Once upon the time there were three little girls who went to the music academy.... I can't believe how long it took me to cop on to the fact that this is a riff on Charlie's Angels, with the Phantom Of The Opera as Charlie, the Persian as Boswell and a rotating cast of three angels on hazardous duties. I think it was the first time they were given their assignment by the Phantom through a mirror with the Persian beside them in good ol' Charlie's Angel fashion. I loved Charlie's Angels when I was a kid. I wanted o be Submarina.

A succession of cases, a succession of angels going together down the mean Parisian streets, following trails and foiling schemes and battling evil. There are lots of great ideas here, and I don't want to give them away, but I particularly loved the reverse-heist in the Mark Of Kane.

It's he sheer quantity of female characters lining up to become angels. A remarkable and diverse selection of heroines or borderline personalities, from Irene Adler to Lady Snowblood to Eliza Doolittle. Many of them are neglected even in the works they appear in - here they're given a chance to shine and take centre stage, cease being marginalised and become adventuresses.

The adventures are cracking, the setting is vivid and the pop-culture underbelly is full of weirdness and nastiness and material a-plenty for the Phantom and his Angels and their hazardous duties.

Written with fierce, brutal energy, these stories are rich with language and often bitter emotion and threaded through with tough, hard-boiled cool in the face of unreasonable horrors. Bit of a puzzle box , too, many of the stories even more interconnected than on previous volumes, recurring characters, recurring events from different points of view, jumps forward and backward in time, shocking, disorienting, unflinchingly honest, luridly inventive and generally as unforgiving as the harsh badlands his characters struggle through, physical, mental and spiritual. The proper way to see out 2016 in my humble estimation - contemplating unthinkable horrors to come.

Dick Grayson is playing Batman, bopping around in London with Squire and Knight in search of a mysterious pit in a deep dark mine while Damien is getting his spine replaced back at ninja assassin headquarters. Will the lazarus pit revive Brice Wayne? Will Damien shake off the influence of his mother? Who has been leaving clues across time embedded in the foundations of Wayne Manor?

Though carrying on the densely bonkers story of RIP and Final Crisis and with plenty of nods to then-current and ancient continuity, there's a marvelous crisp clarity to the storytelling, aided superbly by the art of Cameron Stewart. This is so much fun.

Charles Palliser exercises his usual exquisitely intricate, not to say merciless, plotting, as a young man sent down from Cambridge joins his widowed mother and his sister in a dilapidated gothic pile in a remote part of the southern English coast. Troubling mysteries hang over his departure from college, the death of his father and the affairs of his sister, but worse is yet to come. Poisonous neighbours, astonishingly awful letters, animal mutilation, opium addiction, obsessive sexual desire (not to say ignorance and fear of female desire - very Victorian) create a simmering stew of fear, uncertainty and incipient violence. The text is such that the reader will be a few steps ahead of poor old Richard - but with the nagging uncertainty of how reliable a narrator he really is - but Palliser keeps you guessing until the final jaws of the trap spring shut. A deliciously monstrous read.

You've seen the Beiderbecke DVD, you've heard the Beiderbecke music, now read the Beiderbookes. One more bullet shot from a bell, the tale of two teachers in the moonstruck outer limits of Leeds who, despite being diametric opposites, form one of the truly great and lovable romantic couples of the ages. The offbeat adventures, sparkling dialogue and larger-than-life characters all translate to the printed page perfectly, with the added benefit of Plater's witty, spiky prose skewering architecture and institutions and generally adding an extra layer to the affairs, tapes and connections. A gentle, even tender, paean to the principles of humour and decency and being clever in the face of faceless institutions filled with grey guardians tearing society down to build a motorway and saving the planet one leaflet at a time and being cool and listening to the music and going with the tide.

Of the three Tapes is the one that suffers slightly from variations with the series, most notably the sudden arbitrary appearance of Big Al and Little Norm is considerably weaker than the re-enactment of Culloden with a happier ending on the streets of Edinburgh, even if it does give us the fracas in the Plaka. The lack of Mr Pitt and the appearance of Hobson are less egregious and Plater wisely just whistles past any inconsistencies in Connections as if they aren't there, and the wise reader will do the same.

If it weren't for the series this would be one of the most delightfully singular, funny, angry, touching set of comic crime capers you could hope to find. As it is they are slightly undeservedly in the shadow of the series, and unjustly neglected, but let me reassure you, they are as lovable on the page as they are on the screen.

Tracing the early career of the most notorious double agent of the Cold War, Littell provides us with a series of distinct narrative voices and points of view, from a soviet intelligence analyst to recruiter and communist activists in pre-war Austria and a royalist actress in Civil War Spain as Philby embraces this new iteration of the Great Game with aplomb and natural talent. This is a readable, witty, vivid and enthralling portrait on a young man, a well-educated aristocratic scion of a vanishing age of empire, set on a course to shake the world. Littell rounds the whole thing out with a daring twist that should tickle the fancy of any espionage fan, however credible they might find it.

A Scottish Calvinist replaces God with Nietzsche and travels to London to force himself on the world through sheer will and bare faced cheek and complete and utter self-assurance. His rise is rapid, his fall abrupt and along the way he tramples through a few lives of the poor and powerless and the rich and powerful and is rather like an alien visiting from another planet. Funny and odd and... well, odd and funny. Funny peculiar rather than funny ha-ha, mind you.

A very peculiar but readable surreal and odd novel about killers versus evil chemical byproducts playing games with reality in an old house in Eastern Oregon at the start of the 20th century. If the tone seems lackadaisical, the prose is crisp and there are all sorts of things that tell you this is from the seventies, with its amoral but manly characters of violent action and literally interchangeable women who sleep around a lot, and the whole plot seems vaguely alchemy in the wild west. There are some lovely flourishes in the writing, and the whole thing is a bit of a curate's egg of a book.

About halfway through this book I stopped and looked up and said something forceful to the effect that Holy God, this was the funniest book I'd read in ages. But I hadn't laughed out loud once, because, I realised, there weren't any jokes in it. Narrator Edna Earl is not the sort to go telling jokes; but when she described something as being done 'politely' she actually means the exact opposite, and that's what my English teacher taught me was the definition of irony. It's a little masterpiece of southern US voice and place, like Faulkner via Austen - all the wonderful locutions of language and syntax without the apocalyptic passions. Instead we get Edna Earl and her Uncle Daniel and their familial doings and complications, most arising from Uncle Daniel's heedless largesse and the efforts to restrain his prodigal generosity and the rich comic drama arising from his precipitative second marriage.

Joe R Lansdale goes off the reservation with this affectionate but irreverent homage to dime-store westerns and early science fiction. Buffalo Bill's Western Show in zeppelins! Kidnapping Frankenstein's monster from a Japanese shogun! Get stranded on the island of Dr Moreau - or 'Momo.' Dracula comes for a visit! Things explode! Later, Martians invade and Mark Twain, Jules Verne and a talking seal, amongst others, fight them off while a rips in the fabric of reality threaten to tear the world apart! Don't even try. I mean, it all makes sense, because it's Joe R Lansdale but it's as mad as a box of cabbages. Hilarious, violent, tragic and utterly gonzo vulgar and strange. I'd be tempted to call it old school, but there's no school that'd have it.