As if Aberdeen doesn't already seem to have an ongoing non-stop crime wave to keep our characters busy running around snapping the heads off each other, a convicted serial rapist has been released and wants to come home to his granny's house, causing no end of bother. Counterfeit goods and money are floating around someone's robbing jewelry stores with a baby and a sawn-off sledgehammer and a snitch turns up dead under a slab of concrete. Things run along furiously as Logan McRae wonders where exactly everyone gets off telling him he's got an attitude problem.

Dairy and Hazel tread the boards, inevitably death is abroad! A fiendish;y tricksy case for the Detective Club in this delightful updating of Golden Age whodunnits.

Christmas kitchen sink drama, an online wedding, insomnia and weird goings on outside at night, as well all the usual problems of love and life keep the girls and friends busy and us entertained. Best thing to keep the spirits up in this silly old world.

Lately, this is a series I follow and read and reread with a certain obsessiveness not about the details of plot or character or world but of craft and aesthetic. It's a book about style and fame and celebrity, and it is beautiful to look at, beautiful to read, full of twists that thrill and shock on first encounter and make brilliant sense on rereading. I'm not sure that I've read a comic in this way since Sandman, and I feel I should immediately qualify that it's nothing like Sandman, but on reflection we have an invented pantheon of squabbling potentates whose fictional exploits somehow tap into a current zeitgeist, and maybe they're not so far removed after all.

A lifetime full of lost memories and vague recollections turns out to be crowded with vast dreadful horrors that cannot even be contemplated without losses of sanity, but what's it got to do with him and his wife? Brilliant first novel by master of the short story Barron. Most of the element will be familiar to readers of his terrific collections, but there's a dark humour running through this that suggests to me that there's only so many times you can contemplate Old Leech consuming the misshapen survivors of enslaved humanity in the far future before a touch of high camp enters in through the hopelessness and nihilism, at least if you have a touch of self awareness.

On the scale of Silmarillion-chapters-turned-into-books this comes below Children Of Hurin but above Beren And Luthien, simply by dint of at least having a complete, if early, version of the story to kick off with. It isn't a bloody patch on the later, gorgeous, rich, vivid and witheringly incomplete version, and the frustration will literally make your eyes bleed, so I'm sorry about that, but be warned.

I'm not necessarily in the market for a new serial killer chiller series, but Chelsea Cain has been writing some cracking comics lately so I decided to give it a go, and it's pretty damn good. The Thomas Harris comparisons are... unavoidable, she even throws in a reference herself, but the set-up is bizarre and the protagonists interesting and the mystery and suspense are not in short supply, so the book flies by agreeably and thrillingly.

Washington Black is a slave on a plantation on Barbados. When the old master dies a new and brutal master arrives to take over, and brings with him his brother, who takes Washington on as ballast for his experimental flying machine. Discovering that Washington has a flair for science and for art, he becomes an assistant, and after a bloody event, the two flee in the flying machine. So begins a long journey of the mind as much as the body as Washington must survive as a runaway slave, but struggles to do more than survive, to use his brains and his talents to leave his mark on the world, and to come to terms with the horrors and losses of his childhood.

Reading Alan Furst's Night Soldiers series is a bit like reading Patrick O'Brian. Furst's first (heh) was Night Soldiers, a massive epic of war and espionage, probably the best novel about spies in the Second World War you're likely to read. But in many ways it set the parameters for his subsequent works, while Red Gold set the template. None of the other books have been as epic - except inasmuch as anything touched by the Second World War is touched by the epic - tighter, briefer, sharper, more focused. Few of them go past 1941 or '42 in timeframe. At first this can seem disappointing and the books begin to seem samey and repetitive. But, like O'Brian, they are only samey and repetitive in terms of theme and format. The broad strokes of the War are, to us, predetermined. Within those strokes wind the lives of the men and women in the secret, murky world of espionage. Describing these lives is what Furst excels at, and he has perfected that style and format. If Night Soldiers was his Epic, these are his sonnets.

Our setting is Salonika, 1940. Our slightly shabby, vaguely disreputable, incurably romantic hero is Consta Zannis, a police officer responsible for peacefully resolving knotty political difficulties. He becomes involved in a secret route for Jews and dissidents fleeing Berlin. Time, of course, is running out, and the question is how long the route can be kept open, and whether it can survive the attentions of the British Secret Service.

Drenched in atmosphere, heroism and romanticism, with doom coming down on all sides and the shady, shadowy world of criminals and spies and secret lovers intermingling, this is thrilling, tragic, marvelous stuff. A kind of escapism, sure, but of such elegance and subtlety and the sense of intelligent people making small gestures in the face of unstoppable evil, it always leaves you wanting more.

Gretchen's on the run, but she promised poor Archie she'd murder no more. But murders occur, weird and terrible one with eyeballs and spleens and stuff. Will poor Archie be allowed to recuperate his mental health without being dragged into the grand guignol? No! Each book so far has added a few more wounds to poor Archie's body, and this is no exception - guess what sort of bizarre and terrible wounds are inflicted on the long-suffering guy, and win a prize.

This is such excellent and entertaining trash that the nastily transgressive body-horror bits sneak up on you, but it's well within the sick logic of Gretchen's world.