Book Reviews

It could only happen in a Douglas Adams story - the man whose original Hitcher's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy ran to five books follows up with a sixth: from beyond the grave.

That's right, Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer has released And Another Thing... an official Part 6 of 3 in the Hitchhiker's Guide series - reprising all our favourite characters: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian.

Now, a funny thing happened on the way to this unlikely sequel - over the summer, I re-read all the previous five books. And though I remembered loving the absurd humour of the series as a teenager, by the time I'd completed Mostly Harmless, I was totally burned out on the Guide. My abiding feeling about the end of the series was that it was thin on plot, think on inane babbling and I closed the book feeling that the franchise had been flogged to death.

Colfer, to his credit, does a great job at picking up from where Adams left off. And he earns his fanboy credentials by resurrecting Adams' bizarre universe from the Vogon destructor fleets to Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged (who gets a romantic storyline in this book). I have very little complaint with Colfer's narrative - he does a good job of channeling his inner Adams.

Finally, I got my hands on Audrey Niffenegger's follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife. But where her first novel tackled involuntary time travel, Her Fearful Symmetry is steeped in the aftermath of a death when some sticky family secrets begin to unravel.

Niffenegger takes her narrative London this time, when one of the central characters, Elspeth, dies at the age of 44. This is where the fun and games begin - Elspeth had left her flat and belongings to her two American nieces, Julia and Valentina, mirror twins of her sister Edie and her husband Jack.

It's been a few years since Dan Brown dropped a new book on us, so I was initially shocked when I walked past Waterstones and discovered The Lost Symbol. Of course, in the intervening years, Brown's "Indiana Jones of Symbology" - Robert Langdon - has become a major movie franchise, so naturally Langdon is the hero of this novel too.

Having just re-read Angels And Demons (my favourite of the Dan Brown novels), I was ready for another fix of Langdon and the unraveling of ancient history and secret sects.

Surprisingly, the story takes place on American soil, in the nation's capital, Washington DC. Langdon is invited to give a talk by old friend and mentor Peter Solomon, a high ranking Mason, wealthy heir and all round nice guy. Of course, when Langdon arrives in DC, he discovers the whole thing was an elaborate trick and that some maniac has hacked Solomon's hand off and left it as a symbol which Langdon must decode.

I wasn't aware of it, but Ms Marisha Pessl has been a controversial commodity in bookworm circles. She divides opinion as much on the basis of her (very) good looks as much as she does with her writing style. Yes, a little research on the author reveals two tribes: one which believes Pessl to be a literary wunderkind, the other insisting she's an overhyped author.

Better still, she's only released one book to date, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

The Story

Special Topics in Calamity Physics follows a gifted student, Blue van Meer, who travels from town to town with her father, an itinerant academic who raised her since her mother died.

Blue and her father move to a new town and she starts an exclusive school. She’s taken under the wing of a teacher at the school, Hannah Schneider, and is grudgingly accepted by Schneider’s select group of pupils known as The Bluebloods.

If you don’t have the stamina for a book review right now, scroll down to the question at the bottom for an interesting ethical debate!

The last time I read a Dean Koontz novel, he was specifically a writer of horror stories. That was a fair few years ago to say the least, and in the meantime Koontz seems to have transcended the pure horror genre. These days, he seems to be writing in the more modern, more lucrative thriller style.

My cynicism (for Koontz’s motives) aside, the man has not lost his touch. Velocity is a fast-paced crime thriller, but manages to raise some interesting moral and ethical questions at the same time.

Somewhere it must be written that with every new Harry Potter book release, the population must rush out and buy said tome (queuing up for bonus points, of course) and then attempt to read all six hundred and something pages in about twenty minutes.

Being the independently minded, well-balanced individual that I am, I bought my copy on the Saturday morning (in fairness, I didn't queue) and proceeded to read it. But because I'm a big boy with grown up responsibilities, I finished reading The Deathly Hallows on Monday evening.

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The Plot

I should've probably read The Half-Blood Prince before kicking straight into this new book. I mean, did you know Dumbledore was dead? I must've forgot.

Anyway, we start out at 4 Privet Drive. The Dursleys house. Except the Dursleys are being shipped out for their own protection. The Order Of The Phoenix are moving Harry to a safer location, except it all goes awry. Despite the awesome secrecy involved, and several decoy Polyjuice Potters, Voldemort-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets wind of the plan and sets out to capture Potter.

For those of you who've read Kate Mosse's preceding novel, Labyrinth, Sepulchre follows the same narrative style and relies upon a fairly similar storytelling technique: events from the past are inextricably bound to events in the present day and our present day heroine becomes enthralled with her historical link and is compelled to try to right the wrongs of the bygone era.

Before I read Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs, I was a complete Irvine Welsh virgin - had never read one of his books before, or even seen Trainspotting (hard to believe?).

What’s It About?

Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs centres around the rivalry between Edinburgh Environmental Health Officer Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby, a newcomer to Skinner’s department to whom Danny takes and instant irrational dislike.

Danny’s a full-on shit: womaniser, heavy drinker, drug taker, thinks Saturday night’s definitely alright for fighting (he’s virtually a professional football hooligan). All this makes for some pretty spectacular hangovers…

…which is where Kibby comes in. Somehow, in his complete hatred of the clean-cut mammy’s boy, Skinner manages to curse Brian Kibby - and somehow manages to curse Kibby with all his hangovers! Essentially, Skinner can party as hard as he likes and Kibby receives the hangover.

Bedroom Secrets is littered with some very humorous set pieces, set in Welsh’s gritty but affectionate Edinburgh. Interestingly, Skinner’s and Kibby’s lives are linked in more ways than they both know, and the tension between the two boils over into open resentment as the novel reaches its climax.

Dean Koontz is a veritable thriller factory. Looking at his catalogue of work, it seems he pumps out a novel every day just before breakfast. I came across a copy of The Taking lying around our house as books sometimes do. I opened it up, intending to sample a chapter or two, and ended up finishing the book in record time.

The Taking: The Plot

The action in The Taking centers around the small town of Black Lake, and a childless couple, Molly and Neil Sloan. Living an almost idyllic life together, the couple are overnight plunged into a waking nightmare as a luminescent, torrential rain begins to fall.

The plot moves rapidly from that point. The rain is affecting everything, and it becomes obvious that something larger is happening: you guessed it folks, alien invasion!

The third series of Dexter recently finished its run on UK television. Needing a fresh fix of this brilliant character, I picked up a copy of Dexter In The Dark from our local library.

If you didn't know that Dexter was based on a character from a novel, here's a warning: the TV series and the novels differ slightly. For instance, Doakes is still alive in the books, although severely maimed. La Guerta died in the first novel, and although Deborah Morgan is a blonde, she still swears like a sailor. Goddammit, Dexter!

My one mistake in choosing the third book in the series was that I missed out on some interesting character developments. I'd read the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, but the second book clearly has twists that carry into Dexter In The Dark. The most important of these is that Dexter's sister Deborah seems to know his secret. Not everything. But she knows he kills and seems to be at peace with the fact.