I grew up with my parents getting a succession of Cold War spy thrillers from the library every two weeks, where the evil agents of the Soviet Union enacted arcane and incomprehensible plots against The West that often resulted in a climactic and suspenseful climax involving the threat of global thermonuclear war. It tends to shape your perceptions a little, and I got into the habit of reading the last page of these books to see if the world survived, perhaps hoping to read auguries of our likely future, and mostly the spies and the soldiers of the West saved the day. Though not always.

Anyway, Gorky Park comes along, a police thriller set in Russia with Russian characters and a Russian hero and apparently nothing to do with global thermonuclear war and it felt like an anomaly. I never read it, just in case the world sneakily blew up halfway through, but I saw the film. Russian life from a Russian POV as portrayed by a western author. Weird.

So I recently rewatched the film on Netflix and that spurred me to order up Red Square from the library, since at some point in the intervening years I did read Polar Star. And... wow.

Though written near enough to contemporaneous with events, this has the feel of a historical thriller that engages in carefully and meticulous world-building to recreate a lost period - the sights, sounds, smells and lives of Russia after the fall of the Wall, with the people wretched and starving, queuing endlessly for food and vodka, gangs on rise and gangster hypercapitalism revving up to its various excesses.

Arkady Renko, back from exile in Siberia, now with his own team. When an informant is murdered horribly one night at a black market he finds himself pushing against all the usual sorts of official and unofficial resistance, even rediscovering the voice of his lost love. Renko follows the tangled bloody trail with dogged determination, all the way to a climax on the steps of the Moscow White House during the coup.

This is so astonishingly well-written, it's almost mesmerising. I'm definitely getting the rest of the books in the series, and might even loop back to the first two. Its possible the world will blow up before I get to the end, or perhaps that's just another silly childhood fear.

After his wife is killed in a terrorist attack that employed a new type of weapon Tibor Tarent is returned to a Muslim dominated England beset by climate catastrophe to find that a large portion of London was destroyed using a similar weapon. During World War 1 a magician travels to the front lines to try to devise a means of disguising aircraft from enemy guns. In world war 2 a flight mechanic encounters a female Polish pilot who finds him oddly familiar.

There are a lot of different narratives, jumping about in time and place, alternative realities and world and timelines. The split narratives eem to be the result of the same technology that created the weapon, though this is not explicitly stated or even explained. It's very puzzling but also absorbing, and while no solution is presented, it all seems to be gathering towards a particular outcome. It's lucky I didn't go into this expecting everything to be explained or resolved, as it was I enjoyed it perfectly well.

Renko in Cuba, depressed and suicidal for reasons that may well enrage the reader, though initially barely engaged with the identification of what may be the body of an old frenemy, is glavanised when a murder attempt interrupts a suicide attempt to mull is way through a labyrinthine plot. Extremely well written, brilliant characterisation and descriptions of place, I particularly liked how so much of the confusion in the plot turns out to come from the fact that nobody involved actually knows what happened to the dead body at the centre of the story.

Back sore. Reviews brief. Wet death. Not much Gretchen. Doesn't suffer for it. Still manages to dramatically reduce Archie's overall life expectancy every few pages.

Failed spies who don't get on with each other in a grim London office overseen by bastard Lamb. But one is sent on an op, which never happens, and a young man is kidnapped and will be beheaded live on the net - is there a connection, and what will the Slow Horses do about it, if anything? Best spy novel not by Littell or LeCarre I've read in ages.

From the past to the future, where Mac looks for a cure and the rest of the girls look for a way home meeting a familiar face, albeit a lot older. Meanwhile their continued absence from their present threatens to rip the planet apart. Also, a kiss.

Still on the run with their rag-tag family, still hunted by horrible people, the cast is going to be smaller by the end of this book, but if you;ve been following along the shocks won't be surprising, though the surprises might be shocking.

Ann Leckie, science fiction author switches tracks smoothly to fantasy with this cool, clever, riveting tale of gods and humans. Reminded me of Bujold's Chalion books, in the best possible away, but with a different voice and approach, as you would expect from Leckie whose subtle formalist innovations and interest in identity and the legacy of colonialism and exploitation finds a new and original expression here.

I donlt want to risk spoiling anything for anyone but i think readers should be aware going in that Archie does not get mutilated or physically traumatised to any significant degree in this edition of the Agonising Archie Chronicles. There's a certain amount of emotional traumatisation, but that goes without saying. As does the appearance of a number of bodies to puzzle the police and dear old Gretchen isn't far off having been uncharacteristically low of key in the previous instalment. Fans of this sort of thing will find this thing fantastic.

Was never that much of a Fantastic Four reader, um, mostly because there were no such things as Fantastic Four comics anywhere near where I grew up. This goes for pretty much all superheroes, now that I think of it. I think I once had an X-Men comic. Anyway, I like Hickman, and this seems like a pretty decent start to what will no doubt be something vast and epic.