Ooops. the series has reached the point where the protagonist is so on top of his shit he's being smug about it, so he gets to show off how canny and clever and capable and competent he is, using a couple of US magicians who snuck in to London to nab a mechanical artifact that could be very bad news indeed. Ok, it's not VERY smug, but the tendency is there and needs to be held in check. Finding the right balance between so gormless enough he's a complete idiot and super-competent enough to run rings around everyone else such that they look like complete idiots is tricky, unless you're going the tormented brilliance route like a Lymond character, and that's not Peter. This does not distract unduly from Peter going to work as security at a cringingly with-it tech firm with something weird in its attic. The usual solid policing with added magic and the usual solid London setting made numinous with magic round the edges and in the shadows. Aaronovitch needs to watch it, though. Peter is becoming The Establishment, and while his prosaic law-enforcement point of view is undercut with self-aware references to abuses of power, they're always kept offstage, risking this series becoming cheeky friendly face of magic copaganda.

A great big police operation is underway to finally get the Faceless Man (mk 2), Martin Chorley, and since I listen to rather than read these, I'm slightly shocked that Chorley is spelled the way it is, I had convinced myself it must be something like Chondewembulderley or something. The usual magical policing interrupted by magic-police action set-pieces in assorted London locations, including a big cross-history fracas in some sort of dream-space, ensue. These books tend to stay grounded mostly at plod level, however magical, but it does like to nod to the epic when it gets the chance. Holdbrook-Smith's reading is, as usual, superb.

Earth is generations dead and humans have colonised Jupiter in massive orbiting rings. When a man goes missing at a rail station, an investigator follows the trail to a college town and the home of an ex-lover who studies old Earth science as part of a long-term project to restore life there. The missing person case leads to a remote corner of the colony and to a plot that could have devastating consequnces.

Great world-building, great characters, great mystery, excellent reader.

Pretty much a triumphant conclusion to the series as the empire sets out to invade the Peninsula one final time and the fragile alliance of the three kingdoms struggle to make their people work together to drive them off. There are setbacks and betrayals and trials and losses, and some of the worst perils turn out not to be on the battlefield, but more or less in the soul of the Thief who is also High King. And as usual we see it all through the eyes of an unlikely narrator who has hidden strengths only the Thief is perceptive enough to spot first. 

Although the novel itself lacks the usual mythical tale the rest of the books have always included, there is a short stry at the end that elegantly braids myth and reality - misleading terms because the gods in this world are real, and the it's a fantasy land not a real one, but you know what I mean.

Deeply strange, utterly riveting gothic post-apocalyptic sci-fi exploration of identity as a hive mind controlling bodies across a continent, all devoted to medicine, sends a replacement to a remote manor house. Their predecessor was infected with a strange parasitic organism, and as winter closes in and the body is cut off from the rest of their hive mind and the house turns out to be full of secrets and hidden crimes old and new.

Just amazing, going to all sorts of strange and twisted places, physical extremes and psychological disintegration, and the narrator manages, through accents and cadence and volume to switch between multiple identities without ever losing the listener

A young man decides to honour his dead father by burying the bones of both sides still lying on the site of a far-off border battle. A princess rewards him, or signs his death warrant, with a gift of two hundred and fifty supremely prized and valuable horses. Then someone tries to kill him. What follows is the usual Kayian exploration of moments and choices that sometimes makes history or sometimes sends an insignificant life in a different direction. As usual, a beautifully orchestrated drama.

Sharp clever stories with many a twist. Some very dark indeed, most actually quite funny

Of all Tim Power's books I think this is the one that can be safely called his tour-de-force. A magnificent concatenation of tarot, Arthurian myth, chaos theory, the highs and lows of gambling, the glitter and glitz and dead-eyed exhaustion of Las Vegas, secret and not-so-secret histories involving the ganster Bugsy Siegel, and a collection of misfits and loser and degenerates, some of whom are our protagonists.

After young Scott Crane escapes his father's intention to core him out and take over his body, he's found and adopted by a canny gambler with an eye for the magical undercurrents that swirl around card games. Years later he takes part in a strange game on a lake, which causes his foster father to take his foster sister and abandon him. Now a debt is being called due, and it looks like he's pretty much doomed. His wife dies, he seeks solace in alcohol, and has visions of awesome powers under the surgface of reality. In an effort to get his life in some sort of order, he goes back to poker playing, but that in turn sets off an alarm that makes the Fisher King aware that one of his jacks is back in play, and like the others he is being drawn back to Las Vegas and another game on the lake where the King will finally take what's his. 

It's just an amazing, sprawling, twisting and turning story, held together with a meticulous mythology that fits almost seemlessly with reality. The seamy glamour of Las Vegas never seemed so shiny or so dangerous. 

Great, laconic, wry narration and subtle voice work by the reader. 

Yes I was reading a new Tim Powers boook while listening to an old one. Don't ask me, these things just happen. 

Vickery and Castine are once again thrown together in and around the haunted freeways of Los Angeles, once more desperately trying to save the world, this time from aliens. With crop circles and monstrous figures and columns of ice and thousands of metal spheres appearing all over the place, but especially near out time-shifted duo, it becomes apparent that extra-dimensional aliens - rather like the entities in Medusa's Web - intersect with our reality and immediately die. But this is a haunted world, and their ghosts are restless and they want out, but that will mean catastrophe for the planet. 

Pursued, as usual, by government agents, allied, as usual, with assorted weirdos, freaks and outlaws, they try to work out what is happening, when and where, and whether thay can do anything about it.

I think? this is a trilogy, and if so it's a grand finale, succesfully taking the premise of the series, and Power's perennial preoccupations with ghosts and odd corners of history and geography, to a new conceptual level while delivering the usual thrills and spills and chills.

Honestly thought this was the collection when I ordered it from the library, but no, it's just the novella itself. Lamb orders Ho to carry out an unusual assignment, and Ho wonders what things would be like if he'd never been around. Slough House has a visitor. The Slow Horses plan on having Christmas drinks. Without Ho. Short, sour, festive, scabrous, but does clear up something of a long-running cliffhanger as a reward to constant readers and a consolation, presumably, because Herron's next isn't a Slough House book, and waiting for the book after that would be a bit much even for Lamb. Well, no, not him. But still.