Two years after His Dark Materials, Lyra and her daemon are on the roof of an Oxford university when they spot a flock of birds attack a witch's daemon. Saving the daemon from the onslaught they promise to help it find a man in Jericho, but why is it here and what does it want and can it be trusted?

A nice little tale set in the Materials universe, all too short but wonderfully familiar. I guess it'll just have to do until the Book of Dust comes out. OH WAIT.

With a brilliantly spooky and atmospheric opening as a modern cargo-ship has a strange encounter with a mysterious ghost-ship, this becomes a rousing sci-fi thriller as forces converge in the hunt for the vanishing ship. A young girl is lost overboard, rescued by John Blake and taken on board the time-skipping vessel, cast temporally adrift after an experiment goes wrong, doomed to sail the seas like the Flying Dutchman.. A tech-genius billionaire wants the ship destroyed for nefarious reasons of his own, and he has the missiles to do it. Can the ship be saved, can the sailors be returned to their own time and what's it like to meet your own grandchildren before you even had any children? Great stuff, clever story, fantastic art.

I am well behind on reviewing stuff and books are piling up on my Return To Library pile so these will be brief.

A young woman from a family which features jockeying for power the way some families feature breakfasts makes a daring and rather complicated play by arranging for the release of a prisoner from a prison planet no-one's ever supposed to have escaped from. Not actually being a bad person herself, things get immediately complicated when the ex-prisoner none only has a mind of their own, but also even denies being the ex-prisoner she's looking for. Meanwhile, a large conference of alien races is about to take place, a galaxy-level power play, and one set of aliens in particular is taking a discomfiting interest in the ship she's hired to take her home, so much of an interest, in fact, that they follow her all the way back to her planet.

Trying to explain the plot, I suddenly realise how insanely complicated it is, layers and layers of politics and power and relationships, yet the book itself never seems overwrought or bogged down, flowing along nicely, lightly, even breezily, all of which is quite deceptive. There's a murder mystery, an attempted governmental overthrow, and a heist all fitted in like puzzle pieces slotting together and it all reads brilliantly and entertainingly.

Oh no, the last in the series, urrggh, this has been a reliably fun, spooky, engrossing set of adventures, but it's been building to this, resolutions and revelations and a big climactic battle. Fantastic set of characters, fantastic world, fantastic story. there's certainly scope for more books in the setting, though, so perhaps we shouldn't write it off just yet.

The first meeting between Lee Scoresby the aviator and gunslinger and Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear, occurring shortly after Lee crash-lands the balloon he recently won in a poker game in the Arctic township of Novy Odense. He immediately becomes involved with a crooked company and an impounded cargo, his sense of decency and fair play compelling him to get into a deadly struggle with a seasoned killer.

Absolutely fantastic, I could defintieyl read stories of Lee and Iorek fighting bad guys on the Barents Sea till the cows come home.

Tight, chilling ghost story set in the desolation of a modern American reservation, about a boy who sees the ghost of his dead father and out of an aching desire to know him sets out to try to help bring him back without understanding the costs or the consequences for himself and his family.

hings get wilder and weirder for our paper girls, flung into the future, some of them anyway, and with no less than three Erins confusing things and a mysterious message on a hockey stick and giant rampaging slugs battling against the LA skyline and the war between generations raging invisibly around them. Frenetic story and gorgeous art and fantastic characters and no end of twists and turns to keep you on the edge.

This certainly has the same absurd, surreal, magical dream-logic of The Midnight Folk, an acceptance of the strange and the impossible and the hugely unlikely at face value with little in the way of astonishment or disbelief. If anything this is a bit more grounded than Folk with an unfolding plot and an evil scheme, as the villainous Abner Brown chases the Box of Delights which allows people to move around in time. The old Punch And Judy Man gives the box to Kay and Kay must use it to rescue the Punch And Judy man as well as assorted cousins and a entire cathedral full of clergy being picked off and hidden in caves by Brown and his men in the mistaken belief that one of them has the Box, and all just before the Christmas service, too. Nonetheless, Kay moves coolly and with only rare signs of distress through various strange and wonderful and occasionally terrifying encounters with an aplomb that is downright hilarious. A deeply old-fashioned, arguably antiquated, children's story that takes its logic from deeper stories still until at the final line when even the author seems to give up trying to make sense of it. That ending should be more annoying than it is, and if I'd read it when younger I might have gotten pretty cross about it, but as it is it just left me shaking my head in amazement.

I enjoyed this on rereading a lot more than I expected to. i remember being annoyed at the ending, but it kind of makes sense to me now. It might still annoy, but I think it's supposed to hurt and harden. The point of the books is this final battle between Light and Dark, both of which seem to be kinds of magic or influence, but ultimately the whole thing is a kind of housecleaning, leaving the world clear for humans to save or mess up as they will. This is achieved through a serious of quests and encounters, often taking place at different but oddly intersecting time periods, with almost decorous rules and restraints. It's all a bit odd and formalised, but hugely atmospheric and thrilling. I mean the climax is put on pause so that both sides can settle a dispute over whether the rules allow a particular player on the field, making it seem a bit like an argument at a children's football match about the birth date or place of residence of a star athlete. It's enjoyably unconventional, and the underlying theme of magic departing leaving humans to fend for themselves is a recurring one, but one whose power seems easier to appreciate when you're older. Bran's decision is genuinely moving, though, but the coerced amnesia still rankles, but then again the Light might have been the Good Guys, but they were always prepared to not be the Nice Guys when it suited them, which is something I like more about these books on rereading. I don't think you could get away with a book where the characters, however likeable, are mostly pushed around from one plot token to the next so passively. A bit more push-back against beloved Grummery would be called for, at a minimum. Still, I loved it.

A few years after the events of the first Anno Dracula book, with Vlad's rule in Britain fatally undermined but his ouster not complete, Genevieve Diudonne and a host of other surly recalcitrant, revolutionary, backstabbing or too nasty even tor Tepes vamps are tossed on a boat and thrown into exile. Their long journey brings them to Japan, and Yokay Town, an enclave in Tokyo where the Emperor keeps the various monsters whose existence he does not formally acknowledge. Their position is precarious, if not desperate. They must adjust to a whole raft of bizarre Japanese vampires and their ways in their efforts to secure a sanctuary for Dracula's outcasts.

Drawing on Japanese culture, folklore, pop-culture, art and literature to populate his Japanese vampire ghetto, this is another thrilling and dizzying tale of blood and guts, culminating in a massive epic battle between supernatural monsters.