This darn computer or this darn site just ate the review I was writing. It was an awesome review. It was without a doubt the best review written by human or divine hand. It would have changed the world for the better, healing the sick, curing the lame and bringing peace in our time. Alas, it is no more and I cannot remember how it went.

I really enjoyed this book, though. Excellent. Almost as good as my review.

Naples, 1822. The opening night of Conrad Scalese's latest opera is a huge success and things finally seem to be looking up for the impoverished librettist. The next morning he wakes up to discover the cast, crew, director and musicians have fled or gone into hiding, the opera house has been struck by lightning and burned to the ground and the Holy Inquisition are pounding on his door. In this version of history, music can cause miracles, including bringing the dead back, but such miracles are solely reserved for the polyphonic hymns of the Church. Miraculous operas are heretical. Conrad as an atheist is already on dangerous ground, and his future does not look good.

Only a timely intervention by the King of the Two Sicilies saves Conrad from the torture chamber, but his problems have only just begun. A powerful, heretical, devil-worshipping secret society have harnessed the power of opera and plan to bring about a horrifying miracle. Conrad must conceive, write, produce and direct a counter-opera to negate the dark miracle. He has six weeks, and the dangers posed by the ruthless secret society are nothing to the difficulties posed by discovering that his composer's wife is his own long-lost love.

It's a fantastically enjoyable read with an unusual story, mixing fantasy and history in a way that's nothing short of, well, operatic. The suitably epic ending stretches on a bit too long, but Gentle has about a million different elements to resolve, from the various terrifying physical dangers to assorted metaphysical questions which need to be confronted to the musical duel of competing operas and, most tangled and unfathomable and intractable of all, the classical problem of the love triangle, so it's not that it doesn't hold the interest, it's just that there's too much of it.

A giant of modern fantasy, Powers mixes history and the fantastic, and this sequel to Stress Of Her Regard has a game of cat and mouse set in London, 1862, as vampires and poets and a vet and an ex-prostitute battle it out and chase each other round in move and counter-move, attack and defense across streets and bridges and rooftops and sewers and genteel dining rooms and, of course, graves. I loved it. Rollicking adventure, vampires that barely recognisable as such bu actually scary and poor wee vulnerable humans getting put through the emotional and physical wringer. Great stuff.

Captain Alexei Korolev returns for a second round of murder, mystery and political complications in Stalinist Russia, where political complications can be murderous. Unnervingly rousted from sleep by a knock on his door in the early morning hours, Korlev expects a one-way ticket to the Gulag for the revelations involved in his previous adventure. Instead, he is despatched to the Ukraine, where a young woman working with a film crew has apparently committed suicide. The young woman is a lover of the Commissar For State Security, and Korolev is to investigate her death and make sure there are no loose ends or embarrassing publicity. Unfortunately, it quickly turns out that it wasn't a suicide and there are loose ends that stretch back to the Civil War and the early years of Collectivisation.
The interesting thing about Korolev, of course, is that he's a moral man, a religious believer, who fully embraces the glorious future promised by the Revolution. He's not a fool, though, and is all too well aware of the fear, brutality and terror of the State as it flails around looking for enemies. Nonetheless, he just wants to do his duty, and while the story has a blazing climactic shootout in the limestone labyrinth under Odessa, the real climax comes when the reader realises that the villain is fundamentally in the right, albeit the losing side of history. This is a series doomed to endings that range from bittersweet to cruelly ironic.
Meanwhile, this is a cracking mystery with a great setting, tense with danger, epic in scope, marvelous characters and a thrilling conclusion. Very highly recommended.

Darkness abounds on the Rez as our cast are tested in cruel and unusual ways, and redemption and safety prove elusive and difficult to hold on to. Old murders and grudges spark new violence. Excellent neo-noir western, and one of the best crime comics out there.

Three clades of expanding and changing humanity are fighting a war in the Fomalhaut system. The Quicks got there first, then the Trues came along and enslaved them and now the Ghosts are here driven by their beliefs to claim the mysterious heart of the worldlet Cthuga. A True librarian in disgrace is despatched to find a missing scion of a powerful family. A Quick bot pilot encounters a mysterious sprite which may be part of a living Mind. A young Child grows up in an old garrison town in Greater Brazil, and because of the nature of the conflict in Fomalhaut, it is crucial that she grows up a certain way.

Big, sharp, clever sci-fi. You have to work at it; there's a lot to process in terms of history, technology, philosophy and sociology. A lot of big concepts and quite a few small ones. It all comes together in the end to a satisfying conclusion.

A strange tribe of people who live unseen on the margins of the world, haunted by their weird and tragic relationship with particular people in the world but cut adrift and mostly insubstantial. A writer who just caught a big break. A couple working in a bar/restaurant. A wealthy super-mom. These people and more are caught up in this strange underworld they can't even begin to understand. Everything gets spooky and strange and scary and dangerous. And because I've been out in the sun all day (the sun! The sun!) that's all I have to say about that. The core idea pushes it a bit, maybe more suited to a YA book than an adult thriller, but it's the usual good read you get from Marshall (Smith.)

Too sick to write proper review. Things go boom. Stuff happens. Heads chopped off. Eaten by octopus. More boom. Yay!

Decent enough thriller about an heiress kidnapped by out-of-work musicians.

Undercover FBI agent Dash Bad Horse, coming out the other side of a long self-destructive descent into hell, has been made mincemeat of by his mother's killer but is still determined to get payback even with his jaw wired shut, leaving him little attention to pay to Red Crow embracing the light and shutting down criminal activities. There's a corrupt sheriff with roughly the same idea and a lot of people who won't stand for it and the walls will be painted red. Penultimate volume of this brutal crime epic. You won't want to start here but you'll definitely want to get here.