The first half of Vaughan and Martin's digital yarn, set in a post-internet, hyper-private future where everyone wears masks and adopts fake names in public and policing is done by reporters, the PI tracks down the secrets, dirty or otherwise, you might once have googled or stalked Facebook for. Hired by a young woman to investigate herself to ensure that her past will stay hidden in the course of a (rare) employment background check, he figures the job is done when the client turns up dead, but hasn't reckoned on the determination of the client's sister to discover who killed her and why.

The setting is bright, colourful, full of strange and bizarre costumes and masks. The story is a tight, future-noir detective tale told with Vaughan's usual style and flair, and the art is wonderfully crisp and smooth, with terrific flowing action scenes.

The comic to date is available at the website for whatever you're willing or able to pay, so it can be sampled easily by anyone willing to take a look.

Robert Littell, the great US spy novelist, channels Marlowe and Crumley and possibly a few others for this exercise in wry PI desert noir. Our tarnished hero who drives down these mean highways and traverses these mean dunes and mean motels and mean casinos and mean romance, is Lemuel Gunn, ex homicide detective, ex-CIA adoptive father to an Afghan orphan and struggling with rage issues. Hired to track down a bail jumper whose photographs and files mysteriously vanish and who seems to have given the tipp-off that lead to his own arrest, Gunn sets out with admirable tenacity and ingenuity to find his man, uncovering a mess of rival mobsters and FBI witness protection gone wrong. While he's at it, he's falling for his vulnerable and slightly dippy client.

It's witty, laconic, twisty and sad, everything you need from a wry PI desert noir. Littel's a fairly high-powered thriller writer, and he keeps this tight and small and tense, and doesn't appear to break a sweat doing it.

This doesn't feel like a cyberpunk novel, because most cyberpunk feel very much of their time, whereas this has a freshness to its exuberant vision that seems to disdain such strictures.

Rebel wakes up in Eucrasia's body. Rebel is an artificial persona that has come to life, though she is marked for death by the corporation that owns her. Literally of two minds, she escapes and goes on the run with Wyeth, a friend of Eucrasia's with an interesting mind-state of his own, and they jaunt across the cylinder cities and dyson spheres and ice comets of the solar system looking for answers and adventures and finding both.

It's a marvelous read, bright and energetic and crisp and fun, full of invention and strangeness. The cover for my edition is awful, but it isn't inaccurate and as such is just a single glimpse of the dizzying wonders of Swanwick's strange and alien future.

This isn't the edition I have, but that edition doesn't seem to exist. A varied collection, some in the high heroic, some literary retellings and some oral transcriptions edited to a greater or lesser degree. Lots of actual fairies, which is nice. Two stories from T Crofton Croker's collection, though one of them is credited to William Maginn, no idea why. An episode from Lady Gregory's Cuchulainn veers perilously near self-parody with the overwhelming awesomeness of himself. There's an Irish variation on Jack The Giant Killer and elsewhere a hero who vaguely resembles Hercules, but I think my favourite was Lady Wilde's sinister tale of The Horned Women. The divide between the formal hagiography of the heroic stories and the irreverent, even subversive humour of the more formless, peasant folky stories is wide. An excellent collection, I think.

Fairy tales, or rather fairy stories, if that's a distinction meaningful outside of my own head, about sons and daughters and Fionn, who is a son, and the things they do, fighting giants, playing games of chance and always losing the third, stealing clothes from magician's daughters who change into swans, fighting the armies of the king of Spain, outwitting hags, getting a hell of a lot of wise and/or magical help to see them through their adventures, marrying up and making out like bandits. The repetitions and similarities grate at first, but soon the tales work their magic and you feel the rhythm and the cadences, the comfort of the familiar patterns and things that aren't so much repeated as shared. Alien to a modern audience, not really prose and certainly not poetry, artifacts of a different time and yet the very stuff our dreams are made of.

Unmistakeable McBain - a murdered nun, a quirky burglar who leaves cookies for his victims and the man who killed Carella's father is egged on to get Carella before Carella gets him. The stories are masterfully orchestrated with dark sly wit written in a voice that is by turns mordant, comic and grim, evoking the sprawl of seedy, homey, squalid humanity in the Big Bad City. Like, say, Lansdale, McBain is the closest approximation to an experience of skilled oral storytelling on the printed page.

It's been flippin' yonks since I've read a James W Hall - I think it was Off The Charts was the last one. Did they stop publishing him over here for some reason? The reprobates. Was never a finer writer than Mr W Hall, one of the top Jameses of crime fiction - along with the likes of Lee Burke, Ellroy and Crumley - the unholy quartet of murder and mayhem and marvelous prose.

The inimitable Thorn travels from his snug home ground of the Florida Keys to the bustling and jostling devil's playground of Miami City to look after his girlfriend's ailing Dad while she's away doing search and rescue training. While Thorn is manfully and self-sufficiently mending the roof, two guys show up looking for a photograph. The two guys are brothers, survivors of a massacre that took place on the night the picture was taken at the Clay - Lister fight in 1964, and the picture reveals certain unpleasant truths to those who know that they're looking at. Thorn being Thorn responds by jumping off the roof and landing on one of the guys. Thus begins a whole lot of murder and fighting and hunting and running around and horribly emotional repercussions that are all the hallmarks of a good Hall.

Fantastic to read, these books are, pure, top-notch literate thriller pleasure. I must have more of these.

Typically lean and sleek novel from Holland, this time set in the 5th century, as Atilla contemplates another invasion of Italy with his Huns and Germans. Tacs, a Hun scout left to make his own way back with the body of his dead friend after the last attempt to reach Rome, forms an unlikely friendship with the son of a German king. Their two tribes could not be more different, and with the fundamental and recurring problem of European history, the strong leader who puts together a prototype viable state only for the whole thing to fall apart on his death about to repeat, the whole thing ends in a welter of violence and tested loyalties.

Holland's smooth, polished, diamond-hard prose sucks the melodrama and extraneous details out of historical fiction like venom from a snake's fang, leaving a strong, muscular, stripped-down tale of young men finding their places in a turbulent world.

Laeghaire of the Long Road, from Tralee, no less, an Irish mercenary knight, a devil of a fighter and, well, a devil in general, finds his way, indirectly, into the employ of William of Normandy. The two make an impression on each other in the course of a Summer campaign, but to say much more than that might give things away, though I'm sure even the most casual student of history will work out where it's all headed.

This is Holland's first novel, and it shows a bit as in her first pages of terse, short sentences she's grappling with her craft and learning the difference between short sentences that are monotonous and repetitive, and short sentences interspersed with sentences of more varied length leading to an effect that would be praised as 'hard-boiled' in a crime novel, but which suits descriptions of deadly but prosaic men going about the business of warfare and statecraft. Laegharie is an intense, morose, driven, haunted man who is beating off bandits one minute and buying peasant girls the next; pillaging a landscape one minute, doting on his son by the bought peasant girl the next; but on the whole, Laeghaire is not destined for happiness, whether by mischance or his own love of violence, and if a happy life eludes him, then violence he gets a-plenty, waiting for him on a hill outside Hastings.

Anyway, it's superb.

As a basic guide to Irish folklore, you could do a lot worse than this. The introduction gives a nice overview of the history of folklore collection and its development from the early days of good old T Crofton Croker to the current folklore collection in UCD. Then a marvelous selection of stories big and small, from all over the country, from the many collectors and of many varieties. If you're reading this kind of thing, you have to make allowances for the repetitions that arise from oral telling which translates poorly to the written form, but enough of the stories come perfectly formed, whether through the work of the collector or the skill of the teller, to arouse nothing but respect and admiration. There's a long version of the the old King Of The Cats story that is perfect despite the familiarity. There is a flabbergasting epic about a wicked blacksmith who makes a deal with the devil that must have kept entire communities snowed in for months crowded eagerly round the storyteller to hear what happened next. A useful and enjoyable handbook.