Horrible story about the development and exploits of a serial killer, in some considerable detail. Personally, I can’t understand why anybody would want to write anything like this.

...

Two stories in one which are subversively intertwined, plus a surprisingly engaging Cafferty side-show.

Two whodunnits, with a connection: A man in the rich London set has money which can...

Believe this plotline if you can. There's this woman called Acorna (dunno why; maybe it's because she's got this great mass of white hair and a bloody great horn sticking out of her forehead), and ...

Overarching concept is good: people 200 years in future able to interact with people in present day through an advanced drone, and have been able to send a very advanced artificial intelligence b...

Internet-in-the-head is introduced to the world. But for one soul in the world's most undeveloped village, the initial test goes wrong leaving her both permanently connected to the new web, and wi...

It is a big book. Banks enjoys his writing. Starts out being in essence a quest for the holy grail. The final reveal is brilliant. Always hinted at through the book, but never anticipated. I c...

A story which could only be told in a universe where human souls can be freely replicated, stored and moved between bodies, both artificial ones and real ones (termed ``sleeving''). A very rich th...

A book with a long beginning, no middle, and a very broken, disjointed ending. The beginning seems to take up two-thirds of the book, and continually draws you in, deeper and deeper. The plot is ...

This is Dan Brown's best. People opposed to the Vatican have taken antimatter from CERN and hidden it in Vatican city, where it will annihilate in a few hours, taking all of Vatican city with it. ...

Incredibly over-eclectic mix of hard science and psychedelic flowery writing, over-permeated with Portuguese phrases. To be fair the Portuguese does distract an awful lot from the story, and in pl...

After reading Elizabeth Moon, it came as a great relief to read prose with texture and depth. Richard does a really good job of imbuing said texture and depth into the richness of the characters...

Incredibly inventive book in which Banks manages to create, in some detail, an ancient, globe-spanning business with a finger in every pie, and even an entire small nation which the Business seek...

A word the author likes to ...

Agatha Christie whodunit job this one. I'm not even sure that the plot relies on the famous laws of robotics, or even on the futuristic `womb city' landscape for its realization (it could probably ...

Mankind has encased himself in a sealed city, except that every million years a soul is let loose to test the water and...

A ship carrying a distinguished soldier is sabotaged and goes down on a continent considered to be uninhabitable. Story drags out survival at sea, then on land, then they discover a secret desse...

Well constructed story: An entire star system was manufactured in distant past using a machine which is recently discovered. Daughter of evil Emperor-wannabe escapes his clutches, works for a re...

Story about a spastic who's father murders the dog of a neighbour who has run away with his wife. When the spastic finds out who did it, he becomes scared and runs away to live with his mother. The...

This is incredible. It has all the opposites in all the right proportions. There is hard action and deliberation, historical truth and fictional nonsense, heroism and anti-heroism. The story inv...

My heart sank when, on opening the book, I immediately saw the words, ‘Book 1.’ This is a debut novel. The last thing I wanted was an unfinished piece by someone arrogant enough to think th...

There are types of literature I'm not so keen on: disaster stories, planet-bound sci-fi, microbiology/biology/chemistry sci-fi. This book has all this, but I was hoping Greg Bear would provide some...

I struggle to put a rating on this book. It is absolutely riveting and in parts had me on the edge of my seat, but on the other hand it contains ridiculous action and is a shallow political thrill...

Well, this is the first Stephen King novel I've read, and it might well be the last. He may be the best selling author in the world, but this stuff is not for me. This is a book of four short s...

Quick comparison: Digital Fortress is even better than the Da Vinci Code. For a long time while I was reading this book I was making plans to modify the BookBlog software so I could award six star...

The dysfunctional crew -- everybody necessarily a world apart: robot, android, human, AI mind, simpleton, old lazy woman -- of a spaceship uses software it does not understand to enact trades of ca...

Rock-solid if not run-of-the-mill heist, with a mild twist at the end. Some confusion halfway through about the nature of the heist (which paintings went where?) gives the reader something to thi...

There are three races of people known variously as Ariekene, Terre, Hosts, Ambassadors, `monsters' which defy generic description, people who always go around as (more or less) tethered pairs; th...

First some shallow observations: the book is full of typographical errors, which must be a production problem as the author is clearly capable of impeccable work; the chapter breaks are erratic, so...

Second reading. First time I was awed by the way the book transcends scale in time and space. Now I realize that the book really is about the different scales, as typified by the ending ...

As an entry in the long-running series of John Rebus novels this one charts an interesting time: that of the week of his retirement. Given that the series has been fairly true to time -- charting ...

Another installment in the John Rebus series. If it was the first one I had read, I would probably pronounce it brilliant and look forward to reading the other fifteen. As it is, the same old for...

The story is shallow -- a strange car turns up which every now and th...

Another episode in the rosy life of Mma Ramotswe. Like all the others it is naive, quaint, quirky, mildly funny, and immerses itself in the tiny nuances of life in Botswana. The series has grown ...

Dated book of two halves, the first an origin/quest story, then the hero is given super-powers by an overseeing advanced civilization and it turns into a worthless smash-bang adventure.

Okay, so two competing teams spend the whole book scheming to raise the Titanic--nothing as exciting as even a race--, and then in the last chapter an underwater avalanche covers it in mud and that...

This work starts out astonishingly precise in detail and believability; it feels like a photorealistic depiction of real events, like the author actually carried out all the improbable actions. ...

Almost-epic, almost-saga space-opera needing outworldish science and political infrastructure for its success.

The book begins after the introduction of travel to Earth orbit by riding the ...

A quarter of the book is taken up by an academic-written introduction, which sets it up as the best American book ever. This rather puts expectations on a high level, and initial reading feels k...

Quick comparison: Chris Ryan is not half as good as Andy McNab. This book reads like it has been dictated to an average typist by a fourteen year old. It is, almost literally, only half there; ther...

This is as good as I can imagine crime writing ever getting. An established criminal is in jail, and an upstart has moved onto his old territory to take over. But the Japanese Yakuza (bit like Chin...

Mash of stories and their respective tropes: ‘Frankenstein’ in ‘1984’, ‘Loganʼs Run’, and ‘Neuromancer’.

A decrepit woman spends all her time hooked up to cyberspace. B...

Big ideas

The only realistic way for mankind to explore the galaxy is to clone oneself (shatter) into 1,000, not quite identical, parts, send them on different round trips around ...

A book which tries hard and ultimately fails to live up to its potential. The opening tries to put a human being into the ultimate horrific situation (wakes up in a strange, freezing place, star...

An entire, massive, civilization is about to sublime to a higher state of living. In their wake are predators who will be taking their left-over possessions, and the Culture will be overseeing e...

This wonderfully imaginative book is a play on the Canterbury Tales where the author uses the pilgrimage of seven people to unravel the details of an almost mythological creature (but actually quit...

Funny autobiography of comedian with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak. Very open and honest with flowing writing style, and makes everything seem rather straight-forward. None of the real ...

James Bond-alike, with less gadgetry and misogyny but more MOD machinations and cleverer plotting. The action scenes do not come across as very punchy, and you only realize there was any signifi...

I can't believe this book is so big mostly due to the fact that the pages turn very easily, but also because the story seems simple enough to pass by in fewer pages. Despite that the pages turn ea...

A John Rebus instalment without any action and without any of the Edinburgh atmosphere which this series usually oozes. However the plotting and characterizations, especially the character inter...

The usual gentle, happy writing style which describes the gentle, happy life of Mma Ramotswe, a Botswanan lady.

Core of story is her ex-husband turns up and tries to blackmail her on th...

A very self-conscious re-telling of a Greek play, the outcome is already known, and there are really no surprises, which is in itself a surprise because the book describes a universe of mythical mo...

The first one, the book which kicked off the entire Rebus series.

A killer is on the loose, who, it turns out, only wants to get to Rebus. He kills a series of apparently unrelated girls...

A giant squid goes missing from the Natural History Museum, and it turns out to be an actual dead god worshipped by a church who have taken it, through the expedient of seducing a Trekkie into usin...

This is just so different to anything else I’ve ever read. Paris was hit by a cataclysmic disaster engineered during World War II, wherein surrealist art comes alive with consequences obverse ...

Thomas Young, of Youngʼs slits and Youngʼs modulus fame, born in 1773 and in eminence from 1800 to 1829, turns out to have invented and discovered many, many things in his lifetime, as well as ...

Had high hopes for this one, expecting a difficult-to-read, thought-provoking piece of relative abstraction. Instead I had no problem following the plot, and found a simple adventure story adorn...

Scooby Doo meets Great Expectations. The meat of the story is bereavement and gross sex discrimination in the 1960s, but the story is mysterious and meandering. Five (or s...

A most delicate handling of a most atrocious situation: the murder of a young female family member.

The story is told from the vantage point of said female, in heaven. The book makes pains to ...

A near future in which promotion in the workplace occurs through duels to the death with peers, enacted in souped-up cars on a motorway network deserted by a broken society in which the vast majori...

This starts out as a book which alternates mechanically from one chapter to the next; from the year of the launch of a mission to Mars, to the last days of the astronauts' time on Mars. I've come ...

Up to the halfway line I thought I was getting the gist of this book. A man (in a world where most men have died out due to a plague) is held in captivity where he is being used to farm some bugs, ...

Fleet is run along lines of the British Navy, circa 19...

This is not a Terry Pratchett book in the normal sense. Reading this after the others is like moving from the west coast to the eastern seaboard of America, and finding the pace of life taken more ...

Once again revolves around DI Rebus. The G8 summit at Gleneagles is going on, an MP falls to his death over Edinburgh Castle ramparts, his colleague's parents take part in a peace rally and are ...

For the first time since I was studying George Orwell at school I had to go back before I'd even finished to give the book a second reading.

Incredibly complex with a fantastic cast of w...

This is a thoughtful study of how such a population might ...

It is a push, but the scientific plausibility can be obtained. For example, six suns surround a planet, and change positions randomly every day. This would imply that the biological clocks of the...

A woman living in Botswana throws...

None of the Seafort sequels I've read have anything like the sharpness of the orig...

The book...

He finds himself making an epic journey to a planet in a distant reac...

A fast-moving, easy-to-read who-dunnit: gentle entertainment. It doesn’t quite break the fourth wall but lives very close to it, e.g., “A pretty memorable few days in anyone’s book, ev...

Some memoirs of a person disillusioned with the general practitioner profession finding herself perchance working in prisons, for the new challenges. The voice of the author is quite strange, co...

Much the same as the original book, but now based at Europe’s largest female prison, where we learn that almost all of the inmates are women who have been forced into a very hard life, and many...

This is a book of three parts, and while they join together seamlessly they are on altogether different scales and for all practical purposes take place in different universes. The first part conc...

It is well-established that Terry Pratchett has a universe in which he can be, and is, as diverse as he wants to be, especially with regards to ethnicity and race relations. Nevertheless, it is ha...

This is probably the most boring book I've ever read.

The families of a brother and sister spend a week together in a house after the death of their mother, and it is a day-by-day accoun...

Easily one of the best books I've read.

Massive pretext: universe has fewer civilizations than it should because there has been a previous mega-war (we're talking millions of years ago), and ci...

Unfortunately it also has ...

Insight showing how slow and inefficient the British jurisdictory service has become, after many years of underfunding. Page turner by virtue of the nature of the content.

This is the most boring Rankin book I've ever read. It all takes place in Edinburgh, starts with the discovery of two bodies in the half-constructed parliament building, and then is basically a da...

Unchallenging, easy-reading Dan Brown-a-like without much excitement. An antique dealer gets hold of a journal from someone who sailed on a British Navy ship, which describes a journey in which he...

It's about a bunch of autistic people. Th...

Disappointing Rebus installment, mostly let down by the ending. It takes time before the atmosphere really establishes, and on the whole there are too many characters to be able to follow. ...

The novella is significant because it recounts the time when the Culture comes into contact with ...

I've been avoiding Iain Banks since I read Dead Air, but just couldn't resist. It turned out to be a wonderful read, full of whacky characters which are eminently believable by virtue of their ful...

In the former Gregory very carefully described the whole process of extra-terrestrial travel and the...

My first Ballard, and supposedly his best work. Thus my extremely high expectations were sure to be confounded. But the work genuinely has a sense of place: the near-future Cannes industrial co...

Straightforward plot: A woman born into sexual slavery is killed by her owner, gets re-vented by a Culture eccentric ship, and goes back to exact revenge with the culture and other interested parti...

Book set in an extension of Jonathon Swift's Lilliputian universe, but really any load of giants and dwarfs would have done. The more factual representation of the mid-nineteenth century is actual...

More of the same after The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but the form is still refreshingly naive, and the characters continue to engross. The storyline is equally simple, and although it is ...

I have got nothing good to say about this book.

I found it really shallow and emotionally detached. Here's a woman who met a time traveller, had six miscarriages, saw him after being blown to p...

Peter Carey presents a story as if the hero was the narrator, telling things from his own perspective. N...

A story set on a world populated by anthropomorphic robots, which procreate by the man providing special blue wire containing 'life force' to a woman who knits it into a child's mind, from which po...

My second reading of this, and it's not the book I remember. It's a book basically about the life of a Culture whipping-boy, who gets sent into ridiculous war situations to sway the odds on one si...

Virtual light is simply a process whereby retinal nerve endings are directly stimulated to give the same effect as if light had fallen on them, thereby allowing computer-generated images to be se...

The opening paragraph on the first page tells you he got off Mars, and since the whole story is told from the first-person viewpoint of a soldier in peril on said planet, suspense is dead at the ou...