Brilliant, if a bit too close to the bone. It's like being in an incredibly well-written, vividly realised, psychologically astute, bitingly clever and satirical version of that dream where you're back at school with an exam pending, no study done, your classmates treating you like an alien the teachers giving you the fish-eye and the bullies ganging up on you. Ever have that dream? That's what this book is like. It's brilliant, but of that dream gives you the screaming heebie-geebies, it might be a bit of a struggle

Excellent first novel that makes World War II go kablooey. British secret agent Raybould Marsh returns from Civil War Spain with a burned reel of film which shows superhuman Nazis at work. Monstrous experiments on children have created soldiers who can fly, set things on fire and walk through walls, To comprehend and combat this new threat he recruits a college friend, trained since childhood to be a warlock, and who once, unwisely, allowed him to glimpse the reality of the Eidolons, vast, omnipresent, all-powerful beings who demand a blood price for every intervention.
Soon, the Nazi war machine has overwhelmed Europe with unnatural speed, leaving England weak, vulnerable and ripe for invasion. To combat the colossal evil of the super-Nazis, the British Warlocks must resort to increasingly awful acts of their own to satisfy the Eidolons, and there is a real sense that as the trilogy progresses, the ultimate threat will come from these dealings. By the end of the book, an even greater menace is on Britain's doorsteps, and even more questionable methods are being employed to forestall it. Watching and manipulating people and events is the terrifying, sociopathic seer Gretel, whose knowledge of the future is the most dreadful power of all.
Tregillis drenches his mad science and supernatural flourishes with the general awfulness of the War without lingering the battlefields or visiting the Camps, managing to situate his fictional variations within the reality without one, as it were, invading the other. Dark, well-written, exciting and pretty genuinely unputdownable, Bitter Seeds manages to be both epic and pacy, with great characters and manages to mess it up as science fiction, fantasy and horror without missing a beat.

Dara and Xavier arrive in East Africa to make a documentary about Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. They meet a pirate, a guy who's supposed to be talking pirates out of being pirates, a wealthy Texan with a huge shotgun and a new girlfriend and an American Al Qaeda guy who wants to blow something up. Dara and Xavier talk about films and the film they're making and about stuff that happened. Leonard does that a lot, have the characters tell the story for big chunks. They tell each other what happens, they describe people, they describe the setting and the set-up and the whole damn thing.

Like Cuba Libre, it's an atypical setting for Leonard, but Leonard makes it his own, and the story and the action flow nice and smooth and the cool dialogue and the cool characters, gauging each other's levels off cool, comparing everything to movies, thinking what they're going to say, how it'll sound, what it'll look like. Some carry it off, and some do not. in a Leonard book, it's a matter of life and death.

A ridiculously enjoyable book in a ridiculously enjoyable series. This is the sequel to Anno Dracula, which had Genevieve and Charles Beauregard chase Jack The Ripper through the fog-choked streets of Victorian London, as ruled by the Prince Regent, Dracula. Not to spoil it or anything, but at the end of the book revolution was kindled and Dracula ejected from Britain. Now he's in Germany, running the War for Kaiser Wilhelm. Warm and dead alike are chewed up in the muddy fields of France as the conflict stalls and drags for years, while in the skies above the nascent science of aerial warfare capture the public imagination. The deadly Baron Von Richtofen is Germany's greatest ace. Edwin Winthrop is assigned by the Diogenes Club to spy out the headquarters of Richtofen's Flying Circus, where dark deeds are afoot. Vampire reporter Kate Reed is driving an ambulance at the front and sniffing out stories. Exiled American writer Edgar Allan Poe is conscripted to write a very special biography. With Russia out of the war, millions of German troops are being brought to the western front for a Spring offensive that could end the war and see Dracula triumphant.

The pages are crowded with literary characters, some of them vampires, some of them not, which adds a delightful level to the book, but there is a cleverly constructed, compelling story and in Kate and Edwin a pair of strong, likeable leads in dreadful peril.

This is a new edition, and it includes a previously deleted chapter and a novella set in the 1920s, featuring Genevieve and Edwin in a messy effort to find a new king of the vampires. At 150 pages, it's a substantial chunk of story, and with the annotations and a film treatment for a Roger Corman film this is an attractive prospect even for fans who already have a copy. Still to come is Dracula Cha Cha Cha and then, finally, Johnny Alucard. That's a lot to look forward to.

This superb thriller, by an Irish author, is set in Moscow in 1936, a hungry, fearful place. The Revolution is in full swing. Stalin reigns supreme. The secret police stalk the streets and offices and homes and informers whisper in their ears and every now and then the statue of a Russian hero is taken down and his picture removed and he is never heard from again. The populace walk on eggshells, but the real Terror is yet to come. The churches are deconsecrated and religion is a crime, but Russia’s long, devout history does not die easily.

After the discovery of the horribly mutilated body of a women displayed on the altar of a church,Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia, investigates. The discovery that the body is that of an American citizen is a cause for grave concern and draws unwelcome attention from his superiors and from the NKVD. More bodies are discovered, and Korolev follows a trail that takes him to the lowest depths of the Moscow underworld and the highest reaches of his own organisation.

Gripping and atmospheric, this debut thriller threatens to charge off into serial-killer-meets-DaVinci Code territory, with its horrible murders and historical artifacts, but in fact Ryan keeps the story firmly grounded, so much so that one of the most memorable sections of the book is a trip to a Spartak Moscow soccer match, depicting the crush and excitement and the hurly-burly with an impressive eye for detail. Korolev is an engaging character, strong, decent, secretly religious, determinedly optimistic about Russia’s communist future.

This is the first volume of a series that promises to be one of the most interesting forays into historical crime fiction in recent years.

The third book in a loose trilogy by cyberpunk legend Gibson, author of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, Zero History is set in the present, a snapshot of the world as it was last week, but with that sci-fi sheen of cutting-edge cool that only Gibson ‘s unique vision can impart. Advertising agencies, fashion shows, motor-cycle couriers, military fashion and industrial espionage are all combined in a book that’s as much a sly comedy as a clever thriller.

Hollis Henry, an ex-drummer who lost most of her money in the crash and hasn’t seen her boyfriend since he jumped off the world’s tallest building in Dubai, finds herself grudgingly working for Hubertus Bigend, the brilliantly-named zeitgeist-surfing millionaire with his fingers in many pies. Now he has has eye designing uniforms for the military and the lucrative streetwear market that goes with it. Milgrim is also working for Bigend too. He lost ten years of his life to prescription drugs. Detoxed and reinvented, he translates and runs errands and never asks questions.

Hollis and Milgrim are set the task of tracking down the designer of a mysterious line of denim clothing. Bigend is curious about the secretive tactics of ‘anti-branding.’ Hollis is having second thoughts about the whole thing, and Milgrim is wondering why he’s being followed by a US agent who is sending him messages over a Twitter account. Rival designers with ex-military connections are unimpressed with Bigend’s end run for military contracts and set out to remove the competition, and Milgrim and Hollis soon find themselves embroiled in a tense, dangerous game of cat and mouse.

Set mostly in London,with quick trips to Paris and the US, Zero History is a novel of slick, clean surfaces, ubiquitous brand-names and evolving technologies. It is a comedy, a thriller, and a portrait of the utter strangeness of the modern world. And it’s a damn good read.

It's been a very long time since I first read Tourist Season, but Hiaasen's viciousness towards the venal and corrupt stupid infesting his beloved Florida has not abated one bit. Now his ire is focused on wild celebrities and the people who prey on them. No, it's not really Hiaasen at his best, but it's a polished, scabrous romp through a particularly repulsive underbelly.

We have a corpulent, sweaty paparazzi; a spoiled, out-of-control, barely talented pop star; her put-upon stand-in whose existence she is blissfully unaware of; her mother, who thinks all her drug-overdoses are food-poisoning; her skeevy manager; her plastic PR people and her ex-con, facially disfigured, cattle-prod wielding bodyguard. When the paparazzo accidentally kidnaps the stand-in, she has to be gotten back without alerting the police or the pop-star.

And so a weird, dysfunctional farce begins, wherein the disfigured sociopath with the weed-strimmer for a hand is one of the more sympathetic characters. It's funny, well-written, on-target, and if it's not quite as wild and weird as you might want it to be, well it's still a lot of fun.

On first reading the blurb of this book I found myself wondering what on earth Graham Joyce was up to. Joyce, as original a fantasist as the literary world has to offer, seemed to be going down a fairly well-worn route, if the description of the plot was anything to go by. A husband and wife, caught in an avalanche in the Pyrenees, make their way back to their holiday village, only to find it deserted, and all their efforts to leave bring them back to the same place. I mean, it's obvious what's going on here, right? The reader is right there, one step ahead of he characters.

But only one step. They're not dumb. The work it out, too. The question is, what happens next? The question is, why is this happening at all? Of course, the reader will work out the next thing early on, too, as they're supposed to, but this one is something the characters cannot or will not grasp, for a very good reason. And as the lights flicker and the shadows close in and the ghostly men get nearer, you know what must happen, but instead of being a hackneyed cop-out cliche, it's Hitchcock's old lesson about suspense being when you know the bomb under the desk is going to go off, and the ending is almost unbearable.

I was explaining this to my wife.

'Because it's a love story,' I told her, and she laughed.

'How did you manage to accidentally trick yourself into reading a love story?'

'Because it's Graham Joyce.'