Loved this. Builds on the first book by daringly have our heroes cross another, even bigger desert, hoping to put it between them and the fanatical holy army trying to kill them. Stakes are even higher though as forces move to threaten the city they're aiming for, and the caravan they're attached to has more than one hidden secret and shock in store, to say nothing of the haunted knife and the various monsters infesting the sands and the rocks ahead and the terrifying demon-child following remorselessly behind. Yes, a whoile lot keeps happening, and it ends with a set-up for a magnificently epic final volume of family bonds and saving the world. 

I'm not necessarily crazy about paranormal investigative agencies or anything that shows cops in a positive light as an institution at the moment, let alone the London Met, but this manages to thread the needle of my antipathy through a certain amount of wit, charm and imagination. The murders are gruesome, the characters likeable, and London is explored with knowledge and affection. Superb narrator. 

Beginning as a western, with a blood-spattered tale of outlawery and revenge, followed by a noirish excusrion through 1930s LA and finishing with a sci-fi horror alternate/past/future as the as the final price for terrible gift of apparent immortality granted at the start is finally exacted, this is quite the genre-crossing epic rooted in cosmic horror.

Och aye the noo. 

King returns to the theme of haunted cars, as well as that of found family spinning yarns and revealing hidden histories, this time in the sewtting of a state trooper station with something that looks like a car in a shed out back, but it isn't a car, it's something else, just what nobody knows, or probably can know, all they can do is stand guard. It's Lovecraftian, but it doesn't feel Lovecraftian because it feels so quintessentially Kingian

Andrew Caldecott writes complicated stories set in whimsical dystopias, but does so with an unapologetic intelligence and a straightforward approach to telling, not showing. So when a character decides something, changes their mind about something, or reaches certain conclusions, the story simply tells us about it as it is happening. It gives the characters an odd sense of agency, as if they are informing the reader and the writer that this is the way it is now, get used to it, work out the implications and see what happens. It's kind of refreshing. 

In this second and final book in the duology, various forces and individuals align in conflict and alliance and temporary truce as the sins of the past bear all sorts of fruit, not excluding murder, revenge, redemption and the possible final extinction of humanity. The heroes and the villians are all interestingly complicated and flawed, the adventures are exciting and suspenseful and the post-apocalyptic world is unusally weird and wonderful as well as horrible. 

It must be a source of endless frustration to Davidson's friends and fans that his work isn't better known, because good lord it deserves to be. This collection is a joy and a pleasure - right from the riotous opening story and all through the various layers of disparate and even warring elements that combine in perfectly balanced recipes to produce the others, to the impending passing from history and memory of the fourth-largest empire in Europe. To say the Doctor is a kind of Sherlock Holmes is truly insufficent - he is a kind of court sorceror of a rational age filled with surviving superstitions and ambiguous occurences and every now and the the just plain magical. A wonderful read, a wonderful listen, incredibly funny, deeply learned, Umberto Eco crossed with PG Wodehouse set in the place next door to Ruritania. 

There were two Peter Lorre films that made a big impression on me growing up, on was The Beast With Five Fingers, the other was The Mask Of Dimitrios. It was such a journey thrhugh the seamy underbelly of pre-war Europe, it was utterly enthralling. I'm pretty sure I read the book, but I can't remember so it must have been long ago. It is, obviously, classic Ambler, in a class all his own as an academic-turned-whodunit-author becomes obsessed with the life of a dead criminal he views, by chance, in a Turkish secret poilce morgue. 

but two  Sci-fi-espionage-horror-weird-romance fiction that's ultimately in the same category as Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach series, except that it's so busy being all those other things, which are very readable, when the real Weird Horror is unleashed near the end you're left wondering why the whole book hadn't been like that. It also kinda cops out on being truly transformative and mind-bending in favour of a (sorry spoilers) happy ending. 

The other fault was the admiration for not one super-soldier macho types which felt way too bog-standard for something that was clearly going for being subversive and critical. One character, upon learning that she's been working for a secret network of billionaires who wield way too much power (also a bit bog-standard) decides to retire an work in a dude ranch. I mean, these are secret agents, weapon-trained, combat experts, the best at espionage and counter-espionage, they learnt the world is being screwed by a powerful group that have essentially played them for fools and almost destroyed the world, and they just shrug and walk away. When you get down to it, that's weird, not that I want them to go to war with them or anything, that would probably be even worse, but it does expose how weak and tired some of these tropes really are. 

That all sounds critical, but it's a hugely readable book, just one or two things jumped out at me probably because the main interest of the book is actually the central romance. 

Page after page of a pudgy little guy killing zombies. Page after page. Zombie after zombie. Not really doing justice to the pages and pages of zombie after zombie-killing going on all up in here. Incredible.