Grimwood, who developed his style writing mean nasty cyberpunk thrillers, applies it to a mean nasty historical fantasy set in Venice in 1407. Assassins battle with werewolves over fleeing aristocratic brides-to-be, with the assassins coming off the worse, leaving the city of Venice defended in the secret war by a few surviving killers and a lingering reputation. Can the strange young man with silver hair taken from a hidden compartment in a Mamluk ship, with his unnatural strength, speed and hungers be the answer? He will have to be caught and trained and tamed and forced to give in to his unnatural nature. Kidnappings, murders, power plays and political intrigues come to a head with a massive armada sailing for Cyprus with only a smaller flotilla and the silver haired boy standing in the way.

Fast-moving and vivid, atmospheric and grimy and I may be a little drunk and i had this lovely savoury pie bread thing and yum and I enjoyed this book and the pie and the cider so yay! Stars all round!

After weeks spent on The Alexandria Quartet, this went down like a bomb. I read the damn thing in a day, so fast-moving, slick and smooth is the story and the prose.

The Radleys reside in a compact and assured British suburb, abstaining vampires trying to live a moral life and suffering all sorts of miseries as a result of repressing their natures and appetities. Unfortunately they have not so far told the teenage kids why they're always hungry and have to wear sun-block and suffer rashes and headaches and why animals don't like them. Which is why one night at a party an unfortunate incident leads to a bloody outcome and things start to fall apart, not least when Uncle Will, most definitely a non-abstaining vampire, turns up to provide his unwelcome double-edged assistance.

So it's all a satire of power, privilege, responsibility and repression, maturity and sacrifice. Fair enough, vampires nowadays are more metaphors than monsters. They've been AIDS, homosexuality, corporate and political corruption and Mormoms. Heck, right now they're a metaphor for my uncontrollable craving for a few squares of chocolate, so why not middle-aged suburban conformity? As a parent, the idea of how we inadvertantly harm our children when we try to help and protect them, and simple mistakes have terrible consequences, hold a particular potency, so it certainly worked for me.

Anyway, it's fun, gleeful, clever and I enjoyed the heck out of it.

This is just great. With Northlanders, Scalped and DMZ all winding to a close, you always start to worry about Vertigo as an imprint without a few successful new titles on the go. Unwritten is doing well, and I really, really want iZombie to do well, too. Set mostly in and around a graveyard in Eugene, Oregon, our heroine is Gwen, a gravedigger and zombie, who is forced to dig up the freshly dead to eat their brains or risk losing her memory and turning into a shambling mindless monster. Her best friend is a ghost, her other friend is a were-terrier. Elsewhere, a coven of vampires is running a paint-ball game and a pair of monster-hunters are in town, hunting for monsters. Gwen's latest meal comes with an unpleasant set of memories: namely the murder of the deceased. To calm the dead she promises to track down the killer, but quickly discovers that nothing is as it seems.

Okay, remember Buffy? Remember how cool Buffy was, with her adorable friends and her heavy burden and complicated plots and clever stories? Well, iZombie is nothing like Buffy other than the obvious supernatural stuff. But it's got a vibe to it that fans of Buffy will recognise and appreciate. Strong female characters. Witty script. Dodgy romance. A weird world that promises to get weirder. Mike Allred's beautiful, distinctive pop-art. laura Allred's colours - seriously, lovely colours on a Vertigo book. It's like a goddamn miracle.

It's also, last but not least, a surprisingly fresh take on zombies. Who knew there was still meat on those bones? No? Um. Bringing a dead genre back to shambling life! Better? No? Okay, try: this zombie has beauty as well as braaaains! Oh, feck off. Write your own stupid damn pun. You think this is easy? Huh? Well it ain't. Can't get any apreciation around here, I swear.

Although it's a big tough book about a big tough battle that's, if not exactly pointless, certainly difficult for all but a few to fathom, The Heroes is actually slightly less cynical than the First Law Trilogy and somewhat less unpleasant than Best Served Cold, which I found unbearably horrible, albeit in that way that only extremely good books can be. Having said that, being slightly less cynical and somewhat less unpleasant in the ouevre of Joe Abercrombie leaves ample scope for both.

The Heroes paints a denser picture on a smaller canvas. The Southern Union has marched North, trying to engage Black Dow. Now he finally turns and fights in the Valley of Osrung, and the next three days will determine the fate of... well, mostly it will the determine the fates of the people who spend the next three days fighting each other. A range of characters on both sides prepare for the fight in assorted different ways. The book describes the build-up, the fight, and then the aftermath, a classic fantasy battle put through the modern wringer, removing all broader notions of right and wrong, heroism and villainy, bravery and cowardice and replacing it with something messy and complicated and sad. Because this book really does have more of a heart than Abercrombie's others. many of the characters are quite relatable, if not always admirable, and the amazing thing is after all the horror and the slaughter, he rounds up a few endings that are moving and perhaps even happy.

The weakest part of the book is mostly the sections with Bremer Dan Gorst, an otherwise brilliant and interesting character who, like the torturer Gorka(?) in the First Law books intersperses every conversation, observation or even personal narration with cynical thoughts made even cynicaler by being put in italics. It was overdone in The First Law and it was overdone a bit here, like having a director's commentary running that does nothing but state the bleedin' obvious.

Anyway, Abercrombie is the perfect writer for fantasy fans who like violence and dramatic irony. The Heroes is also tightly plotted, exciting, and self-contained, for those sick of waiting for the next volume of Song Of Whateverit'scalledagain, though it does use minor and even major characters from the other books. It's not exactly All Quiet On The Northern Front, but it's definitely nodding in that direction, a fun It's Grim Fighting Up North novel, that manages to not be as utterly irredeemably grim as it could be.

Volume seven of Aaron and Guera's Vertigo series about crime and degradation on an Indian Reservation. There's a hint of redemption here as well, more so than in any of the previous volumes, and hard-won, high-cost, painfully vulnerable redemption at that.

Coming right out of nowhere is the heart-rending opening story about an old couple facing up to some grim realities, living in an isoated spot far from town. This is followed by a two-parter about Shunka, Red Crow's right-hand man, and that takes an amazing turn right from the get-go. After that, we travel to Vietnam 1969, and Dash's father's experiences in the war and after. Then it's back to Dash Bad Horse and Carol, two horribly wounded souls at the bottom of a long fall into utter self-destruction, just beginning to claw their way back to the light, if it's not too late.

Scalped is a dark, twisted, violent series, but in this volume Aaron writes the heart out his story and his characters, leaving them sad and sorry and alone, with darkness ahead and only thin shreds of human dignity to protect them.

So these may be two stone-cold literary and popular classics of the 21st century, fully and deservedly so. In Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell rose from nothing to one of the most powerful men in Tudor England. Now he holds and consolidates his power having learned his lessons well. And the lesson was this: give Henry what he wants. Start giving it before Henry even knows he wants it. And what Henry wants is this: a new wife. Anne Boleyn must go, and Thomas Cromwell, intelligent, adaptable, genial and even liberal must ensure justice is done the way justice must be done. That he will avenge himself on old enemies is part of his elegant design. Cromwell becomes truly terrifying here, even more so than the petulant child of a king or the arrogant and presumptuous queen. We like Cromwell. We see he does good. We see he tries to minimise the damage. he is realistic and compassionate without being sentimental. It is best to be ruthless and, having chosen a course, pursue it without question or apology. And so the queen falls, and others fall with her. And what are we to make of this?

A masterpiece of historical fiction, a humane portrait of a man written off as a monster, but which does not flinch from his bloody deeds. An amazing piece of work, and presumably, one that, like the life and work of Thomas Cromwell, has yet to be concluded.

Jesse Bullington's follow-up to The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart is just as energetic, muscular, horrific, violent, inventive, fast-paced and icky as his debut. What wrong-footed me slightly was the sympathetic lead characters when I had mentally braced myself for more in the way of entertainingly sociopathic monsters wreaking havoc on the innocent and the guilty and the spectacularly evil alike. Instead we get Awa, an ex-slave forced into an apprenticeship by a necromancer, as nasty a piece of work as any Bullington has yet invented, and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, an artist turned mercenary who, against his better judgement and self-interest, rescues said trainee necromancer from the attentions of some of his fellow soldiers. The unlikely pair become friends and, with the aid of a another mercenary, a female gunner, set out to thwart the ultimate and extremely horrific schemes of the necromancer. Touring the battlefields, graveyards and whorehouses of a war-torn Renaissance Europe, pursued by a rogue witch-hunter, the ambulatory corpse of Awa's former mistress, a doctor of questionable ethics hungry for hidden knowledge and a particularly horrific corpse-hungry monster.
With corpses galore, in various degrees of decomposition, the grue and gore and ghastly fluids are plentiful, and with war raging all around and the inquisition in full flight there's violence and injustice and poverty and inhumanity to spare, but the warm heart of the book is the friendship between Deutsch and Awa and the things they do to help each other find some measure of redemption and salvation in a savage world. A strong, satisfying second novel that manages to revisit many elements of the Brothers Grossbart and yet remain utterly different. Recommended.

Science fiction is the genre of wild ideas, and this is a major novel of ideas from a great fantasy writer of, er, ideas. I'm not inclined to go explaining the plot at all. The cover blurb is a good precis without giving away any of the major developments, and part of the joy of this book is the process of working through the various ingenious conceits, so as well as a great story, cool world-building and excellent writing there's the intellectual thrill of seeing a set of arguments made and followed through to conclusions that are logical but unexpected That's what I fell in love with when I first read Isaac Asimov, and that's what I love best about science fiction now. A future classic.