It really is an awful pity that Thomas Harris got stuck going back to Lecter in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising when he could have been writing more thrillers like this, scultped from soid blocks of gorgeous prose, giving us protagonists like Cari Mora, the ex-FARC child soldier hanging onto residency in the US by the skin of her teeth, caretaker of a house built for Pablo Escobar, where he hid millions in gold bullion. What a brilliant, twisted, twisty thriller it is, by turns atrociously horrible and profoundly humane, way more of a heist than the woman-in-peril suggested by the blurb, but also that to some extent.

The pantheon has split, Ananke's scheming continues despite her apparent death. Avoiding apparent death is apparently the whole point of pantheon gods apprently dying and losing their heads, and it all goes back a very long way back in time, but what exactly is going on still remains obscure and the surviving gods are having a hard time gettign their act together to counter it what with either being captured or on the run or hidden away deep underground. The gods are still doomed, but now it's more complicated than that.

When a new Russian billionaire falls to his death poor old Renko just can't stop himself nosing around some of the odd corners of an apparent suicide, but he heardly expects as a result to end up zooming around the irradiated Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl with its ragged population of scientists, militia, hustlers, and displaced natives who have snuck back in. What's it all got to do with deadly tiny pieces of radioactive material found in a salt shaker under the dead man. Renko has little to go on, and in the haunting site of so much death, what can it possibly matter. But Renko does what Renko does, going down these mean irradiated streets who is not himself mean and irradiated.

After being thrust into command in a besieged fort on the Danube, ending in disaster, Alexios Aquila is disgraced but protected by a powerful uncle, and sent to the northern frontier of England to take over a force of frontier scouts, most of them members of the various tribes. They aren't an attractive prospect for a young Roman officer, but then neither is he for a tough group of soldiers with their own ways.

Alexios settles into his command, establishing good relations with the local tribe, but there are vague stirrings of trouble in the further north, and when it finally comes it is exacerbated by disastrous and tragic local events. There follows a riveting adventure narrative, one if the best war stories I've read in ages. Sutcliff does action and military personalities and men under extremes of stress exceptionally well.

Sutcliff's tendency to treat the Roman Empire as a civilising patrician force that benevolently rules the world via a kind of historical inevtibility rather than ruthelss military invaders gives her stories a Kiplingesque air, and indeed you could transport the essence of the story to some frontier of the British Empire without changing its essential personality and the cool sensible decency of the better types in the officer class. Sutcliffe's saving grace is that she can inhabit a wild celtic tribe just as thoroughly, if not more so, since she captures their distinctive voices so well. She reminds me a LOT of Mary Renault.

A thin collection, with one nice story, one nasty one and a lot of pictures of the real Lovecraft. Almost worth it for the first sweet and sad story, the second one being a bit over-the-top, deliberately. I got this from the library, so it's fine, but not an essential addition to your collection.

Tim and friends are taken to the Machine Moon, where surviving robots hatch their plans on humanity. Some friends are left behind, an old friend is on the trail, nobody can be trusted, the galaxy is on the brink of war and the big robots might be on their way back. I haven't got the book in front of me and I've forgotten all the names, sorry. It's pretty good!

One problem with the connected world and all its attendant dangers and drawbacks, is you can't turn your back on it. I mean, you can, with effort, but that doesn't make it go away or ameliorate its effects. Bridle, advocates the difficult option of greater understanind of the systems involved and how they work and what they do. It's all a bit grim, to be honest. The internet as a hyperobject. Too much data overwhelming our ablity to respond to crises in a timely manner. Climate change as an existential threat. The need to ground ourselves in the here and now with clarity and act decisively. A lot to digest in a relatively short book, but many of the more sickening anxieties about the mordern world are very well articulated, explored and expressed.

Bodies in the woods and Gretchen on the loose. Chekov's imprisoned serial killer - they must execute an elaborate and bloody escape by the third act. Or the second book. I just made that up because it sounds cool. Archie and Gretchen's messed-up relationship is traumatic romantic heart of these books - hence the naming system, presumably, and it is truly a wrenching gothic portrait of abuse and physical and mental torture. But let's not forget plucky spiky reporter Susan Ward out to bring the truth behind an old scandal that gets pushed aside when some people die in a car crash. One or two of Susan's deductions seemed a bot forced to me, but it's a terrific page turner all the same.

A familiar face at a funeral sets off the appalling Jackson Lamb, despatching his Slow Horses to settle a score. There's a missing teenager and a new face in whose transgression is particularly nasty even for Slough House, and it all comes down to a snow-bound chase through deepest darkest Wales. Oooh, this one left a mark.

New I'd come back round to thi9s one eventually. Three bodies under the snow, mutilated to prevent identificiation. Chief Investgator Renko's forst priority is to get the KGB to take the obviously dangerous case off his hands, but everyone seems to to want him to carry on, and he does, uncovering the names of the victims, meeting the beautiful Irina, and pursuing their ruthless, powerful, apparently untouchable killer. It's a classic for a reason.