Charlie and Gil, a pair of tormented and tortured writers in Hollywood, 1948 each deal with the fallout from the death of an actress, caught up in the ensuing cover-up by a ruthless mogul and his security chief. Charlie wants to laet it all go, but can't. Gil knows he should let it all go, but wants to to kick the hornet's nest. Mysteries and secrets from the past raise their ugly heads, and violence, corruption and sleaze are never far from the glitzy movie surface. Dark and twisted and passionate, this is classic noir brilliantly updated.

Low on time so forgive the brevity - one of the coolest and most zeitgeisty of superhero comics by the team that went on to double down on that with the Wicker And The Divine. It's got Li'l Loki and Chavez America and Kate Hawkeye and Hulkling and Wiccan an d Marvel Boy and that is why you should read it because it is awesome.

The mind games contine, escalating every which way, every twist and turn and setback. Light is the only suspect, but L brings him into the investiation! There's a second Kira! What are they up to and can L catch them or can Light use them to kill L? It's crazy, like Sherlock with a good Sherlock and a bad Sherlock and death gods. Flippin' addictive.

An astonishing trilogy, best read, I suspect, in one big 1,000-plus paged lump as presented here. Helliconia is a formidable work. The timescale is vast, the themes are difficult, the human dramas, though full of intrigue and passion, battles and spectacle, are unashamedly literary in the demands placed on the reader. The trilogy, in fact, expects full intellectual and emotional engagement in order to fully appreciate the scale and complexity of Aldiss' achievement.

Helliconia is a planet with two suns and two years. The shorter years are over four hundred days long. The greater year takes milllenia. At one end of the great year the planet is shrouded in extreme cold, at the other in extreme heat. Civilisations rise and fall over the course of the year, only for the survivors to come forth again in the Spring and start all over again. Helliconia is an epic of climate change.

Vying for supremacy on the planet are two species, the phagor, who dominate in the cold time, and humans who dominate in the warmth. The two are profoundly hostile to each other, and yet fundamentally linked in the struggle to survive. Overhead is a research station from Earth, the Avernus, cataloguing and recording and transmitting its findings home.

Life persists, in abundant forms and varieties, though the processes are cruel and profligate with individuals, but the books chart the stories of individuals as they struggle with their strange world, trying to understand it or shape it or control it, often with plenty of cruelty of their own. Can the cycle be broken? Can memory and civilisation persist, and if so at what price?

The worlbuilding's the thing here. Designed, envisioned and delineated with great care and detail, Helliconia is alive on the page, but though marvelous and splendid and strange, it's more than a simple vehicle for escapist fantasy. It's a world in some ways even more circumscribed than our own, partly because of the strictures of the environment and partly because of humanity itself. It's a big, broad, shambling masterpiece. Every human is flawed, every venture doomed and the vast natural processes designed to preserve life are merciless and inscrutable, yet ultimately Aldiss unifies these elements into a vision of universal empathy in which intelligent life must adapt to to the natural vehicles that keep it alive.

Denny Malone is an awesome cop, a cool sleek law-enforcement machine, King of North Manhattan. He's also crooked as hell and sitting on a small mountain of drugs ripped off from a dealer at the cost of the life of a member of his team. It's a long hot summer and racial tensions are close to boiling point in the city. Denny is being squeezed by the Feds but he's playing them and won't sell out his fellow cops. However he can't stop his world from slowly crumbling into chaos and betrayal, just as the city itself is on the brink of a race war.

Winslow's hypnotic, hard-boiled staccato prose propels the reader through this intense portrayal of personal and public corruption at a ferocious clip, vividly bringing the city and the cops and the criminals to life with ferocious energy and righteous anger. Riveting.

Light is in prison and so is Misa and the killings have stopped, but thanks to the rules of Death Notes, both Kiras have forgotten their Kiraing so both are convinced of their own innocence and want to help catch Kira. L is confused, but if he was easily thrown off the trail he wouldn't be L. Then more Kira killings begin, and a group of corporate executives meet to discuss people whose death would benefit their corporation, while one of them who is Kira or is connected to Kira goes off and kills them! What the heck! L. Light and Misa team up to catch this new Kira, but if this new Kira is caught there's a chance L will learn enough to implicate Light It's like The Big Clock only and Misa but Light and Misa don't know this! HEADWRECKING! It's like The Big Clock only with Death Gods. Love it.

Imperialism! Fighting nasty little wars and installing puppet regimes to ensure control of resources! Only with lasers and lightsabers and killer robots and the Force and lots and lots of lava! The lava must flow! Gonzo epic space opera done proper good with everyone's favourite villain putting the pyre back in Empire.

I'm not sure why, but this feels like a return to form, though I've enjoyed all his previous books. But this is pure fantasy/horror, with Smith's trademark rich writing and wonderful turn of phrase and ability to evoke place and character and atmosphere. It's dark and strange and funny, and I suppose part of what makes it superior to his other more recent books is that they often suffered from the choice to spend most of their length establishing their premise, as their protagonist tries to work out what's going on, whereas this lets you and the characters have a solid idea of what's going on before you get a quarter of the way in, while still retaining a sense of mystery. The youthful voice of the main protagonist gives it the feel of a YA, actually, and it mostly works as one and it seems to suit Smith quite well. An unfeasible book in lots of ways, but not a mundane one.

Oooh, bold move. Game changer. Can't really talk about it if you haven't read it, but let's just say a death... got noted. Now, wait... a NOTABLE DEATH. You've been deathnoted, character. You will be missed. Can you be replaced? That's the question! Take note, death!

The final volume of Gillen's amazing run, establishing, or re-establishing the character as a formidable and evil bad-ass. Also features Triple Zero killing people and being hilarious about it and Doctor Aphra surviving against the odds. Really quite fantastically entertaining.