Kate Vane

It’s unfortunate that All That’s Dead is the first one I’ve reviewed because, although it’s an enjoyable enough read, it’s not my favourite. The premise that makes these novels so fascinating, as Stuart MacBride explained to the Partners in Crime podcast, is the opposite of the familiar crime fiction trope of the larger-than-life detective. As this case escalates, Logan becomes fully embroiled in the investigation of what appears to be an extremist nationalist group. If you’ve been reading the series (and I’d recommend reading them in order) you’ll know that Steel has been present in Logan’s life from the start.

They are condemned to do mind-numbing tasks in a dank, dark building, under the supervision of Jackson Lamb, a former agent who appears offensive and incompetent but retains a mysterious aura of invincibility. Herron has kept things fresh throughout the series by bringing in new people to replace those that leave (no spoilers but a stint at Slough House doesn’t generally end in glittering promotion or quiet retirement). In Joe Country, a new member has joined the team, and the reasons for his disgrace gradually emerge and are fully exploited by Jackson Lamb. Meanwhile Diana Taverner, the head of the service at Regents Park, is at the heart of political intrigue, sparring with a disgraced former politician with fluffy blond hair and a ruthless eye for self-aggrandisement.

Here, Grant Price discusses how his passion for communicating the threat of climate change led him to speculative fiction and to write By the Feet of Men. I’ve stressed myself out reading about the scourge of pesticides in Silent Spring, turned myself off from eating altogether thanks to The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eating Animals, watched documentaries that have left me mentally and physically numb, and run the dystopian fiction gamut from The Death of Grass to The Three-Body Problem. What actually happened was that I watched the movie Sorcerer by William Friedkin and then the movie it was based on, The Wages of Fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and I thought the narrative blueprint underpinning the two works—four people risking their lives to make a delivery while grappling with fate and destiny and free will along the way—was so hard-boiled and plain entertaining that it was worth revisiting again. Speculative fiction, in particular, is able to offer wildly different visions of Earth’s future, usually with the core message of ‘You don’t want it to turn out like this’.

The grey, stone buildings in her village appeared to be crumbling into the ground and the people, too, had an air of defeat about them, especially the dark, stooped old men in their grey, crumpled suits and trilbies. Over the years as they began to disappear from our lives, beaten by years of toil on the land and especially by the horrors of war, I began to pick up stories, hints of the lives they had been forced to lead thirty-seven years before. The others, those who had not been sent away, took to the mountains and fought as partisans in the brutal conflict known as the Italian Civil War. The story of my novel, The Partisan Heart, arrived almost fully formed, having been percolating in my head for a number of years.