Eating things and the things that happen to the people who eat things and to the things that get eaten and lots of shooting and fighting and romance and Poyo and a toe in the fridge. The usual high-octane hilarity and thrillsThe danger with trying to review collections in an ongoing series that has reached a high standard and is firing on all cylinders is it leaves you with little new to say from collection to collection, even though the book remains as fresh and new and different.

Action and intrigue as Vader's new lackey, Doctor Aphra, and her psychotic droids recruit a four of the galaxy's best bounty hunters for a heist. Meanwhile, back at the Empire, Vader is given his marching orders: found out who committed this expensive heist. he's also given a new aide, and this one proves to be unusually competent and perceptive, leading to a Big Clock In Spaaace as Vader tags along and Tagge tracks down the culprit who will turn out to be, of course, Vader. One can't imagine Vader getting nervous and sweaty as he is obliged to let the noose tighten around his own neck, but such is the characterisation in this series, with Vader cool and deadly and ready for anything, that you;re rather more worried about the aide and the inevitable result of his solving this mystery.

A lot of fun, with lasers and spaceships and spectacle aplenty and a delightful array of villains to aternately revile and root for, depending.

Filling in some of the gaps in the whole RIP, Final Crisis saga, the missing chapters here should really be read sort of in between those. I dunno, it seems awfully messy and disjointed but it's nice to finally have it all filled in so that it makes sense. Wait, did I say makes sense? None of it makes sense, obviously but now all the glorious nonsense hangs together better. Still, messy. The other two are a past/present/future spanning mystery that's clever enough and a slightly more straightforward adventure that's a solid read, if not spectacular.

Tough, subtle, ultimately tragic tale of Bjarni, an Icelandic viking who hates his father but loves his stepmother. Leaving Iceland gives him no respite, and though he returns to his home too late to confront his father, he is not too soon to replace him. More of Holland's brilliant, hard-boiled early historical fiction.

Well, this was grim. I mean, it's brilliantly written, masterfully constructed and a dazzling literary accomplishment, but it's a bit of a trip through various modern hells, some real, as with the bleak desert vistas and the carnage of incompetence and corruption that is Iraq, or the existential mental disintegration of a man trying patiently, ploddingly, to vanish but who seems to end up multiplying.

There's a lot of vanishing in this book, people disappearing in various sinister ways, some victims, some perpetrators of appalling crimes, and some just fall away or become confused and almost forgetful. There's the hideously banality of the motiveless murder and the hunt for the various versions of one particular vanishee. There aren't any answers - mostly there are just disappearances and vanishments, but as the book moves from place to place and character to character there is most definitely a story, or a series of stories. None of it amounts to the significance one might hope for in a thriller - a deliberate thematic choice - but lives are nonetheless devastated in various ways. Mostly it's about lives being devastated, corrupted, poisoned, derailed by venal, random, indifferent, greedy or malevolent agencies, all a microcosm of the geopolitical world, really. So, a bit grim and unremitting, but written with brilliance and a deep, troubling intelligence about the ugly mediocrity of evil, even on a grand scale.

This is a strange and spooky and brilliantly-written tale of a rising folk band in the 70s retreating to an isolated country house to work on their second album. There's drink and drugs and a bit of sex, but these are, as one member describes them, halcyon days. It's the strange doings and secret mysterious obsessions of the doomed lead singer that invokes something strange from the English landscape, that attracts the attention of something or someone best left undisturbed. Told from multiple points of view, this is a wonderful and evocative story, genuinely creepy and disturbing in parts even as it brings to life a long-lost era of music and innocence and possibility.

Bulikov is a city of dead gods and now of a dead historian who was studying the dead gods. Shara is an intelligence operative who isn't so much sent to investigate as takes it upon herself to do so because she was rather fond of the murder victim and has an abiding interest in the Divine. Unfortunately this case is going to reopen old wounds, not just for her but for the two countries as a whole load of very deadly and miraculous secrets and Shara must discover them, fight them and somehow keep a lid on them, a formidable task even with the assistance of her terrifying bodyguard, Sigurd.

Excellent writing, fascinating worldbuilding, a tricksy take on post-colonialism with lots of intrigue, violence, doomed romance, religious zealotry, monsters, monster-fighting and a warehouse full of miracles. Shades of China Mieville, but with the lighter, wittier, defter touch of someone like Bujold. A lot of weighty ideas and engaging characters and pumping action - perfect modern epic fantasy in other words.

This is a reread for me, the first time since the book came out in 1998. I was trying to place the book in sequence - it came out after A Song Of Stone and before The Business. The previous science fiction novel was Excession and the next was Look To Windward. Of those, A Song Of Stone was his worst book, and The Business was fun but certainly not his strongest, though I heard him read the prologue in Fred Hanna's Bookshop when I worked there and it was one of the funniest readings I ever heard. Anyway, it's in a funny place. After the misfire of ASOS I wanted a return to the Culture to be a big big bold space opera. Instead I got this, which isn't. I did write a review, though I've no idea where it is, but I know I didn't dare allow myself to feel let down or disappointed, and, frankly, I knew it was too well-written and well-crafted for that, even as I mourned the lack of grandeur. But I think I was.

Now, of course, it's different. He's gone from us way too soon, and we're left with a body of work to enjoy and judge and re-evaluate. I think The Crow Road will remain the best book he ever wrote and the most beloved. But Inversions is a masterpiece, and it achieves that by sheer dint of the one thing Banks was not known for in his writing: restraint. He reined it all back in for this, two concurrent stories set on the same world featuring a Doctor to a King and a Bodyguard to a Regicide. It might be a quasi-historical fantasy novel save for the many moons and the falling space rocks and various other clues that we're in a different genre. The setting is not so much drab as understated, and in many ways unexceptional - societies emerging from feudalism, caught somewhere between Reformation and Enlightenment. There is a great deal of courtly intrigue and political maneuvering and suggestions of social reform. All of those in power are men. There are harems and concubines and serving girls. There is the Doctor, who keeps the King healthy, there is the Bodyguard, who kills the Protector's enemies. They are from a different Culture. They represent differing philosophical approaches to intervention by an advanced Culture into a less advanced culture. It is not as obvious as it seems who represents which approach.

So, no explosions, no battles, no mind-bending cosmic science, no vast entities, no mind-boggling warfare, just these two stories, which do converge but most assuredly not in the dazzling, head-wrecking narrative coup of Use Of Weapons. Instead, Banks creates his most literary of science fiction novels, exploring the theme set out in the title. As a science fiction novel, it is an inversion of all his other novels by sheer dint of the restraint in style and setting. The doctor and the bodyguard are inversions, as are the king and the regicide. But it is power that is inverted most, and what is at first the casual scenery of misogyny, the jokes, the crude or clever lecherous references, the dismissals, the insignificance of women in both settings, becomes the overwhelming heart of the story. If this is a world creaking towards progress, women are the afterthought, and a kind of rage builds, a hidden and barely detectable undercurrent of horror.

Because of course, the Doctor is a woman. She alone of all the women appears to be granted agency within this world, for all that she must bravely defy convention and face danger as arrogant men conspire to bring her down. But there is an inversion there, too. She is not one of the women of this world. She is armed with knowledge, and more than knowledge, she is protected. Of course, she is the character we identify with, root for, cheer on to defy these irredeemable sexists. The women of this world have no such privileges and while we sympathise with their plight, they are background dressing, the necessary illustrations of the backwardness of this world, to give the Doctor's position a more heroic stature. Which is how Banks delivers a salutary lesson in the shallowness of tourism in developing civilisations, whether you be a reader or an agent in special circumstances, and that no matter how much of a long view you try to take and how much you debate your philosophies of intervention and what is necessary to do the right thing, these little people are real and they demand justice, or revenge.

Banks started the Culture series from the point of view of one of its enemies. Inversions pulls the rug out from under Special Circumstances and holds it up to show the real blood from real people staining it. I now think it is one of his finest works, and I hope that if you first read it when it came out, or in sequence with the rest of his books, and felt let down by all the things that it does not contain, you'll go back and give it a chance and appreciate it for what it does contain.

The bomb only lives as it is falling and some books are not read until they're reread, still falling. The first time you reach the last page is merely the book's apogee. This book has been falling for a long time, the conclusion still resonating, the deft trickery of the contra-flow structure a dazzling achievement, the twist devastating and satisfying. But to return to the beginning (for me, the first time since its paperback publication) knowing how it ends can seem intuitively futile, as if the point of the book is the twist at the end. But the sign of a true masterpiece is if the twist is merely the mid-point and the second half of the book is to read the book once more with the mystery of 'what happened' and 'who' solved but the greater mystery of 'why' further beyond understanding. Dorothy Dunnett did this with an entire series of seven books. Though the final volume of The House Of Niccolo appeared a decade after Use of Weapons, I had come to retroactively assume that her twist must have influenced Banks. Impossible, obviously, but they were contemporary Scottish authors of some renown, and all her individual books had their own twists and coups and rug-pulls, more than enough to serve as an example to an ambitious young clever-clogs with literary talent to burn and a love for genre.

To read the story of a warrior recruited by the Culture to fight dirty wars in the name of Doing Good knowing the warrior's darkest secret and greatest torment is to know him as a monster and a madman. What seemed clever becomes reckless. What seemed like ruthlessness forced by necessity becomes instinct unleashed. What seemed like a psyche tormented by horror becomes a selfish desire for forgiveness that is as impossible as it is undeserved. What seems like a quest for atonement by serving a higher cause becomes an indulgence of a rotten talent under a thin pretext of redemption. When Sma and Amtiskaw find Zakalwe he is busily driving a planet to war, through an effort at mimicking the Culture's tactics of trickery and manipulation, making a complete hash of it and yet seemingly oblivious. Throughout the book he never seems to fully grasp the mechanism or the goals involved in creating a better outcome. In the abstract, knowing he is part of such a process salves his bloody conscience, but as an object it is completely outside his conception. On first read he is a victim, shaped by war into a supreme warrior and doomed to keep doing the only thing he's good at across the galaxy while hoping that the higher plan will lead it all to the ultimate good. On second read he is the antique weapon only other soldiers find beautiful and his only saving grace is that he is being Used. He will never get what he wants, but neither will he get what he deserves. The Culture, meanwhile, gets what it needs, and we are told up front that it does not need any kind of hero. Rereading Use Of Weapons lets us know what that truly means.

(Edited to add - on reflection, Zakalwe is a kind of reverse Lymond. Lymond is a romantic hero, and in Game Of Kings he and the book work very hard to make us think he is a complete bastard. Lymond's curse is that whatever he does he does well, so winning sympathy back when his motivations are revealed is quite an achievement, though for me, in a way, he never becomes truly likable. Still, the book has the advantage that anyone going in will assume that the bastarding behaviour of the main character is some sort of elaborate ruse. Zakalwe's behaviour is assumed to be on some level heroic because he is tormented and because he is part of a complex Machiavellian strategy to Do Good. But no. It turns out that guy you think is being a bastard because he has to be is really just fundamentally a bastard. As I say, I don't know if Banks was influenced by Dunnett, but I really hope he was.)

The second Hap and Leonard book is more of a mystery where the first was a suspense thriller, however it is about the same packed with irreverent but sometimes thoughtful dialogue and bad taste humour and bonecrunching violence.

Leonard inherits a house from his Uncle Chester, who he loved but whose homophobia spoiled their relationship in later years. Hap joins him in fixing the house up for sale, and in the process starts sleeping with Leonard's lovely lady lawyer, though her drive and ambition and his general relaxed waywardness may prove incompatible. Also his whiteness. A grisly discovery under the floorboards leads to a dark and disturbing investigation into child disappearances as Leonard tries to clear Chester's name, even if only for his own sake. Chester left clues, the product of a mind in decay, and Hap and Leonard struggle to make sense of them all, while Hap struggles just to keep hold of his new girlfriend.

This is where the series really hit its confident stride, its voices established, its poverty-stricken, racially divided milieu, its anything-can-happen attitude, its commitment to pure storytelling and everyday strangeness and bizarre, even surreal encounters with the stupid and the depraved and sometimes both. Incredibly fun and entertaining all the way.