It’s the end of the world. The environment is crashing, the markets are in freefall, populations are on the move, social disorder and anarchy are breaking out all over. Who do you want in charge? Who’ll ride in to save the day? Politicians? Action heroes? Or rock stars? Rock stars? Good answer. Welcome to the world of Dissolution Summer. The United Kingdom has broken apart and Europe is spiralling into chaos. In Bold As Love, an unlikely Triumvirate of activist rock stars emerged to shepherd England through a series off all-too plausible crises: waif-like witch Fiorinda, wild-boy punk coder Sage ‘Aoxomoxoa’ Pender and dictator-in-waiting Ax Preston. In Castles Made of Sand, our three heroes confront the new realities of their own unorthodox relationship and a world where technological advance and magic have become intermingled. 
The current volume sees the trio, ousted from power, bumming and birdwatching on a beach in Mexico, recovering from their traumatic battle with Fiorinda’s appalling father, Rufus O’Niall. Sought out at the behest of the President, they are brought to Hollywood under the pretext of helping promote a film recounting their exploits in England. In reality, the three are hunting for the emergent ‘Fat Boy,’ a human magical weapon powered by an unholy union of scientific research into human fusion consciousness and radical Celtic eco-warriors who practice human sacrifice. Fiorinda is the key to finding the magician, but her fragile psyche is giving way to full-blown schizophrenia, a condition that could lead her straight into the clutches of their enemies.
It’s odd that something with a premise that sounds like a rather cuddly fantasy adventure thriller with heroes straight out of a Hanna Barbra cartoon – magic rock stars team up to fight evil, crime! With lovable cartoon animal! - should succeed so well in being real. First of all, any vestige of wish-fulfilment has been ruthlessly burned away. Sure, in one sense it’s about flamboyant pop-stars wielding music, magic and science to save the world, but in another way it’s nothing like that at all. The world is never saved. Dictator Ax negotiates half-measures, compromises and sellouts and still barely manages to hold things together. Magic, though rare, is hated and feared for excellent reasons. Very often, the only thing that remains constant is their music. Jones keeps her world fully grounded in science, managing to incorporate magic as a function of the world’s breakdown into irrational conflict and superstition. There are no easy answers or straightforward solutions, just tiny, incremental bits of good in the face of a massive landslide of bad. It helps enormously that Jones is an incredibly good writer, who never lets melodrama infect her style or language. She dissects the group dynamics of her three protagonists with the same cool, level tone of voice she uses to depict an assault on a group of Celtic fringe lunatics barricaded in a ghost town.
With two more books to go, this series has gone from compelling to riveting to incandescent. Fiorinda, Sage and Ax are real enough to step off the page, so much so, in fact, that in the first book it’s difficult to keep track of the large cast of supporting characters. Their conflicts, dilemmas and suffering become our own, as do their joys and epiphanies. The grim realities of a future where all our barricades finally gave way is immediate and, frankly, terrifying. We’d better pray that Ax, Fiorinda and Sage are there to save us. Otherwise we’ll just have to bloody well do it ourselves.

Slightly steamy southern thriller about a decades-old murder that's also a family drama set in a town full of secrets and corruption, steeped in racism (and resentment at being seen as corrupt and racist by the surely just as corrupt and racist North) and pretty darn miffed at having the past dug up. It's entertaining stuff. The narrator/hero, a legal paragon and bestselling popular author no less, is full of himself, but gets cut down a peg or two often enough to keep him likeable. 

It's all solidly entertaining and enthralling, and moves along at an amazing pace after the more stately opening. When people aren't shooting at him, they're warning him or waylaying him or setting his house on fore or iinexplicably trying to kindle a long-dead romance that left scars while the plot twists and turns and ploughs irrevocably to what you know from early on is going to be a climactic courtroom battle. It's smart, which is something I've really come to apreciate over a lot of other qualities in the books I enjoy, and well written. 

Published in 1999, some of the way it treats race raises eyebrows because critiques of well-worn tropes have penetrated much further now than they had then. But I think it plays fair and wears its heart on its sleeve. Oh, it also does that thing where every woman's relative attractiveness is detailed and catalogued and assessed, but as characters they're as well drawn as the men. 

Galactic goth space fantasy - the Emperor is trying to train up a few new lictors while a hiedous beast created from a murdered planet hunts them. One of them isn't a proper lictor, is having memories that do not match volume one, and one of the other, older, lictors is trying to murder her. A clever, violent, gothy, tricksy puzzle box of a narrative that pays off in terms of plot, character and world-building at the end, and it's drenched in atmosphere and spectacularly gory.

On relisten - what an ambitious and daring headwrecker of a sequel.

After the first two volumes, it's safe to say that the cautious reader will be aware that this volume is no less likely to yank the ground out from under them than the second was, but, cruelly, upsettingly, Muir does the worst thing possible: create her most utterly lovable character yet, and make sure it is understood that she is doomed to either die or change utterly as a result of the complex workings of necromancy, God's court politics and a galactic civil war. Life and death, gender and identity, are all grist to the mill in the rearrangement of the skeleton of the series into a newer, more tragic, but also incredibly exciting and suspenseful and often hilariously funny configuration. It does not end with the same crescendo of violence and chaos as the first two did, probably because it's one half of a longer volume, but it definitely leaves you with a whole new strange and awful puzzle and wanting more. All-time great audiobook reader, too. 

The survivors of of the original cornfield clown massacre are trying to get on with their lives, but the mastermind behind the original killing spree has other plans and to achieve bloody revenge he has incited the most terrifying beast of the modern world - an internet mob comvined of the rightousness of their cause. A twisty, fast-moving slasher thriller and a great follow-up to the original.

Gotrek and Felix are drawn into a quest to cross the Chaos Wastes on a Dwark airship in search of a lost city. This is lots of fun but enjoyment was enhanced every time the words Karag Dum were spoken and Horslips started to play. 

It makes absolute sense, but still comes as a relief, that Barron's foray into crime writing would become increasingly immersed in the Weird, albeit carefully staying on the other side of the line from the outright supernatural. Nonetheless, by the end of this book, you're ready for about anything to happen, like if Ellroy or Crumley fell in love with Lovecraft rather than Chandler. Coleridge is an ex mob enforcer, current private detective trying to channel his propensity for and affinity with mayhem and violence into being, roughly, one of the good guys, not so much on a quest for redemption as a modification of his self-image. Hired by a an ex-cop turned bodyguard for a wealthy tech guy turned politician (everyone in these books has gone through more jobs and identities than I have white t-shirts from Dunnes) to look into the death of his nephew at a now-mothballed Large Hadron Collidor site, Colerdige tools up and heads down into a creepy Valley with a dark past and darker subterranean secrets, tussling with a group of bizarre pantheistic cultists who are catspaws of the local super-wealthy family behind the Collidor and its darker purpose. Phew. 

It's pure Barron, dark lyrcism and characters who self-identify as Epic, with a strange dark howling laughter suffusing every sentence. Dark, blood-soaked history and dark blood-soaked bursts of violence, but this eats at your brain with its intimations of nihilistic billionaires engaging in blood sacrifice and dabbling in apocalypse, and our small but thus-far indestructable protagonist creeping about its edges.

2022 - relistened and enjoyed.

Admiring more and more the rock-solid craft that goes into these, from the handling of the plotting-for-the-novel-and-for-the-series, to the characterisation, the just-enough-detail worldbuilding, the carefully constructed epic action scenes. This volume has the contrasting highlights of opening with a huge dragon versus a dwarf airship, and a pleasingly prickly and difficult adult relationship developing between two people in uncertain circumstances who aren't always their best selves towards each other. Also, every time the Skaven are onstage there's invariably a reference to their fear musk-glands, which feels like a reference to a billionaire currently spraying his glands all over a social media platform.

I want to write a proper review of this because I feel it's under-rated, though I have no evidence for that, maybe just overshadowed, it's really great, I reread it often, audio book was very good indeed, and I've read a lot more Lovecraft since the last time I read it, which improved the experience. Unfortunately I am ill and feel utterly horrible.

I enjoyed this a lot more than the last Ramsey Campbell I read, I think his books are better if the protagonist is aware of the supernatural peril earlier, rather than pushing on oblivious until the final undeniable bit at the end when it eats them. Lovecraftian and the first in a trilogy, so more to look forward to. Narrator was American trying to do a British, though not Liverpudlian, accent, and kept running afoul of vowels.