Maggie, the ex-marine police dog, transforms “Suspect” from a good police drama into a memorable book.

Anyone who knows dogs will recognize the accuracy of Robert Crais’ description of their behavior and the bond that they build.

The passages written from Maggie’s point of view were fresh, compelling and thoroughly believable.

The police officer’s character is also well drawn and develops through the story as his relationship with Maggie changes the way he sees himself.

If you’re a dog lover who enjoys police procedure novels, this is custom-made for you.

If you’re not a dog lover yet, you may be by the time you get to the end of this book.

“Thieftaker” is not just a modern urban noir supernatural detective story dressed up in a period costume, it is driven by the events and the mindset of the period, which gives it a distinctive and intriguing flavour.

It is driven as much by character as by plot. Our hero is not an easy man to be near but he is one you could learn to care about. The people who threaten or help him (sometimes the SAME people) have motives and emotions of their own that make them much more than plot devices.

The supernatural world is well thought through and skillfully revealed and the plot stands up as a detective/thriller story in it own right.

Jonathan Davis narrates the book with a steady voice that has exactly the right pitch and pace to get the most from this tale.

I’ve already ordered the next in the series and I have high hopes of it.

This book disappoints on multiple levels.

It lacks the humanity that is normally at the core of Terry Pratchett’s books. No matter how odd the circumstances of DiscWorld are, the people, even the non-human ones, a real and you learn to care for them or to hate them. “The Long Earth” is so focused on a (good and original) idea that it never comes to terms with real people. At the end of the book, I still didn’t really care what happened to the main characters. My desire to read was driven by mild curiosity about the plot rather than involvement with the people.

It is not a complete novel. It should be called “Long Earth – the Pilot” -. it’s an interesting start but it doesn’t end it just sets you up for the next installment and then stops.

It rambles a bit. The Long Earth is endless. I get that. But did it have to feel like the parts of the book were endless too? If something is going to be plot driven then the pace has to be well managed. I found my attention wandering.

It is very old-fashioned SF – early Asimov or Heinlein without the passion. All idea and no grit. It’s a sort of “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” without the funny bits.

At one point in the book, a character points out that you can’t find out anything about a world by flying over it for a few minutes and then moving on. It’s a shame the authors didn’t apply this thinking to their story. I would have preferred to have passed through less settings and spent more time trying to make any of them mean anything.

Michael Fenton Stevens did a good job with the often slightly dull prose. I suspect he is the only reason I got to the end of the book.

I won’t be ordering the sequel.

I have to start a series from book 1, which in this case was ” A Cold Day for Murder” a competent whodunnit that introduced the Aleutian Native American who lives, with her half wolf half husky bitch, Mutt, on her homestead in an Alaskan National Park. It was fun but showing its age a little.(it was published in 1992). Initially I found Marguerite Gavin’s reading style a little distracting – great dialog but too sing-song on the text.

I’ve now listened to the first six books in the series and my view on everything has changed. Kate is now a richly written character, set in the context of an Alaskan society and a family and cultural history that each book has done more to explain.

“Blood Will Tell” moves Kate’s life forward in emotionally intense ways, draws on characters from previous books to add depth and continuity and still provides a satisfying mystery to be resolved.

I’m now in love with how Marguerite Gavin reads the books. She is the voice of Kate Shugak and I have finally understood that the slightly sing-song style is an echo of a Native American story telling tradition.

My favourite passage in “Blood Will Tell” is when Kate, forced with no warning, to make a speech to a Native American conference, falls back on telling a story in the style of her people. The story itself is beautifully written and read, but it also pulls all the threads of the book together into a set of images and ideas that are perfectly expressed. It starts with the same image that opens the book, Kate shooting a moose that has wandered on to her homestead, but this telling is a very different one, a parable, an invocation, a challenge, almost a manifesto.

Dana Stabenow seems to be telling us that stories are always more than they appear: they are how we bring meaning to ourselves and the world we live in, how we share meaning with others.

She is writing a series of detective stories but she is also helping us find meaning in a life and a world different from our own.

I strongly recommend this book to all readers looking for a “detective” that is also a human being they can care about and root for.

By now, Dana Stabenow has published twenty Kate Shugak novels. Books sixteen to twenty are available on audible.com. The earlier books are still being recorded. Brilliance Audio released book six, “Blood Will Tell” in June and Audible picked it up. Book seven “Break Up” was released in September 2013. I'm still waiting for the rest.

"Reamde" is more than 34 hours long and I still regretted reaching the end.

Malcolm Hillgartner delivers a masterful performance that kept me engaged thro

ughout.

The opening chapter of REAMDE reads like something from John Irving or Richard Russo. It establishes Richard Forthrast, online war game billionaire and former smuggler, in the context of his Iowa farming clan family which covers the American spectrum from "American Taliban" Freemen, living off the grid, through Vietnam vets working the farms to Zula, Richard's adopted Eritrean niece.

The home team here is American in all its flavours, but the game is played, both online and in real life, on a global stage, stretching through Canada, China, and the Philippines, with characters from the Russian, the UK (a half-chinese British spy, a Scottish fraudster and a black Welsh Jihadist), Hungary, and China.

The plot is complex but clear and its twists and turns are driven as much by the characters as it is by the underlying situation.

The themes are rich and rewarding: the links between the cyberworld and real life, the nature of money and power, the clash of cultures between the West and the rest, the power of friendship, the limitations of money and the value of honour in uncertain times.

Richard Forthrast is in his 50's. He's lived long enough to make parts of the cyberpunk fantasy imagined in Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (published in 1992, two years before the World Wide Web was born) into a reality and is now living with the consequences.

The book is named after a computer virus that preys on people in the real world and makes them pay up in Cyberspace (shades of Bitcoin here), starting a real world hunt for the hackers that spirals out into ever-increasing mayhem.

The action scenes are crisp and focused. The sense of place is strong. The people are believable.

In the end I wondered if the on-line game was really so important to it all. Then I slapped my forehead, gave the obligatory Simpson's "Duh!" and realised that that was perhaps Stephenson's main message: of all the kinds of reality that are out there, the one that matters most is the one where you do anything you have to to make those you love safe.