I'm calling it, Kirk's Hoon thrillers are the best comic crime novels since Westlake. They're nasty, brutal, vulgar, violent and hilarious. I laughed out loud many-a-time. He's an anti-hero with a heart of gold. Cursed evil dragon's gold, but gold all the same. Audio reader guy is an absolute champ. 

A thoroughly loveable and endearing fable about oldey timey horror movies in Hollywood and the woman of a thousand faces who stars in some of them, the brain of Charles Darwin transplanted to the body of an ape and, since biology texbooks now have to leave it out or risk the wrath of the godly, a crusade to educate America on the facts of evolution through the medium of horror movies. The satire and the genuine affection for old movies and the righteous defence of science and education are all expertly handled to ultimately moving effect. 

I do love a big huge, complicated, tricky, fiendish story, and this one is big enough to stand no less than four retellings of the same events, only going over the same ground to put an entirely different spin on them. The death of an Oxford don is apparently at the centre of the mystery, but it soon becomes apparent that the conpsiracies, agendas and motivations are layered, hidden, twist back on themselves and are, in at least one case, quite irrational. The period-accurate misogyny is a bit hard to take at times, but drives the plot as much as the conspiracies and secrets, and there is also period-accurate philosophy, gropings towards the scentific method and devout faiths of various stripes. The narrators are unreliable, except, I think we are supposed to accept - thematically laid out by the Francis Bacon epigrams - the fourth. Perhaps four unreliables requiring the reader to piece an aproximation of the truth from their co-relation, might have been a bit too high of a challenge for autor and readers alike. Like Janice Hallet only historical. 

Peter Guillam finds himself obliged to revisit a particularly painful old case, one which is related intimately to the events in Thje Spy Who Came In From The Cold, looking doiwn the barrell of a Parlamentary Inquiry and even prosecution. So what happened and why was it all buried so thoroughly and what can Peter do when the truth is being exposed and there's nothing he can do to stop it. 

Really, really good. Intricate, complex, filled with the agonies of making wretched sacrifices for a cause that may not exist. Tom Hollander narratyes, exquisitly. 

 Skipping across several decades of Secre Service skullduggery - tall tales and anecdotes and character sketches under the shadow of Smiley and Karla and the ever-present mole. 

Smiley's final battle, as he unravels a tangled plot that may expose the one weakness of his enemy. But can he make sense of the mess left behind after the death of an expatriate general and follow the slender thread across Europe while Karla's footsoliders ruthlessly wipe out the traces? 

This was my first LeCarre. I think I was sixteen. I loved the writing, the characters, the setting. I didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. The story was too complex, the real-world politics and conflicts utterly beyond me. And yet, I sat in the bus in freezing cold evening eating dry-roasted peanuts and immersed myself in world as alien to me as Middle Earth, more alien, because I knew it was really my world, to which I was an alien, and which completely defeated my comprehension. 

Now I think it's an amazing book, the second in a trilogy, about the crumbling of a dreadful old world order and the establishment of a newer, even nastier and darker one. Smiley chases one slender thread from the ruins left by the mole Gerald, seeking to redeem and reinvigorate the secret service to which he has devoted his life. Even as he does so, the vultures are circling to snatch it away, and surely he's too canny an operator to be as unaware as he appears. Jerry Westerby is dispatched to Hong Kong to follow the thread, to war-torn Cambodia and Thailand and back, and the moment of triumph is debased with the humanity of his quixotic despair and futility. A bitter, thrilling epic of espionage, that somehow knits together the first and third books depicting Smiley's battles with Karla. 

In a bravura piece of stroytelling, this instalment is set concurrent with Book One. A journalist investigates the shootings that killed Kurtis' partner, putting together connections between those deaths, the Corp activities and the odder aspects of Habitat unions. The usual deceptively slow investigation that ends in something utterly wild. Best contemporary comic series by a mile. 2000AD still has the chops, it seems.

After the wild conclusion of Book Three, Kurtis is somewhat sidelined in a desk job with no remit in the Habitat where she grew up. Drug gangs vie, corruption is rife, but there seems little to do for a specialist in dangerous Sect activity. In the aftermath of a massacre, however, Kurtis realises somethign bad is up, but it's weirder and worse than she could possibly expect.

While the solar system shakes in the background, Kurtis goes undecover at the secretive Corp who tried to make something truly weird and terrble out of the habitat from Book Two. Truly terrible and weird things are happening right at the top, and the disappearance of Mercury is directly connected.