A deeply English bit of fantasy that draws as much from The Wind In The Willows as from Gormenghast, with its band of decent sort heroes and the eccentric architecture of its secluded and insular namesake town, not as gothic as the architecture of its plot, which initially stretches back to Elizabethan times, and later proves to have roots in Roman times, and hints at deeper still. Twelve gifted children are born, though how it is they came to be identified as such remains obscure. Have being presuably spawned by God or the Devil, they are sent to a distant valley to be raised and educated, but the worm is already in the apple.

Modern Rotherweird is an independant city-state that supplies the outside world with technologies both delightful and horrifying, while obeying strict laws against any study of history. When the consummately corrupt mayor sells the centuries-deserted manor in the heart fo the town to a wealthy outsider, he isn't quite prepared for what follows, but a disparate group of men and women gradually gather to oppose him. Lots of mysteries and incidents that swing between the tragic and the comic. There's a murder, though every knows whodunnit, and a Narnian otherworld, albeit a Darwinian nightmare. Mad science and magic jostle with boat races and school pageants, and everyone knows the bad guy is really bad when he shuts down the local. A long, enjoyable, rolling read.

Review to come.

The Border, and the other two books in this trilogy, are modern thrillers as Dickensian social documents, filled with moral outrage at the horrors of injustice, specifically, those of the fifty-year-long war on drugs. In the aftermath of the death of Adan Barrera, as a young generation of druglords come into their own, Mexico is plunged back into brutal and bloody violence. Art Keller takes a new role as head of the DEA, deter,ined to finally reach into the well-nigh untouchable towers of high finance, and finding himself at the heart of a politcial storm that threatens to break over a complex operation stretching from mexico to New York. A brave undercover policeman risks everything, a Gutamalan boy flees the gangs on a train called The Beast, a junkie coupl go from fix to fix and Eddie Ruiz gets out of prison and back in the game. Horrors and tragedies unfold, and there seems to be no respite or solution that can get past vested interests and institutional corruption.

Amazing, riveting, heartbreaking work of fiction ripped bleeding, as they say, from the headlines.

The art is as messy as the storytelling, which is as messy as its muddle of genres, and in less capable hands it would be a mess, but this is a dazzling and strange and delightful whirl of myth and fantsy about the daughter of Death and the hunt for her, and for the little girl who may replace death in some ineffable cycle, all as told by a dead rabbit to a butterfly. Story and art do not hold back from the weirdness but jumps right in and trusts the reader to immerse themselves in the story and the art and the idea that it all makes a kind of sense. There's nothing quite like it out there.

Renko abides - stalwart, honest and dogged. Stalin also lingers, in the new Russia many look back to the certainties of his rule and his victories in war. okay, so a few innocents died, bad things were done on both sides. But why is Stalin making appearances in a Moscow subway? What's it got to do with two new war veteran detectives and their political ambitions, and the heroic battle they fought at a bridge in Chechnya? Oh, yeah, Arkady's lover, Eva, left him for one of them. Is he driven by jealousy, or justice? Feck it, why not both?

Catherine kidnapped, River racing, everybody else wondering where they are. The evil villain NotBorisJohnson is ascending the political firmament and pulling dirty tricks, but he's not in control, in fact nobody's in control, but it's all headed for a bloodbath anyway. The best of modern spy thrillers, mostly because they sneer in disgust at most other modern sly thrillers while still having spies and being thrilling and modern.

Review to follow.

Okay, I had serious problems with the relationships in this book, particularly around the Evil Pirate Everyone Loves Even He Is Male Toxicity Personified. We are given precisely no reasons whatsoever to like, let alone love or be loyal or go our of our way to help this scumbag, yet everybody falls over themselves out of devotion to a romanticised version of him that does not exist on the page. It's creepy and horrible. And his death makes no sense. First of all, there must have been a way of gtting the loot into the cave without dying, so there must, ipso facto, also be a way of getting it out because sealing your loot up in a cave where it can't be recovered without dying seems like a poor way to invest the wealth you have accrued through murder and robbery. So this is terrible, and all the worse because the central protagonist, a young girl devoted to the scientific study of sea-life is bloody brilliant, and I kept waiting for her increasing loyalty to her unpleasant kidnapper to turn out to be some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, or a pure survival mechanism, but no. It isn't even as if the guy redeems himself in any recognisable fashion - he's a violent narcissist obsessed with the woman who rejected him for his violent narcissism so he tries to make it up to her, or lay a massive guilt-trip on her, by dying, stupidly, after kidnapping and terrorising her grieving niece.

There's probably a bright line that runs from William Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor to Cormac McCarthy, but I'll leave that for others to describe. What interests me is the little branch line that runs from O'Connor to Joe R Lansdale, converging, I'm sure, with many lines from the likes of Hemingway and ER Burroughs. Lansdale and Connor have an amazing amount in common: there are similarities of style, voice, setting and preoccupations. Lansdlae, of course, is firmly and unashamedly a genre writer: crime, horror, fantasy or sci fi all mix it up in his novels and stories. Nonetheless, the strangest and most bizarre occurrences in his work are often firmly situated in the quotidian, usually at the point where violence, stupidity and random acts of fate intersect. O'Connor isn't quite as gonzo as Lansdale, and in this book at least, she demonstrates a dedication to her singularity of vision and a commitment to the senseless logic of her character's lives that shows why Lansdale is someone you read for deliciously bizarre entertainment, and O'Connor is someone you read for a vision of the world warped by heat and religion and insanity and guilt into a fun-house reflection of the human condition.

Hazel Motes preaches the word of The Church Without Christ, trying to chase Jesus out of people's lives, but really trying to chase Him out of his own head. He haunts the blind preacher Asa Hawkes, hoping to be saved, and tangles with Asa's twisted daughter, while his own unwanted disciple, Enoch Emery, offers up a new messiah.

This is a fierce, shouted, heated tale that takes some untangling. Naked impulse and unshakeable certainty built on a foundation of loss and fear and death and rejection and guilt rule the lives of Hazel and Enoch, as if they can free themselves from the trap of the world by bluster and rage. The world rarely even acknowledges them, and then only as a nuisance. Whether in the end they achieve some form of freedom or peace of mind is hard to say, but they each make a bloody sacrifice to get there.

Incredibly strong debut about an ambassodor from a tiny independant mining station sent to the heart of a great empire where she discovers that her predecessor was murdered, there is a potential conflict of succession and calls for a war of expansion. She has to struggle with her own affinity for the culture of the empire and the danger it represents as an all-devouring beast. I can't imagine why the fraught and tangled idea of falling in love with the culture of an evil empire would be so appealing in this day and age, particularly from the point of view of a post-colonial country whpse native language has been relegated to fringe status in daily life and whose native culture has mingled with imperial cultur to create something distinct and not altogether untroubled. If you enjoyed Ann Leckie's thoughtful and exciting explorations of the ideas of empire and colonialism, you'll very much like this.

A young girl arrives at Moscow's Three Stations, her baby stolen. An only slightly older chess hustler is drawn to help in her single-minded search that draws in street gangs and pimps and murderous hoodlums, not to mention the chess-hustler's sort-of-adopted father, Arkady Renko. So far on the outs with his militia boss that he's not even working any cases, Renko pushes at the the apparent suicde of a prostitute and finds himself moving in some high circles indeed.

Two seperate plots neatly dovetailing is a new approach for a Renko book, and it works brilliantly, moving from the desperate lives of Moscow stree children to the obscenely wealthy elite who hold auctions to raise money for those same street children very little of which, as you migth imagine, reaches the actual streets. In particular, following the progress of the kidnapped baby from opportunistic kidnappers to would-be purchasers who have a change of heart when confronted with the reality of a crying child to abandonment on a subway generates agonies of horrified suspense, though the agonies and despair of the increasinly desperate child mother runs a close second.