So after only a little bit of torturing, I got caught and sent to prison where I turned snitch and testified against a major Snicket dealer and now I'm in the Snicket Protection Programme. Happy ending after all!

The Hotel in The Penultimate Peril is called Hotel Denouement, for reasons that are fairly obvious, and of course it's a very Snickety denouement indeed: sure, lots of characters from the previous books are all gathered together in one big hotel for a final showdown, a trial where Olaf and the orphans get to plead the case, but everyone ends up running around the place in blindfolds while it starts to burn down around them, the sort of development which should come as no surprise to anyone who's being paying attention.

The hotel could also have been called the Hotel Ambiguous, because for much of it the orphans don't know who is a volunteer and who is a villain and which actions are part of a noble scheme and which part of a villainous one. In fact it's so expertly crafted to be a series of ambiguous events, that it is, in its way, a perfect denouement for the kids. They have spent a lot of the series relatively powerless and forced into passivity. The more actions they take, the more ambivalent they feel about their own morality and doing bad things for good reasons.

The reader might feel they're overthinking it a bit, since all of their actions were forced on them by bad people, but how many of the bad people started out the same way? And, sure. it wasn't their fault the bad people forced them into such situations where they had to do bad things to escape or survive, but life often forces us into situations a bit like that, if not perhaps as melodramatic. This may be a more valid view of how life works than readers care to admit. This series is basically Thomas Hardy for kids. The author may have been perfectly sincere when he goes on about how awfully this all turns out.

Having turned over a new leaf I have been an active campaigner against the War On Snicket, calling for the full legalisation of Snicket only to be recently informed that Snicket was never illegalised. I don't quite know what to do with this information.

You don't always get what you want but sometimes you get what the person who gives it to you has been telling you it's going to be all along. So we get The End, and The End is full of all the things that should be resolved or should have been resolved, many of them overshadowing the series from the Bad Beginning, many only arriving now to be briefly mentioned. There are mysteries that have haunted the whole series and mysteries that have haunted other, hypothetical, series, fragments, allusions, glimpses, tangents, all enough to acquire a critical mass of unresolved secrets and stories and mysteries and I suppose one could get cross at this but it isn't as if the narrator has not been warning you repeatedly that the last thing you should expect from this series of books is any kind of satisfaction. A series of books narrated by a person who is clearly and sincerely and articulately desolate at the cruelty and misery it contains, who would be flabbergasted at the idea of this as entertainment or fun, for whom the conventions of children's stories, which require good people to be relentlessly inflicted with horror and treachery, are torture, as they should be to any soul with a hint of sensitivity. He would not be impressed with complaints about lack of plot resolution and mysteries left mysterious and secrets left hidden. He would wonder if the complainant had been reading the same books he'd been writing at all.

Of course there is a whole other story going on: the little community on the island, figures from The Tempest and the Lotus Eaters and no doubt many others, leading bland, safe lives eschewing violence for peer pressure. Naturally it is full of secrets and a schism is forming, to be precipitated by the arrival of the orphans and Olaf. No place is safe from the treachery of the world. The children escaped the early cycles of the series, to be plunged into newer, larger cycles, and the breaking of those, the denouement at Hotel Denouement, has merely propelled them to the beginning of another, even larger cycle that encompasses their parents and the Snickets and VDF So there is no escape from the treachery, villainy, and injustice of the world, and that is what this series has been about, and that is what happens in The End.

But other things happen, too, other things that have happened just as consistently through the series. There is survival and resilience and fierce burning love. There is regret and guilt and self-doubt, but there is refusing to allow them to rule you, and getting on with what needs to be done. There is invention and intelligence and good taste and the joy of those things. Life goes on. There is no schism there, no betrayal. There is hope, because ambiguity cuts both ways. We may be born astride the grave, but there's time to enjoy the flight, even if it is a fall.

Of course it's not a happy ending. There's no such thing. But it's a start.

So it turns out it is perfectly legal to sit out right in the open where everyone, even children, can see you, reading this. I have started a campaign to prohibit all Snicket reading and Snicket production for the sake of the morale and morals of our children and our grown-ups and to corner the market with lucrative underground Snicketing.

The Unauthorised Autobiography is a postmodern portmanteau palimpsest collage of fragmentary fragments and decontextualised correspondence. Fortunately if you have read A Series Of Unfortunate Events you will be able to make the right kind of nonsense out of all this sense and immerse yourself in the world of secret organisations falling apart in arson and betrayal and, indeed, fill in a few blanks and make a few connections here and there. In keeping with the overall theme of the main series, every secret revealed and mystery solved generates more secrets and mysteries, and if you haven't worked that out by now maybe you should go back to the beginning and read it all over again until it finally sinks in.

Letters from Beatrice and letters to Beatrice and the letters of Beatrice all combine to create an odd, forked, enigmatic story of a lifetime of unrequited love and a strange series of missed connections. Very clever. Centerpiece is a prolonged and impassioned and very Snickety declaration of feeling. Whether it's worth the price - for a very handsomely designed book - I don't know. When it came out it was a sort of preview to The End, now it's a coda, albeit a worrying one. I suppose some sort of reassurance would have been too much to ask for, all things considered.

Hazel and Daisy go to Cambridge to spend Christmas with Daisy's brother, and, not incidentally, to meet up with the members of a rival detective agency. Mysteries and puzzles start piling up almost as soon as they arrive, keenly sniffed out by the veteran Detectives. Rivalry ensues, with Daisy unable to contemplate anyone else being allowed to take an interest in a mystery when the Detective Club is in town, though Hazel a bit more in favour of the spirit of co-operation. Before long, events take a serious turn and rivalries must be set aside in the interests of catching a ruthless and cunning culprit.

Another sparkling whodunnit with a knotty mystery and great characters and setting. Stevens does a great jb of balancing the innocence and youth of the detectives against the gravity of the crimes, not to mention the assumptions and heedlessness of the time and place against some more uncomfortable attitudes never far from the surface.

I dislike reading books on computer, or, indeed phone, once the PDF has been converted to whatever it is that phones let you read, but the advanced digital copy of this book overcame that prejudice and had me scrolling bleary-eyed through screen after screen in breathless pursuit of Emmeline and Thing as they embarked on their perilous journeys. A fun and riotous mix of steampunk mad science and mythological fantasy set in the far frozen north, I was instantly reminded of the writings of Joan Aiken and Philip Pullman, but O'Hart stamps her own style on this old-school tale of high adventure.

Emmeline grows up in an unusual household. Her scientist parents have a rather detached, hands-off approach to child-rearing, leaving their young daughter to learn by herself the skills and instincts necessary to survive the various extremely dangerous living specimens lurking around the house and its environs. These skills stand her in good stead when her parents vanish and she is dispatched to Paris across the rising seas. Despite her tendency to assume everyone she meets is trying to kill her, she befriends a stowaway who calls himself Thing and helps her elude a gang of thugs intent on kidnapping her. Ultimately, the thugs succeed, and Emmeline is carried away on a north-bound ship, but Thing and others are in pursuit, and the mad scientist with an eye on immortality is underestimating his captive.

This just rushes along from twist to turn, from wonder to cliffhanger, with a thoroughly engaging pair of protagonists to cheer on and a truly horrible set of villains to boo and hiss at. Lovely writing and a fertile imagination in a unique setting make this a truly enjoyable read.

Lucy's on the outs with Lockwood & Co and working hard to persuade herself that she prefers the independent life of a freelance operative, but when the opportunity presents itself to work with Lockwood, George and Holly, she jumps at it, monstrous cannibal shade and all. There's more going on than that, though. Someone's buying up ghostly objects on the black market, even objects that were supposedly destroyed, and when they kick Lucy's door in and steal her whispering skull, they've messed with the wrong ghost hunter. Meanwhile, a small village is experiencing an immense outbreak of hauntings, all seemingly triggered by a strange hulking figure stirring spirits out of the their graves. Lockwood thinks the black market and the outbreak might be linked but how, and will the gang survive long enough to do something about it?

As the series draws on we're circling gradually closer to the heart of the mystery - what caused the Problem? By the end of this book we're no nearer an answer, but we're beginning to get some idea of who was involved. Lockwood & Co carries on as witty and gruesome and spooky as ever.

A family of musicians traveling on the somewhat oppressive and repressed south of Dalemark perform in towns and villages, passing messages and news as they go. An unwelcome passenger creates tensions and problems, and when tragedy strikes, everything seems to fall apart. Wynne Jones expertly crafts an other-world fantasy around family and music and a fight for freedom.

Armpit, or Theodore, a character from Holes, is going straight, working hard, saving his money, going to school, getting tested regularly for drugs by his suspicious parents, making friends with the girl next door and generally scaring people by doing nothing but being big and black. X-Ray, another Camp Green Lake alumni, ropes Armpit in to a ticket-scalping scam, not illegal but definitely dodgy, but that doesn't stop it from threatening Armpit's fragile and precarious existence.

Funny, sharp, warm and clever, this is the story of someone trying to keep on the straight and narrow despite the travails and temptations and surprises of modern life. Armpit's a great hero, dogged and down-to-earth and straightforward with a heart as big as the planet, but constantly being misunderstood or mistaken, except, perhaps, by his best friend, Ginny. Terrific.

Cat and Gwendoline are orphans. Gwendoline is going to be a witch. Cat isn't. Taken to live at the strange castle of the mysterious Chrestomanci, Gwendoline expects to thrive and hopes, more or less literally, to become queen of the world. Things don't quite work out that way and Gwendoline goes to more and more extreme efforts to show off her power and gain the attention of the increasingly loathed Chrestomanci. Cat quite likes it there, even though he has no magic, but he has always gone along with Gwendoline, but what is she up to and what will happen if she goes too far?

Typically lively and engaging tale by Diana Wynne Jones, full of wit and invention and cleverness. It shows its age here and there in ways that are slightly unexpected, but which would certainly have been unremarkable to me when I read it as a child. Didn't stop me devouring it in a few quick hours, though I was a bit miffed that the supposedly responsible adults were a) less horrified by the magnitude of what Gwen was doing to Cat than they really should have been and b) less hard on themselves for letting it happen right under their flippin' noses. There's a reason why they let it happen and it works but they were so appallingly wrong they were practically accomplices. Grr. I've more sympathy for Gwen getting so aggravated at Chrestomanci's complacency than I care to admit...