The hardback edition of this book is one of my most treasured possessions (purchased, if I remember correctly, at my first Octocon.) Howard Waldrop's short stories blew me away, but this was my first head-wrecking, brain-buzzing encounter with a writer who bends fiction and time and space and history into equally gonzo shapes.

Them Bones has three separate strands of war, archaeology and adventures amongst the Amerindian Moundbuilders of the Mississipi as refugees from a dying world try to save their own future and instead doom another, while a team tries to save the past and preserve the truth against rising floodwaters. This is a slim book, and the prose is polished til it shines, but it still covers epic ground as the slow scale of the tragedy becomes clear. Not quite like anything else you'll ever read. Then find his stories, which are something else again.

Awesome fast-moving crime thriller with a sprawling, formless plot but a riveting story full of bad-ass characters with lousy attitudes, hair-trigger tempers, serious substance dependencies and terrifying amounts of firepower. There's also love and heartbreak, tragedy and hollow triumphs, friendship, PTSD and some friendly waterfowl. Crumley's the king.

Right, then, the final volume in Park's quartet about Greater Roumania. Park has been compared to a lot of other writers over the course of these four books, but one other springs to mind: Michael Swanwick, specifically his anti-pastoral fairy tale, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. These stories share a common approach to fantasy in which they refuse to deliver or indulge in the traditional consolations of the fantasy genre. So when Miranda turns out to be a Princess in a magical world where she wields a terrifying magical power and has friends and allies and dangerous enemies, none of these things count as a blessing. Her home is destroyed, revealed as a magical illusion then ripped away, taking her adoptive parents with her. Her royal blood marks her out not as a figure of real power and influence but at best a ragged guerilla figurehead, or a political chess-piece in a morally and politically complex world in the throes of burgeoning modernity where royalty is rapidly becoming an empty symbol of the past.

Her powers work best in the Hidden World where she is the White Tyger, but even this is mostly the power to kill and destroy dispassionately, and as she realises herself, killing a few bad people here and there solves very few of the larger problems her country is confronted with. Her friends are altered and changed in profound and subtle ways. Her allies are powerless, superstitious gypsies or secretive, untrustworthy, jealous old women with ambiguous agendas. Her enemies include everyone powerful enough to damage or destroy her country. There is no clear path or plan for her to follow, no easy way to make things better and save her home or her friends. She makes many mistakes at terrible costs. This is not the rousing tale of a plucky modern princess rallying the peasants of a Ruritanian backwoods against an evil pretender to the throne.

In The Hidden World her mistake is to have the tourmaline stolen by the ghost of the mad baroness, stranding Miranda in the hidden world and allowing the baroness to possess bodies, including hers, in the real world. Dreadful, increasingly mechanised trench warfare rages on the border against the Turks and the Russians and a madman and murderer rules in Budapest. Is there anything she can do to save herself, her friends and her country? Answers do not come easy, and the ending is sad, lonely and uncertain, but concludes the quartet in a deeply satisfying manner. The four books mark a brave, thoughtful, beautiful addition to the fantasy canon and I recommend them unreservedly.

Mad Dogs was one of the best thrillers I read last year, and Three Days of the Condor is a favourite film of mine, so it’s great to see Six Days back in print and finally get the chance to read it. First, though, there’s a bonus novella, condor.net, a sequel explicitly updating and re-imagining Six Days. In its relentlessly paced 44 pages Grady crams an epic, insanely complex, action packed tale of mass murder, betrayal and intrigue in the post-9-11 espionage world into a ridiculously small package, and makes it look easy. Awesome, jaw-dropping stuff. Six Days follows, stately and slightly old-fashioned by comparison but still packing a punch. Though unfairly overshadowed by the iconic brilliance of the film, this grandaddy of paranoid conspiracy thrillers still manages to show the others how it’s done. Worth picking up for condor.net alone, and for heaven’s sake look out for Mad Dogs, about a gang of insane CIA agents on the run, framed for the murder of their group therapist. It’s pure genius.

A massive, epic alternative history of the twentieth century, but told in brief elliptical, ambiguous fragments, eschewing plot and linear storytelling. Una Persson and a large cast of real and imagined figures, including Jerry Conrnelius, Colonel Pyat, Joseph Conrad and Trotsky all rub shoulders and exchange cryptic remarks and ponder philosophy and politics and the nature of time or perform plays and songs dressed as a harlequinade. There is very little for the reader to grab hold of here in terms of traditional narrative, but the very treatise of this sharp, sad little book is that it is the mystery and the ambiguity and the uncertainty that makes life worth living.

This is a secret history, but it is a secret history that reveals the conspiracies and machinations and vast, intricately plotted schemes are projections of those with linear imaginations on the people who move through history. As the century flattens and simplifies and becomes colder, the wonder and mad idealism and passion wane, become coarser and more mechanical. From the glorious anarchists revolutions in Ontario, to a final dance in a fog bound cruiser as the ice closes in, The Entropy Tango traces the falling arc of the time operatives through this world as as Empires crumble and war becomes business.

But I could be wrong about that.

Genial and entertaining thriller. Chet is a New York cab driver who gets a tip on the horses in lieu of a tip in cash. When the tip comes trough and Chet goes to collect his winnings, he finds his bookie shot dead. Two rival gangs, the cops, the wife and the bookie's sister all think Chet had something to do with it and all he wants to know is who he's supposed to get his money from. There's a great sequence in the dead man's flat with cops and gangsters coming and going and going and coming that's worth the entrance fee alone. Good stuff.

Fantastic PI novel which definitively propels Winslow, after Power of the Dog and Winter of Frankie Machine into the must-read pile. Boone Daniels is a burnt out ex-cop who finds solace and escape with a small surfing clique who meet every morning, funding his lifestyle with occasional PI jobs. Hired to find a missing stripper, he soon finds his whole world threatened, not to mention his life.
Written in clipped sentences, like a more lyirical and laid back James Ellroy, Winslow's style should by rights become intensely irritating after only a few pages, but he captures a rhythym and a metre that gets under the skin and rolls the story along at a smooth, fast clip that nevertheless allows plenty of time for character and place; funny, vivid sketches which perfectly combine cyncism and real heart.
A superb crime novel, that's also a lot more.

Great to see Dortmunder being published on this side of the pond again! Here he’s coerced into going after a closely protected chess set worth a large fortune, but just can’t see a way to do it. Not as laugh out loud funny as some of the earlier heists, the wry tone, the New York attitudes and the deliciousness of the plot will keep the smile on your face and your hands on the book all the way to the end.