Mendoza, imprisoned alone billions of years in the past, is suddenly and unexpectedly visited by someone who looks a lot like not one but two other men she loved and lost under various violent and traumatic circumstances and despite knowing that history has every chance of repeating, she falls for him all over again, and even advises him on various ways of carrying on his time jaunt without dying. But how does this mysterious third iteration of something even a immortal time-travelling preservationist cyborg has a hard time crediting come to exist?

Way up in the future, close to the fabled blackout point from whence no report comes, four history buffs in a highly constrained world who are part of the Dr Zeus company invent a new type of enforcer. Alec Checkerfield is one of them, and this is his life. Staggeringly priveleged but deeply dysfunctional, he hides his genius and sails the world with an artificial companion he, at first inadvertantly, turned into the most powerful AI in the world. Searching for a purpose and a way to do good, Alec gradually homes in on the truth of his origins, following the path that will eventually lead to Mendoza, and then on further still to utter catastrophe.

I love these Company books. Witty and clever, they are also dark and exciting. I was also very pleased to come across a Dorothy Dunnett reference.

Still unwell. Ugh. John M Ford, man-about-literature, wrote a spy novel, and it is a clever, elliptical tale of game-playing and historical secrets and a plot that, quite properly, reveals a contempt and hate and fear of the world that gives us spy novels. Ford can be downright obscure in his writing, but I thought it all worked to his advantage here in the murky world of secrets and betrayals and double meanings and triple agents. I do now wish he'd written a novel about Christopher Marlowe. The brief historical bits made me want to go reread The Dragon Waiting (or Waldrop's Heart of Whitenesse.)

My second Ross Thomas, the first I bought (in Cork city, Bridge Street Books as it was then, don't care what they changed it to, it's always Bridge Street Books to me, even if it was only called that for about a week.) My copy vanished, but I have now acquired a replacement, and it was so long ago and I was so callow and ignorant of the world that it's like reading a Ross Thomas book for the first time all over again! Yay for the callowness of youth!

The usual whipsmart plot sees a terrorist nabbed in London, leading to a counter-nabbing of the US president's brother by Libyans who were funding the terrorist and who think the original nabbers were the CIA. Except they weren't and nobody knows who has the terrorist. A quintessential shady Ross Thomas political fixer is summoned and a quintessential shady Ross Thomas troubleshooter - Chubb Dunjee, ex-congressman and so-called Mordida Man for his renown in getting people out of jams in Mexico - is enjoined to shoot the trouble. While he slides obliquely from London to Rome chasing connections and making plays the CIA, the terrorists holding the president's brother, a diplomat, a UN official, the Libyans and the actual original nabbers work their schemes and their plans and their plots. It's at once insanely complicated and smooth as a blade, like a good whiskey. Funny and dark and twisty and and sly and cruel. Quintessential Ross Thomas.

Getting a new Howard Waldrop collection is always a little bittersweet because it's been about seven years since the last one and it'll probably be another seven years or so until the next. I usually avoid reading Howard Waldrop stories until they're collected, just so I can have the whole fresh experience. This collection has the added poignancy of Waldrop's description of his rather serious and horrible medical misadventures from which I wish him a full and speedy recovery.

So, Howard Waldrop stories: they're not really like anything else out there. We have the waning days of an obscure B-movie actor, we have a, well, there's no point in paraphrasing it, a wolfman in Alacatraz, we have a secret history of vaudeville complete with a quest for the Holy Grail, a poignant tale of a boy whose sister catches polio, an account of the career of the actress from King Kong - no, not the actress who played the actress, the actress, Bob Howard and his best pal take a trip down south, pirates and pirates and other nautical legends, a Vancian tale set on the Vancian Dying Earth, and a trip to No Man's Land in any language. Each is a unique and subtle set of tastes and flavours for the mind, each is distinctly Waldropian.

Constantinople, AD 802! Is there any place and period in history Cecelia Holland can't write about with confident authority? Hagen, Frankish warrior on his way home from pilgrimage to Jerusalem becomes ensnared in a nasty little power-struggle between the Basileus Irene and pretender to the throne John Cerulis. A complex, poisonous affair it ensnares court and city officials, diplomats, spies, courtesans and competitors in the hugely popular chariot races. Hagen is just looking for revenge, but he doesn't know what to believe or who, if anyone to trust.

There's some wonderfully manly stuff in this, between barbarian Hagen's fighting prowess, the single-minded charioteers, the hermit from the desert, the imperial treasurer, straining under the weight of empire, all men struggling in manly roles, yet all ruled by a woman. Holland excels at this.

I can't believe how quickly I read this. I honestly expected three or four days of picking it up and putting it down when a bright distraction went by, but once I picked it up I'll be damned if anything other than an earthquake was going to interrupt. It's not as if it's a fast 'n' furious thriller. It's a slow, atmospheric tale of a strange year as seen from the point of view of a young boy in a small American town, which is practically a genre of its own. Every other Stephen King book, Ray Bradbury, Rober R McCammon's Boy's Life and the late great Graham Joyce's Tooth Fairy did one in England. What has to happen is that the young protagonist has to be in the cusp of leaving childhood behind and as the fog of innocence fades and the other fog of hormones rises to take its place, strange things emerge from the murk. Unreal, half-real, surreal. In The Shadow Year, it's a long white car driven by a man in a white coat. It's people dying and disappearing. It's the model town in the basement and the eerie correspondences between the little figures moved by little sister Mary and the people in the real town above. It's a hundred other things, some strange, some banal, and the whole year exerts a strange fascination over the reader and draws them in as the town reveals its secrets but somehow every secret seems to make it more strange and mysterious, a thing constructed from faded dreams and memories. Wonderful prose paints the place and the people and then tilts them all slightly askew. Compulsively readable.

Raw, angry, powerful novel set in the dying days of the Vietnam War. Hanson is ex-Special Forces, a veteran of the war who has become a cop on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Revelling in the squalor, the violence and the adrenaline, Hanson waxes cynical about the world, but struggles with an inner conflict between his addiction to the power of violence and his soldier's certainty that it's the only way to get anything done, and his own soft, liberal heart, to paraphrase the late James Crumley's introduction. Encounters with pimps and whore, drug dealers and winos, psychotic lunatics and enemies on his own side of the law are punctuated with acts of random, brutal violence and occasional flashes of human warmth. More of a novel than a straightforward thriller, with a novel's structure and concerns, this is a portrait of a damaged man in a damaged world. Highly recommended.

Not one of McBain's usual mysteries, but a crime drama, or even an urban social drama, centring on a single Sunday morning on a baking hot street in a Puerto Rican neighbourhood in McBain's fictitious city. A teenager on the make, a drunken sailor looking for a good time and McBain's perennial Bad Cop, Parker, congregate in luncheonette. The cops of the 87th Precinct are hunting notorious killer Pepe Morano. While the sailor looks for love, the teenager looks for blood and Parker mouths off, a violent siege develops, a crowd gathers and the neighbourhood threatens to explode. McBain winds the tension and suspense with consummate skill and a keen eye for the foibles and failings of multifarious humanity. Fast paced and unputdownable, but then I don't think McBain ever produced a dud in his life.

The last of Parker, one final lean, mean book, a masterclass in the art of crafting a hard-boiled crime novel, or, indeed, any kind of novel. So long, Stark.