Walls! Walls walls walls! Walls everywhere! Mysterous inexplicable ancient walls! They're all around you! Also, a girl has gone missing and an ex-wife is on the case so YouTube personality Whatsisface Thingummy - can't remember names, sorry - takes his crew to a small town surrounded by mountains and trees and things start to get spooky. Very spooky. Almost excessively spooky, one might say. Reminded me a lot of the sort of horror Charles Grant used to write, and that is not a bad thing at all. Atmospheric and creepy and suspenseful. Couldn't ask for more. WALLS!

Thanks to that Simpsons joke I can't stop myself thinking of this comic as 'The.' So, this is 'The volume 1!' A group of friends vanish during a fateful birthday D&D session, only to reappear two years later, one member (and one arm) down unable to talk about where they were or what happened to them. Decades later, broken and haunted and middle aged, they are sucked back into the magical fantasy world of Die where they have to play the game to get home again. Written with savage affection, drawn with lush and epic genius, this is a pretty amazing book, even for someone like me who never really got into D&D but was always vaguely fascinated by it.

When you absolutely positively most sincerely need to have a war but you haven't had one in ages and you've been maintaining your peaceful utopia with a secret system of selected murderings rather than through the exercise of military strength and you don't even have nation states any more, you can't just go rushing in, you need your emperors and kings and psychopaths and corrupt officials and ideologues and messianic figureheads and rogue assassins and ressurected classical warriors to sort things out so we get a good clean war. High drama indeed as the politics and philosphies and social structures cast about in some confusion over how exactly to go about kiling lots of people who disagree with you about some incredibly fundamental things, all told thorugh the shiningly intelligent and certified insane mind of murderer and torturer and cannibal and devoted worshipper of an incarnated God from abother universe, Mycroft Canner.

What's better than one Jedao, ressurected general who slaughtered his own army? Two Jedaos! One with a reduced set of memories working for an immortal hexarchate who wants to keep torturing people so he can live forever, and the other the rest of his memories stuck in a rogue Kel who brought down the old empire and who is determined to assassinate both the new Jedao and the hexarchate, though she doesn't realise just how dificult it's going to be. There's a new, fragile, less torturey society coming together, all it has to do is survive.

Urban fantasy steampunk secondary world religious whodunnit legal thriller type thing that certainly hits all its marks in a fairly entertaining way. Some fantasy has been getting quite theological lately. Wonder why?

This was the first Martin Cruz Smith book I read, oh so long ago, and the real mystery is why I never read any more until this year. Akso, having read through the entire Arkady Renko ouevre, I think this may well remain my favourite, if only purely for the setting on the North Pacific factory ship the Polar Star, engaged on a joint fishery venture with three US trawlers. Renko has fled Moscow and found his way to the slime line, cleaning, gutting and freezing the catct in the bowels of the ship. When the body of a canteen worker falls out of a net full of fish, the captain puts Renko on the case, even though it's clear from the outset that finding out what actually happened to the young woman will only cause all sorts trouble, and not just for Renko. There's a lot more than fishing going on aboard the Polar Star.

Back to Rotherweird, the odd and eccentric independant British town where the study of history is forbidden but whose science drives technological development in the wider world. From out of the past comes the plot of the evil Gideon Wynter, whose acolytes and henchmen, transformed and immortalised, are preparing the way for his return. Can the small band of heroes who defeated Sir Veronal rally to battle this new/old threat? Not likely. Dispirited and in disarray, they struggle to detect the plot and mount a counter-strategy. Tere's an election coming and the Aopthecaries are set to rise with the help of a cunning clairvoyant. There are sinster books, hidden tunnels, funerals, fireworks, kidnappings and expeditions to the mysterious and dangerous Lost Acre.

This is much pacier than the first book, but just as wonderfully eccentric, packed with detail and life and twists and turns and deeply British.

It took me a while to get through this, for some reason, as if I had to take it in digestible chunks, which is a pity, because it's really good. Imagine if Umberto Eco had written The Name Of The Rose inspired by speculative rather than detective fiction, it might have looked something a bit like this. To get too much into it would be spoilerish of a good twist. A thoughtful, philosophical, theological story about life and eath, damnation and salvation.

Great story, tightly written, fantastic atmosphere of recurring dread, brilliant illustrations by the great Bernie Wrightson. No actual cycling by the werewolf, so be warned about that.

Robert Carey flees the stultifying court of his cousin Queen Elizabeth for the border town of Carlisle, where he takes up the appintment of Deputy Warden in a wild and lawless area. There he meets his sister, as well as the married woman he loves, and becomes acquainted with one Sergeant Dodd who has just discovered the murdered body of the son of a feared local reiver who blames Dodd for the killing. With horses hard to come by, somebody's planning something. Carey enacts a bold, not to say daft, plan to discover what's going on and possibly find the real killer.