, all of them focussed on their experience with Katherine Cole, a young woman who has been arrested and accused of the murder of four extremely wealthy, important and influential men. Katherine was the only waitress working at their private members club when the men were served a poisoned bottle of brandy. Since Ka...

It's not a Man Bites Dog story, it's not even a Dog Bites Young Girl story, as Champ has an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the alleged incident, but even if that were the case no-one, we are led to believe, would do what the Lamberts have done. But when a policeman comes knocking on the door of the Hayloft in Swaffham Tilney to say the Lambert’s Welsh Terrier has been accused of viciously biting, not just nipping, Tess Gavey, Champ’s owner Sally Lambert does what no one else would do. And evidently enlists the rest of the family. The title makes it sound a little more sinister doesn't it? Well, that kind of suspense is something that this author is a master - or mistress - of, and surreal suspense at that. It's all in the way you tell it and Sophie Hannah has you on tenterhooks from the start with her extraordinary and unusual opening. A policeman, the PC in question in the first paragraph, has been left what looks like a battered dug-up manuscript that detail...

John Ironmonger is a wonderful and unique writer. Let's just get that out of the way. In fact he has just got better with every book he has written (I haven't read The Coincidence Authority , but will have to remedy that; even though by my above assertion it's not going to be quite as good as later works, but it will still be brilliant I imagine). His second novel, after his debut The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder , was the wonderful The Whale and the End of the World (or Not Forgetting the Whale ), a quirky book with a serious message set in a little Cornish village during a worldwide pandemic; the novel a marvel of English character, wit, superstition and deeply felt humanity, features that took on an international flavour in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild . Ironmonger, I'm very pleased to discover, has returned to St Piran with some quirky English characteristics for another timely work that encapsulates all the same qualities in order to approach another ...

Sergio Bonelli's editorial for Dylan Dog, Color Fest 1 , published in August 2007, highlights it as the start of a new direction, the original creator Tiziano Sclavi stepping back from writing duties and giving other writers and artists - some new, some familiar with the character of Dylan Dog - some fresh new ideas and interpretations. And that's what we get in a great variety of styles and artwork in the first Color Fest, a 130 page issue containing four new stories, some of which work well, others not so much, but all very definitely in the established character of the London based Investigator of Nightmares and his sidekick Groucho. Dylan in Wonderland Story, script -  Giovanni Gualdoni Art -  Bruno Brindisi The opening story in the collection is a simple one that nonetheless operates on different levels, as you would expect to be the case of someone who often delves into the dark places between this reality and the one of nightmares. This childhood nightmare takes place i...

Regular readers of Dylan Dog will know that he doesn't have much luck with women. Hold on, let me rephrase that: Dylan manages to hook up with a beautiful woman almost every month, but they don't last any longer than the gap between monthly episodes. The beauty he loses in issue 175 is however perhaps more painful than any of the others. At the start of Il seme della follia (The Seed of Madness) Dylan is not only in despair at having lost another girlfriend even before the episode had really started, one moreover that seemed to be perfect for him in every way, but the way Amber has been taken from him is truly horrendous. Stopping off for a quick canoodle in the woods, Dylan and Amber are beset for no apparent reason by a group of youths wearing horror masks. Dylan is badly beaten and tied to a tree where he witnesses Amber tied to another tree in front of him, petrol poured over her and set alight. The doctor treating Dylan's wounds recommends he sees a psychiatrist, and ...

Winning the lottery doesn't exactly seem like the stuff of nightmares, but up to the moment that his number is called out Clarence Clough has had his share of misfortunes, but perhaps no more so than anyone else. There is the loss of both his parents in a car accident while he is a child, but luck is on his side when as a young man he meets up with Brittany, the girl he has dreamed of since college, they marry and have two children. True, they are separated now after Brittany found Clarence in a compromising position with the glamorous Gloria, but that's life. When he has a stroke of luck ( Un colpo di sfortuna ) and wins £5 million in the national lottery, true to form for Clarence, there's a downside, as he discovers soon after the win that he has a serious illness and only two months to live. There is certain a hand of date or just misfortune in Clarence's situation, but where does Dylan Dog, the investigator of nightmares, come into the picture? Well, aside from tha...

Back before I had even read any of her work, I nonetheless had the impression, mainly based on the accounts of The Gathering , that Anne Enright wrote mainly about women and difficult family situations. Despite the acclaim and awards, that didn't strike me as a subject that I would find interesting and when I finally got around to reading The Green Road it turned out to be a mostly accurate view of her typical subject matter but it was also clearly just a brilliant piece of writing. Having got past the inaccurate impression of it being an off-putting subject then, Actress seemed a more approachable book. A fictional account of a writer's memories of her mother, a once famous Irish actress who caused a scandal at the end of her carer by shooting a film producer in the foot, it seems again like the familiar territory of women in difficult family relationship, but in the hands of Anne Enright it's also much more than that. The story focusses on this as a central point, as if...