On a cold January morning in 1973( is there ever any other kind in the Northern hemisphere ?), inside a foreboding old house in Reykjavik, Jacob Kieler Junior lies dying from a fatal gunshot wound to his chest. Detective Jóhann Pálsson, an expert in the emerging field of forensics, is called to the scene and soon discovers something more disconcerting than the murder itself. The deceased's father, Jacob Kieler Senior, a railroad engineer, was coincidentally shot to death in the same living room nearly thirty years earlier. The case was officially closed as a bungled robbery.
Pálsson rapidly uncovers diaries that portray Kieler Senior as an ambitious man dedicated to bringing the railroad to Iceland no matter the cost. Sensing a suspicious murkier mystery , the detective and his colleagues piece together .through the elder Kieler's diaries a family history rich with mendacity and deception.
Riding in somewhat on the coat-tails of the Nordic noir explosion House of Evidence none the less is an initially effective if rather tortuous read that starts off well but becomes flimsier and less enthralling as the narrative progresses.
If I may compare to a railway journey , as befit's a central plot point this is one where you are originally fascinated by the landscapes passing by but after a while realise that you are in fact looking at the same scene over and over again. Like the background in a Scooby Doo chase scene. Then all you want to do is find something else to divert your attention and pass the time. This book would in all likelihood not be on the preferred list.

And so before you can say Triplets in a growly movie trailer type voice, here comes the third and final instalment in the "Codename Chandler " series. The three books in this preposterous but hugely entertaining series have been released with quite breathtaking haste ( George RR Martin could do with some of what the co-authors of these books are on ) , mirroring it would seem the high-octane action and amphetamine fuelled shenanigans of the plot.
Talking of the plot.. Chandler and her twin sisters , the psychopathic Hammett and the cripple Fleming are now the worlds most wanted after being put in the frame for assassinating the President . The former Vice President, now the main man , is plotting along with "The Instructor" in the global interests of the U.S.A. and have come up with a plan so irredeemably fiendish it would make Hussain , Gaddafi and Bin Laden virulent green with envy. The sisters , already exhausted and traumatised ( apart from Hammett who does not do traumatised ) must come up with a plan to foil their powerful enemies whilst fighting other elite members of the "Hydra" squad.
So it is pretty much business as usual for this trilogy. However the authors have fleshed out the final book to include the perspective of even more characters ,some from the less salubrious side of the equation and allowed more dialogue and character development. Consequently Three is an absolute door stop of a book running to 600 pages.
As ever Chandler is the only character who tells her side of things in the first person . Chapters are told from character viewpoints as with Flee and Spree. There are even back story sections expanding on certain character histories. Once again there are also cameos for Jack Daniels and Harry McGlade who provide much of the zinging dialogue that populates this book. There is also ,as ever ,far too much preoccupation with carnal activities . These segments are dull , pointless and slow things down .......with the notable caveat from two certain characters getting it on which is actually highly amusing. You'll know the ones I mean when you read this.
Three is a quality denouement to a ludicrously pleasurable trilogy . The sort of unadulterated superior pop-corn nonsense that makes absolutely no apologies or concessions for what it is. Rather like Hammett in fact.
There may be more to come as well. Given the speed at which these books appear I'd give it a week.......maybe two.

I do enjoy a good alien invasion. I very much doubt whether I would enjoy in reality but gimme one in film or a book and I am there. As Exodus( Extinction Series) is the second book in an on-going series and as I haven't read the first I am genuinely undecided as to where I would place it in the pantheon of great sci-fi alien invasion stories.( E.E. Knights Vampire Earth series is one) Based on this book alone It would not be at the top of the list -the series entire may lead to a different conclusion ...but somehow I doubt it.
The gist of it is that a red rain has fallen over planet earth wiping out virtually all life .From the corpses of the massed dead have risen a parasitic? Alien life-form in the guise of huge gnarly red trees festooned with large pods and skittering alien spiders that attack en-masse .Journalist Emily Baxter and her canine companion Thor have somehow survived and are trying to make their to an island off the far northern coast of Canada to team up with a group of scientists .
This is not helped by the fact that Emily cannot drive ( this is remedied with unbelievable haste later in the narrative) and is travelling on a bicycle. Events take a not entirely unexpected turn when she runs into a family who have also survived the red rain.
Exodus at one point threatens to transmute into little house in the neighbourhood, albeit with a touch more threat before things take a welcome darker turn. This feels like a book written to move the story from one place to another( literally as it happens) but more for the narrative sense than the geographical . Consequently much of the plot is more concerned with the logistics of getting from A to B in a post apocalyptic world rather than anything to do with the alien menace.
Exodus has been marketed as science fiction but there is little true sci-fi writing in there. This is more like a road /post apocalyptic novel ...well rather like The Road in fact. Except with the odd gangly legged alien.
It is competently written and actually quite tense and exciting at times and there is no doubt the aliens are quite intriguing. Therein lies the reason I would read the next volume in the series. Paul Antony Jones has created an intriguing alien peril . Let that red rain fall.

"Remember death and life are in the power of the tongue" .That quote from Joel Osteen is especially pertinent given that in Max Barry's Lexicon words are as powerful as the most devastating weapon. They can wipe out an entire town so....Max Barry introduces us to a world that exists away from the norms of the rest of us. . A world where a elite group of people have honed the power of words. They are "Poets" and they can influence and manipulate people based on their personality type. They recruit those that have a gift with words, or can influence those around them and they are sent to study at an exclusive school where they study all aspects of language and its power.
Emily is one of those recruits but she would , if she were in a normal school , be a problem pupil. Taken off the street where her canny sleight of hand and clever wordplay were letting her grift for money she is overwhelmed by the academic side of the school but shows remarkable adaptive and nefarious talents to get around this. Words are powerful she learns, more powerful than she would ever had believed.
Now one of these "Poets" has discovered an ancient word. A word that has destroyed different civilisations for thousands of years. The word has wiped out the town of Broken Hill in Australia. One single word and three thousand people are dead. But one man escaped it seems. He is immune to the word. Which makes him very dangerous too. Depending on whose point of view you take.
Lexicon is basically a thriller but anyone who has read any of Max Barry's books before will know that there is always a serious underlying satirical message behind the story. The author makes salient points about social media , Government manipulation of our personal data, media misinformation and how the authorities exploit situations to chip away basic freedoms. The end of chapter point caveats about this are actually the most interesting part of the novel.
As for the thriller, well it starts out quite brilliantly and the first two thirds of the book are terrific. Once the action moves to Broken Hill it becomes less coherent , more amorphous and less absorbing. If I were being really harsh I would say it loses the plot. It is like the author knew where he wanted to go but was not sure what to do once he got there. His characters mirror that.
It is good to know Max Barry is now on the radar of film makers. Previous novel "Syrup" is "Soon to be a major film" so says the book blurb and this book has been optioned . Lexicon is not his best work though. Anyone wanting to read the author at his finest should read the aforementioned " Syrup ", or the excellent "Jennifer Government".

Monsters as allegorical signifiers are nothing especially new but rarely has the monster as an alienated outsider arousing suspicion and paranoia been so eloquently written as it is in Benjamin Percy's Red Moon. Using Werewolves, or Lycans as Percy mainly dubs them, as the disenfranchised minority of post-9/11 America ,the book asks serious questions about identity and xenophobia. Here, the werewolf is the ominous Other--unknown, separate, and therefore feared.
When a flight from San Francisco to Portland is infiltrated by a lycan who transforms and slaughters all the passengers ( a brilliantly described scene -"The rear of the plane is splashed with blood that oozes from the walls in strange cave painting designs Bodies are strewn everywhere in various poses of death like a garden of ruined statues" ) bar one the survivor, Patrick becomes an unwilling celebrity .His fate is intertwined with that of Chase Williams, governor of the state and anti-lycan activist and Claire Forrester, the lycan daughter of two prominent, retired lycan revolutionaries.
Red Moon is an ambitious novel that fuses the horror genre with something far more socio-political ,distilling it into a potent parable concerned with the tyranny of the majority and the stigmatisation of a minority. It is also quite brilliantly written , expertly plotted and thoroughly believable in it's clandestine machinations and escalation of terrorist led events. Unlike some other reviewers I did not find it the conclusion rushed either , feeling it built up expertly to a climax that leaves plenty of room for a sequel.
Indeed the one criticism I would make of this book is that it is a tad over-written , though the narrative is convoluted I felt that 500 plus pages is just too much. The plot could have been established and pursued just as well with some salient editing .
Still Red Moon is definitely more than a genre specific novel and as such deserves to reach beyond the horror tag it may well be lumped in with and get hold of a much wider audience.

Alberto Negrin's television film Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man tells the unfamiliar story of a more unfamiliar man. An Italian national working as a cattle salesman in 1944, Giorgio Perlasca found himself trapped in war-torn Budapest and was witness to the violent round-up of Hungarian Jews, but, using his status as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War( where he fought for the Fascists so he was by no means perfect) terminated his own escape ,sued this companies money to buy freedom for many Jews and successfully posed as The Spanish Consul to help over five thousand people to safety.
Unsurprisingly, Perlasca's biopic has been regularly dubbed `the Italian Schindler's List,' and this extends further than the similarities between the titular men's deeds. Frequent nods are made to Stephen Spielberg's film, particularly in a homage to the girl in the red coat, and both effectively cover the sheer terror ,apprehension and uncertainty of living under the Nazi's. Negrin however is a tad more courageous in his depiction of war torn Budapest , indeed only Polanski,s excellent "The Pianist" has more effectively represented a city under war time conditions.
At the end of the film we see a tiny section of an interview with the real Perlasca , who astonishingly after the war, returned to his home in Padua to live out a humble, quiet life and never spoke about his war-time experiences. For forty-five years his heroism remained a secret and it was only the efforts of people he saved that means his memory has been properly honoured and quite right too.
Luca Zingaretti's portrayal of the eponymous hero is solid and believable and the film is at times shocking , tense, exciting ,affecting and occasionally very moving. It is however not quite the masterpiece it might have been. In places, the film's roots in television are all too apparent, with frequent slips into maudlin manipulative melodrama detracting from the sombre subject matter and veracity of some of the more resonant sequences. A few of the main characters Perlasca saves never seem to truly convey that element of constant impeding peril. The production values are skimped on at times with CGI planes and flames .The sub-titles are sometimes poorly translated.
None of this prevents this film being one I would recommend highly though . Perlasca,s deeds deserve recognition. He really was a quite extraordinary man, who though sheer force of will , remarkable mental dexterity , superhuman reserves of energy , moral courage and breathtaking altruism saved thousands of life's. Perlasca's son says that in real life, his father "just thought he was doing his duty as a human being.. He truly believed that any man that was in his position would have done the same thing." I think I will beg to differ on that point.

I really only know David Mitchell from his various appearances on various panel shows and his hilariously acerbic rants on the "10 o'clock Show". I have never watched an episode of "Peep Show" or "That Mitchell & Webb Look" despite being an admirer of his strangely hypnotic tirades and an huge admirer of Olivia Coleman who appears in Peep Show.
Yet I was looking forward to reading Back Story , only to find that the pedantic subjective dissecting style of the author does not come across as well in print as it does in person ( as it were).That is not to say that this is a book without merit, it is occasionally very funny indeed , and in his own roundabout way David Mitchell makes many salient points but i often found it hard work and found reading it for any length of time quite wearing .This may say more about me and my ability to cogitate and digest such dense and contorted ruminations than it does about the author.
Of which much kudos for the way the author takes us through his life. The central concept is he has taken up walking an hour every day in order to alleviate a painful back problem ( the title obviously has two connotations ) and as he wanders around his patch of London it triggers memories of his past which bleed into the narrative. The inside jacket novel is very funny and original as well.
Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, David is the son of a couple who ran a West ­Country hotel in the Seventies and then moved to Oxford where they became lecturers in hotel management. The young David started treading the boards at New College prep school in Oxford, before failing to get into Oxford University but was then offered a place at Cambridge to study history, becoming president of Cambridge Footlights, where he met Robert Webb. David struggled to make ends meet for some years after leaving university, hanging around with friends in shared digs in London's Swiss Cottage. His friendship with Robert Webb led to them performing a number of two-man shows at the ­Edinburgh Fringe and they were then given the chance to write for comedy duo Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller leading onto their series Peep Show and fame and presumably fortune.
Many celebrities will try and make out how tireless and brilliant they were in pulling themselves out of the gutter, from poverty, deprivation, etc - in Mitchell's case he makes no pretence about his comfortable, middle class background and of having many lucky breaks. He's very honest about how hopeless he is at so many things - not least relationships. But then we find out that after meeting the very lovely Victoria Coren he waited three years till she was single before making his move ( the very idea of David Mitchell making a move on a women is somehow absurd ) and they are now engaged. I wish I was that hopeless with women.
Among the tremendous points made in Back Story is how the British, in the age of The X Factor and those hideous reality shows like Geordie Shore look at modesty and diffidence as failings that show lack of character. Where of course the opposite is true. David Mitchell is modest and unassuming .He has much to shout about. Unfortunately this book while selectively superb is not one of them,.

Ghosts..... Ohhhhhh I am so there. As I imagine is Jeremy Dyson , the co-creator of "The League Of Gentlemen", indeed I don't have to imagine. There it is on page 12 of this book. "Since the age of five or six I have been fascinated by the supernatural ".So finding out he had written , what I perceived rather naively as it turned out, to be a travelogue of haunted places thought , "I must get my hands on this book ".
Well as I intimated earlier this is rather odd book that is in no way what it first purports to be. The concept here is that a journalist, Aiden Fox, who writes a column about true ghostly encounters, has proposed a collaboration to Jeremy Dyson suggesting he provides his extensive source material and Dyson will write up the stories as fiction. Dyson after some deliberation accepts the offer, and vows to visit all the locations.
But here is the twist -the stories connected to these places are all actually works of fiction. .Then another twist , as Dyson suddenly comes upon a book, called `This Book is Haunted' which contains another book `A Book of Hauntings' inside it .So we have effectively a book of fiction inside a book of fiction that may or not be a total work( I suspect most strongly it is ) of fiction.
This is a brave stylistic gamble from the author. Some, like myself will applaud his audacity while not entirely understanding the conceit .Others will totally love it ,and other will hate its pretension and duplicity. The real decider should be does it work as an effective tale(s) of terror?
While very well written and at times completely compelling The Haunted Book is, for this reader, about as chilling and scary as an episode of "Young Dracula" ie not at all.
That's not to say it is,nt effective fiction, but if it,s main aim was to scare the reader rigid then it certainly falls well short. There is one more surprise for the reader, in the final, coal-black pages which explores the conventions and tricks of the form even further....well out there in fact
Which leads me to mention how brilliantly this book is designed , indeed I would call it a work of art. A beautifully conceived authenticating framing device: the dusty diary, the old newspaper clipping the bent yellowing pages , the aged garbled notes in the margins. The Haunted Book sets out not merely to entertain, but to embody a creeping menace with the very physical form of the book itself. It works better as that than as a work of terrifying literature.

Killers, it would seem excel on frigid freezing landscapes and the rather sadistic killer of Stephen Taltys debut novel Black Irish is no exception. But , as the title would suggest, this is not set in some Scandinavian city or backwater but Buffalo in the United States-though the action does flit into Canada. Black Irish takes you inside a community that wants justice, but doesn't trust outsiders to bring it, even shutting Irish Americans out of the circle whose ancestry hails from politically unpopular regions of the "Old Country".
Detective Absalom "Abbie" Kearney is investigating a spate of murders that suggest the killer is working to an agenda motivated by events in their past. The killer is sending a message-one that only the fiercely secretive citizens of the Irish-American neighbourhood known as "the County" understand, and one that seems especially tailored for Abbie's ears.
She has returned to her hometown after surpassing all the hopes her former detective father has for her .But she will have to dig deep into the past overcoming secrecy , chauvinism and adversity, not least from her own colleagues.
Black Irish is a decent enough debut thriller, which sometimes surprises and quite often grabs the reader by the throat. Lead protagonist Abbie is a fearsome character, determined, intelligent , driven and as hard as a diamond sledge hammer....with a grit stone handle. There are a couple of mis-steps where her character behaves out of kilter with her established persona. Or at least I felt so. Inevitably this involves romance-a common mistake in thrillers involving female leads. Once or twice the plot tries too hard to be clever and tricksy , but overall it hangs together well.
While not a novel for the squeamish or easily shocked I would not say that Black Irish is especially gruesome , but then I am avid reader of horror novels so am maybe inured to the more hardcore elements of this book. Overall Black Irish is well worth checking out .It augers well for future novels by this author -maybe more with Abbie Kearney at the forefront. It would be nice to see her deal with something less personal and away from the closeted Irish community of Buffalo . Ohh and in somewhere warmer. These ice cold murders are becoming a touch passé now.

Did anyone watch that excruciating Bruce Willis appearance on the "One Show" where looking like a drugged up turtle prised from it's warm comfy shell he mumbled his way through an interview so fawning Mat Baker and Alex Jones might just as well have licked his face for half an hour?
Well , if I said that I would rather sit through that on an endless loop than ever watch the debacle that is A Good Day To Die Hard again you'll get some idea of just how bad this film is. It fully deserves it nonsensical title .To leave you in no further doubt I will now elucidate further.
The plot is so dumbed down it has gone past basement level and plummeted into some subterranean hell sees the permanently indestructible John McClane (Bruce Willis) go to Moscow to retrieve his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who's been arrested for murder. John and Jack have been estranged for a few years, which I guess is how John McClane the cop who misses nothing failed to know that his only son was working for the CIA. Bickering tiresomely the duo strive to extricate Komarov (Sebastian Koch) who has a very important file hidden away somewhere that the decadent Russian in charge of things wants very badly .Cue lots of very loud explosions , bullets flying around like......well bullets I suppose and feats of physical endurance that bear no relation to actual reality what so ever.
Written by Skip Woods whose previous films include "The A-Team," "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," "Hitman," and "Swordfish, and directed by Jon Moore whose previous efforts include "Max Payne" this is film every bit as good as that pedigree suggests-ie: absolutely no good at all. If it did not have the words Die Hard included in the title I feel this film would have drifted rapidly into the obscurity it so richly deserves.
There is nothing to recommend A Good Day To Die Hard at all. The performances are rote , the better ones that is. Newcomer Jai Courtney might pass as a reasonable bit of eye candy for the ladies but has all the charisma of the skip he tumbles into at one point in the thunderingly dull and pointless plot. The editing is in that quick cut shaky-cam style that quickly becomes tiresome and confusing. There is no tension, no character development, no real plot. Nothing...just elongated repetitive generic nonsensical action sequences.
The whole thing ends up climaxing at Chernobyl in a spectacular detonation of rapid fire anarchy and slow-mo conflagration that requires you to dump your disbelieving brain in the 3D glasses dispenser before you walk into the auditorium . This is a film too far for this franchise and should be the final nail in it's coffin but worryingly there may be more to come. It should , like the landscape it climaxes in be left to it's own devices . To slowly rot way and drift into folklore. Like Chernobyl this film is toxic and best avoided.