This is a reasonably fun, light, enjoyable read about a world where magic comes from wine and grapes and the Vinearts are wealthy and powerful, but forbidden from involvement in politics. A young slave, Jerzy, is taken from the fields to become an apprentice Vineart, how very fantasy, except, we learn, that this is how all Vinearts are created, necessitating a rather brutal system of slavery to both work the vineyards and supply the Vinearts, a perfectly designed and deeply nasty cycle accepted unquestioningly by our hero, thus far, at any rate. With Jerzy we learn how the magic works, and then the plot slowly develops involving a form of magic that should not work by those rules. It's all a bit careful and painstaking, but towards the end Jerzy is sent forth from his sheltered existence into the wider world. As of the end of this first volume we're not much the wiser, but our hero has acquired some companions and is on the run while more dark deeds are afoot.

It's not in the first rank of fantasy writing, but it is clever enough, diverting, and I want to see both what happens next and whether the slavery cycle will be properly examined, let alone broken, though it's hard to see a hero as timid and unsure of himself as Jerzy doing much other than agonising about it for a while and moving on. Hopefully he will grow and change and cultivate some backbone.

The rather surprising conclusion to the trilogy is high on moral quandary and low on all-out action or boardroom shenanigans or Natschian trickery and manipulation. Oh it's there all right. We have an all-out battle, we have Natch on a space habitat stamping out a drug just to see what happens, we have clever political maneuvers between the Unconnected, the fiiefcorp and the Committee factions, but these are all preamble to a colossal and terrible choice thrust on Natch by Margaret Surina, and even of he has made a long and arduous journey from the selfish slimebag of book one to the dispassionate saint of book three, how can he possibly know which is the correct choice to make?

A clever, moving ending to an exciting and highly readable trilogy that genuinely managed to make the stuff of high finance into the stuff of cheap thrills, and then, in the end, maybe they weren't so cheap after all.

Though published in 1976, this doesn't feel like the type of crime/PI novel of the seventies. It's not remotely hard-boiled, for a start, though it's certainly noirish. If anything, MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are downright soft-boiled, there's always a terrible sadness at their core, and Archer is not immune to that sadness, in fact he seems drawn to it and braced for the inevitable pain he's determined to uncover.

In The Blue Hammer, Archer is asked to recover a stolen painting. Almost at once it becomes apparent that this isn't about an art heist but about deep dark family secrets, and Archer follows the clues and the threads, with a murder or two along the way, until the whole thing finally unravels.

This isn't exactly action-packed. Archer moves like a secular priests from person to person, extracting their confessions and putting the outlines of the larger story together from the details. There's lots of driving from one place to another, walks on beaches, long conversations and short ones. The urgency mounts when someone goes missing, though, and outcome depends on Archer working out who the hell is who.

It's the future and we killed religion! Atheists and agnostics finally had enough of their god botherin' ways and kicked some sense into the true believers! Now peace and reason reign and the world is a utopia. The end.
EXCEPT when someone blows up a priest! Who? Why? How? What? Huh? Edindurgh's finest future fuzz are on the case, sniffin' round with wiki pages and superbots and things, uncovering a dastardly plot even more dastardly than a dastardly museum full of dastardly creationists moving the dinosaurs next to the neanderthals.
Yes, it was good, though I slightly preferred the more wide ranging thriller style of The Execution Channel. This is more Ian Rankin than James Buchan, ifyouknowhatImean. Also, I'm in a hurry. Bye, now.