Terrific, mordant, satirical thriller set in the mid 60s civil-rights era about a young heiress who is kidnapped,has her skin darkened with tanning drugs and hidden in a cathouse. The villain is a supreme monster of utter selfishness, but Disch and Sladek have keen eyes for human weakness and lacerating wit and intelligence to lay it bare. A brilliant piece of work.

Dortmunder falls into a convent full of silent nuns who, despite just about everything about him, see him as a Godsend, just the man they need to rescue their sister, kidnapped by her obscenely wealthy father and held for deprogramming on the top floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. This is not the sort of thing John does. It's not even the sort of thing John approves of, but he hatches a scheme and puts together a string and before you know it there's burgling and rescuing going on and everything might even work out for the best. Except the obscenely rich father is planning a coup in a South American country and figures the floor below the top floor is as good a place as any to keep his mercenary army for the weekend before flying them out. And that's what Dortmunder's got to get through to get to the nun and then back down again through to get her out and soon the nun's rescuing John and everyone's rescuing each other and there's mercenaries and security guards and cops everywhere and a ton of loot and one nun and Dortmunder and pals all wondering who's going to recuse them.

All-time classic comedy crime caper. You cannot do better for lifting rainy-day blues.

Extraordinary and strange tale of a blue-eyed Jewish New York detective, abandoned by his mentor, Isaac Sidel, tossed from department to department, loathed as a spy by his fellow cops, he is thrust into the dealings of the Guzmann family from his old Bronx neighbourhood to shut down the delivery of young girls to Mexico. Surrounded by enemies, Coen is tough but vulnerable, and only has time for ping-pong. Told in lovely, lyrical prose that packs more info and character and sights and sounds in a single paragraph than most writers can manage in a whole book, Blue Eyes is fast, furious, almost hallucinatory, a bit like Chester Himes or James Ellroy, but utterly unlike them at the same time.

Technically the first book in the Dark Future cycle, set in a dilapidated decaying alternative United States, most of which has been reduced to scorching desert, plagued by roving bands of armed gangs, with only the reconstituted US Road Cavalry keeping the highways open. There are dark forces at work, ushering in the end of the world, and as part of their plans, they unleash a demon virus on an unsuspecting Cavalry patrol. Satire, ultra-violence and lots of in-jokes follow in a fast-paced, tightly-plotted well-written chunk of sci-fi horror.

I was slightly surprised to discover that I hadn't read this, being as I'm such a fan of Newman's work, but there you go. It's probably been a the bottom of a box of books somewhere for the last ten years or so. Anyway, this is back from when, as Jack Yeovil, Kim Newman was writing for the Games Workshop, a series of novels and stories set in the Warhammer universe. By the by, here's Stephen Baxter's fascinating account about how a small group of young writers who had been published in Interzone in the eighties came to write tie-in novels for Games Workshop, with all sorts of interesting results: http://www.vectormagazine.co.uk/article.asp?articleID=42

Anyway, Genevieve Undead is a series of three novellas, featuring the eponymous heroine, a six-hundred year old vampire in a sixteen year old body. The first, Stage Blood, sees an artifact of the evil Drachenfels - defeated in the book of the same name - set out to avenge the dark lord. Genevieve's human lover Detlief, a playwright and actor, has just begin a run of his dark new play, much to the approval of the audience and the Trapdoor Daemon, a phantom-like figure who haunts Detlief's theatre. Newman's literary playfulness is in full force here. The setting of the Warhammer universe is a Germanic Mittle-European 17th century sort of place, and the play is 'The Strange History Of Dr Zhiekhill and Mr Chaida.' Cue lots of troubled angsting about man's dark side and the evil within, while the poor hideous Trapdoor Daemon clings to his innate humanity and the artifact bears down on our cast, bringing out the worst inside whoever it touches.

The Cold Stark House takes the literary games to a whole new level as Genevieve is trapped in a remote, crumbling old house to become part of a horrible family who plot, steal, poison and kill each other in endless, bloody variations of the most insane, twisted, gothic melodramas. The arrival of a revolutionary on the run and a courtesan help break the spell, but it may be too late for all of them.

Unicorn Ivory is the final story. Genevieve is inveigled into a plot to assassinate a political rival, something she is initially reluctant to do. Graf Rudiger, however, turns out to be exactly the sort of person who needs a bit of killing, and Genevieve tags along as he takes his party on a unicorn hunt. The story twists and turns and reverses and tables are turned and humans and vampires become the prey as Genevieve and Rudiger match hunting skills in a deadly game.

This is a quick read: fast-paced, intelligent gory fun. Genevieve proved to be such a compelling character that Newman uses no less than two more alternative versions in his Anno Dracula series and his Diogenes Club series. It'd be interesting to see him return her to the fantasy setting from whence she sprang for another couple of stories, but then it'd be also great to see the Dark Future series finished, and neither seem likely, which is a pity.

Probably the most downright likeable of the Dark Future books, purely because of the alternative version of an Elvis who abandoned music and went back into the Army while the world went to hell, came out a Colonel and set himself up as a Memphis-based Independent Op. He's a tough, decent, downright heroic figure, half-embarrassed by his period of fame, but out to do some good in a rotten old world. Hired by Krokodil for a cool million, they set out for the flooded, abandoned Cape Canaveral, where the agents of Elder Nguyen Seth are out to revive a long-forgotten NASA project.

The transformation of Jeassamyn Bonney! From homicidal gang-girl to bionic spirit warrior fused to a cosmic monster! Damn, it's such a pity this series was never finished.