John Dortmunder has to steal a rock six times. Or rather, the rock sets of a chain of six heists all geared towards securing said rock. There are complications, so many complications that it's easy to miss what a a miracle of clear, uncluttered efficient story-telling a book with six heists in it is, while at the same time being a minor comic masterpiece, most of it character-driven with its collection of lovable prosaic lowlives hatching schemes and executing complex plans that invariably go wrong, or don;t go wrong but still leave them empty-handed. Robert Redford played Dortmunder in the adaptation and it's such a weird piece of miscasting, but if you've only read this, the first in the series, before you've become truly familiar with the drab, downcast, put-upon little mastermind, then it isn't quite such a bad fit.

I could see this coming and I'm absolutely delighted with the result. The Detective Club go to Hong Kong! With the death of her grandfather, Hazel returns home for the mourning and Hazel goes with her. Already grieving for her beloved grandfather, she is landed with a rude shock when she arrives. Hong Kong may be home to her, but a lot has changed, and Daisy has some adjusting to do as well, with this new Hazel on her home turf. Tragedy strikes, and a terrible crime in which Hazel may be implicated. Are the perpetrators among her father's clients, the terrifying criminal Trids or someone closer to home? Detective Club fearlessly follow the clues, even when the solutions are almost too awful to bear.

I read the first two Fourlands when they came out, but they fell off my radar somehow, which is annoying, because I really liked them, and now I like them all the more after years of Grimdark fantasies all over the place. So it's great to revisit the Castle and the Circle and rediscover what made them so fresh and exciting. Set in a world under attack from hordes of giant insects, united by an emperor who grants immortality to fifty individuals chosen for excellence in a particular field or skill who devote themselves to the defence of the Fourlands when not being distracted by petty squabbles and love affairs and addictions. Jant is Comet, the Messenger, the only person in the world with the power of flight. he's also a junkie, addicted to a drug that sometimes lets him travel to another world he calls The Shift. While helping his mentor, Lightning, prosecute his latest love affair with a aristocratic musician who wants to become immortal through her own merits rather than through marriage, the war with the insects suffers a dramatic reversal as swarms of insects breach the front. It doesn't help that a king has died and been replaced by his more cowardly brother, or that open civil war is breaking out amongst the other immortals. The stresses and pressures send Jant more and more to the drug, which takes a physical and mental toll, particularly when he discovers that the current disaster may be all his fault.

Imposing a modernist style and sensibility on classic fantasy to invigorating effect, this feels like a take on the current moment in our world in the same way any given Discworld novel did. The Year Of Our War is witty, but not comic - it has moments of horror, bloody action, explicit sex, surrealism, and essentially office politics and celebrity culture built around a mythic pantheon in the making. It's written in marvelous polished crystalline prose that reminded me of Gwyneth Jones and is an incredibly assured and confident first novel.

Gunpowder has come to the Fourlands, courtesy of an arrogant but brilliant ex-artist fro the newly acquired island. So now there are muskets and rifles and massive traps packed with enough explosive power to wipe out waves of Insects. Or it would, if at the last minute it wasn't discovered that most of the gunpowder has been stolen. This causes horrible problems at the front, but that's nothing compared to the havoc that ensues when the thieves out the gunpowder to uses of their own. Terrorism has come to the Fourlands.

Brilliant, thrilling, horrifying breakneck action as an ossified social order acting as bulwark against an existential external threat comes under attack from centuries of built-up anger and resentment, harnessed by one driven genius consumed with hatred and a desire for revenge. But surely no-one could or would threaten the Emperor himself?

The Scottish border 1592, and a Minister is murdered by two men. His pregnant wife rides off in a panic all the way to Lady Elizabeth Widdrington, who in spite of misgivings of what her husband will do when he finds out, rides back to help arrange the funeral and perhaps find out what's going on. There follows a tangled tale of border reivers and boy choirs and tooth drawers as Sergeant Dodd and Robert Carey are drawn into the mystery.

An absolutely splendid little yarn, full of domestic and social detail and twists and turns of the plot. Elizabeth, Dodd and Carey are great characters, and if I'm not mistaken there's the welcome appearance of Character From Another Series, too, which is nice.

Things get colder and darker and louder for Cass Neary as she flees New York for Helsinki to consult on what turn out to be some beautiful but horrifying pictures. Her next stop is Iceland in search of a very old flame, but it turns out she's left some bodies in her wake and maybe it's the drugs and the booze feeding her paranoia, but she thinks the killer might be coming for her next. Steeped in the angry raw noise of death metal rock and the remnants of a resurgent Nordic religion and some frankly psychotic behaviour that seems even beyond the scope of damage connoisseur Cass Neary to properly process or cope with and in the end it's just about all she can do to survive and get the hell out.

Cass abides out on the far edge of the remnants of a long-lost scene, wasted and wasting, and this feels like her European tour of even more frightening and forgotten jagged edges. Hand has an eye and an ear for the relics of deranged sub-cultures and twists their ancient sins into riveting modern thrillers.

Back to the Overlook, my God, when did I last read this? I was a teenager, for sure, one of my first King books, but not THE first. I remember the trailers for the film terrifying me when I was little, and it was rewatching the film that prompted me to impulsively order this from the library. King can write, of that there is no doubt, college-professor literary wunderkind level writing, but utterly devoted to the genre of horror, the good old haunted house/psychic child tropes reworked with stunning skill and craft, albeit still raw, to some extent. But the burning molten core of The Shining is the alcoholic father and the destruction of a fragile family. There are a lot of well-described things in here, a lot of well-evoked emotions, but none as real as the ravages of alcoholism on the psyche of the male father and breadwinner and wannabe writer.

Still, though, winter closes in and the hotel comes to ghastly life and the hedge-animals move - yes, well done leaving those out of the film, Stanley Kubrick - and nobody does the unremitting terror of the supernatural like King does. A bracing reminder why he has ruled the bestseller lists for decades.

Danny Torrance, who survived the explosion that destroyed the Overlook Hotel, is an alcoholic, moving from town to town until he's drunk it dry or beaten someone up or gotten fired. The True Knot travel the roads of America in RVs and Winnebagos and every now and then they take a child with the shining and torture and murder them, generating steam, which keeps them alive long past the natural stretch of human years. Alba is a young girl with an extraordinary power, and while Danny finally reaches bottom and starts the long climb to sobriety, Alba begins to grow into her power and the True Knot migrate along the highways and turnpikes and camper parks, all three paths destined to cross in a savage conflict.

This is the newest Stephen King I've read in a very long time, and it's great to see he still has it, refined by the sort of craft and skill you can only possess after writing more than fifty books. The fact that it's a sequel to The Shining should have been more of a big deal for me than it was, maybe, and indeed, the true heart of this sequel is Danny's heartbreaking descent into alcoholism and his efforts to shake off his father's legacy and his own disease, not the supernatural battle and the climactic return to the site of the long-gone hotel. That was never going to match the raw power of the toxic man and the good woman and the little boy in the haunted hotel in the first book, for all that the years of experience have tempered his abilities. But Danny in AA? Yeah, that's where it's at, and that's what you get and that makes this a Good Book and even a Great Sequel.

Been a while since I checked in the Tom-Sharpe-meets-Clive-Barker-in-a-Scottish-police-procedural series featuring Logan McRae. Two thirds of the way through I realised I'd skipped two books, which actually speaks well of how self-contained they are, in fairness. A horrible burning, nasty beatings, strange bone circles, missing teenagers and a big film production all pile-up to cause headaches for the gang in Aberdeen. Good gory twisty entertainment.