The Capture of Cerberus and The Incident of the Dog's Ball by Agatha Christie (AUDIO)

Two Poirot stories found by Agatha Christie's family in 2004 among her private notebooks, they are intriguing and well plotted as her other works, similarly evoking an era that is past whilst also unearthing the universal reasons for murder and hiding.

To me, The Capture of Cerberus is the least successful.  The father of a son torn apart by a mob for the killing of a Nazi dictator is convinced of his son's innocence and comes to Poirot looking for his help.  I felt this one was a little hampered by the slightly heavy handed references to the oncoming Second World War and the allegories with Hitler.

The Incident of the Dog's Ball is classic Christie, a letter posted long after being written leads Poirot to the death of a rich old lady in a Kent village, a change of will seems to imply some skullduggery but as usual all is not as it seems.  A really great story.

Both are read evocatively by David Suchet, the actor best known to us in the present day for playing Poirot himself, which adds real richness to the audio book.

The book to accompany Billy Connolly's 2008 tour of the Northwest Passage is beautifully illustrated with stunning pictures of the landscape and people he encountered along the way in the Canadian far north. As everything is written by Connolly from his point of view it is very much his reflections on what he sees around him, about his value judgements and reactions, but there is probably not a better person to do this with his charming self deprecating wit and his ability to connect with strangers on a profound level.

The book is a chronological diary of his journey, beginning with Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland. Here he is immersed in the world and traditions of the descendants of the Scottish and French settlers, their music and particular brand of nostalgia for countries that no longer exist and celebration of the Viking connections with the area.

Then he gets on a Harley and moves North to Nunvut, territory of the Inuit granted to them by the Canadian goverment in repayment for years of brutal colonial rule which saw the children of the natives shipped away from their homes to be 'educated' and the Inuit and their towns renamed. He reflects on the Inuit responses to climate change and going from an intinerant to a settled lifestyle and experiences the juxtaposition between the modern world of high speed broadband and the traditional one of hunting and throat singing.

Moving north over the Arctic circle to Baffin Island he boards a cruise ship, a much hated experience but one that does take him through the Northwest Passage and the history of the Europeans who died trying to find it.

He then boards his bike again to travel south through the Northwest Territores meeting the Inuit of the west cost before heading south with a fruit seller in his massive truck through abandoned gold rush ghost towns and experiencing modern day gold panning.

He ends up in the Yukon, staking a mineral claim and British Columbia, spending time with ranchers, cowboys and totem pole carvers, experiencing the rigours of a sweat lodge, becoming inducted into the Killer Whale tribe as 'Prince of Laughter' and watching grizzly bears and golden eagles catch the salmon running upriver , ending his journey logging on the coast.

A stunning book that taught me much about one of the wildest land places in the world, narrated by a charismatic and entertaining author.

It's All About the Beads by Barbara Case

As a complete beginner I found Case's writing style and use of diagrams excellent she made me feel confident that I could take on the patterns myself.

The introduction comprises a primer on types of beads, materials, tools and basic techniques, all of which are clear, easy to understand and well illustrated

These are followed by 80 'recipes' for necklaces, earrings, brooches and even golf counters.  The recipes are really clear, at the top of each is a rating of how easy the project it is, how long it should take to make and the length of the finished piece.  There is a clear picture of the project as made by the author, and then the 'ingredients': everything you will need to make the project, and then step by step instructions.  A multitude of different styles are included and many many different kind of beads, a delicious invitation to take the recipes and use your own ingredients to make the designs your own.

A gift to the reader

The Beader's Handbook by Juju Vail

This is a good comprehensive book but as a complete beginner with regard to beading I found it a little difficult to follow, there aren't enough diagrams to make me feel comfortable following the instructions.

This is unfortunate because the structure of the book is very good, starting with a section on tools and equipment before introducing the reader to the basics of beadings.  The it goes on to working with wire, stitching and weaving (including knitting and loom and non loom weaving) and ending with a section on different types of beads.  Lastly there are a selection of bead weaving graph papers to be used for designing using the different types of stitch.  It has the potential to be a much better book.

Torchwood: Consequences by James Moran, Joseph Lidster, Andrew Cartmel, Sarah Pinborough and David Llewellyn


Five interlinked Torchwood stories on the theme of consequences of actions, my favourite Torchwood book / play to date

In the first book: 'The Baby Farm' we are in Victorian England.  A desperate mother is driven to give up her baby to the deliciously spooky Ms Blight and one of Torchwood's founding memebers: Emily Holyroyd places a mysterious book in Cardiff University Library.  The Torchwood team follow the fate of the babies to a Ragged School.  These were real historical institutions set up by philanthrophists to give boys training in skills such as shoe making, ironwork and tailoring and offer them a real chance of escaping the poverty they are born into.  But in this case something Rift borne is involved and those taking the babies have to pay a terrible price for exploiting an alien species.

In 'Kaleidoscope' we have moved forward to the time when Jack had disappeared leaving Gwen, Toshiko, Ianto and Owen rudderless.  Danny is a young boy terrorised by his physically abusive father.  When a piece of alien technology comes into his hands he looks through it at his father believing it to be an ordinary kaleidoscope, but this is a Rehabilitator.  They were used in prisons and when the viewed was seen through it they became the ideal according the person doing the viewing.  Danny's father becomes loving, gentle and a real father.  But the Rehabiliator is very addictive, and when Gwen removes it from Danny she causes terrible damage which Jack would have foreseen.

Jack is back in 'The Wrong Hands' and Torchwood's attention is drawn to the strange deaths of a number of drug dealers, one cut in half by a weapon that is clearly not terrestrial.  On a sink estate in Cardiff an alien child has taken over control of a young impoverished girl to take care of him.  As the alien child tries to take over Gwen Ianto and Jack struggle to get her back, and the local supermarket is destroyed in a ball of fire as the child's surrogate mother fights back.

James Moran's 'Virus' takes up the story, as the child's remaining parent fights their way through the Rift to find their child and mate dead.  They blame Torchwood and inject Gwen and Jack with a virus that leaves them in a catatonic state of living death, the worst possible fate for an immortal.  It is up to the remaining member of Torchwood, Ianto, to rescue them, drawing on the depth of his love for Jack to become the least likely action hero.

The final book 'Consequences' brings the story arc full circle.  It is narrated by Nina, an ordinary hard drinking student who is losing chunks of her memory but seems to be driven to follow a handsome man dressed like a World War 2 soldier.  The Torchwood team are drawn back to Cardiff University Library to solve this last finely written story.

A wonderful set of stories that include both great science fiction storytelling writing but also great heart and a real sense of the difficult dilemmas the dwindling Torchwood team face.

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear TPB by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr

This is a beautiful rendition of the Daredevil genesis story arc  from the masterful pens / pencils of Frank Miller, John Romita, Al Willamson, Christie Scheele and Joe Rosen.

The artwork stunningly accompanies the devastating tale of Matt Munro, the motherless son of a boxer and reluctant mob enforcer raised in Hell's Kitchen.  An accident in which he is blinded by a chemical spill saving another man's life seems the end of his ambitions to educate himself out of the ghetto.  But a strange man known only as Stick comes into his life and teaches him how to use his other senses.  After his father is murdered for refusing to throw a fight Matt turns vigilante and metes out a terrible revenge, but loses his mentor as Stick abandons him as a lost cause.  Things don't look good as Matt is becomes passionately involved with fellow vigilante Elektra but he is redeemed by his fight to save a young girl.  From this he emerges as the fully fledged Daredevil.  Awesome.

Torchwood: The Lost Files AUDIO

Three Radio 4 full cast dramas set before the Children of Earth series

The Devil and Miss Carew is the simplest of the three adventures.  Rhys' great uncle dies drawing him and Gwen to the nursing home to pick up his belongings, but they encounter a resident speaking of other residents that have left with their life force restored to them.  As increasing power cuts disable the country and the world Gwen tracks down Miss Carew, previously dying from terminal heart failure, now back at the helm of her computing company, and Torchwood homes in on an alien force communicating via the Shipping Forecast.

In Submission the team receive a distress signal heard throughout the world through the water.  It's source is the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the sea.  Ianto is reunited with an old friend from Torchwood One and the team journey to the bottom of the sea.

In The House of the Dead it's closing night at the pub of the same name known as the most haunted pub in Wales.  As last orders are called a psychic calls on the dead to contact their loved ones, and Jack bursts in trying to stop the seance.  The ghosts start arriving, Jack's behaviour becomes erratic and Ianto and Gwen are torn between their trust in him and worry for him.  At first a good story, but then with a twist at the end that is a real punch to the gut, elegantly and devastatingly plotted.

All three plays carry each in their own way speak of what death is, how it defines life and The Lost Files is a precursor of and paen to the events to come in the Children of Earth story arc.  A great chilling collection.

Doctor Who: Blackout by Oli Smith, AUDIO

The Doctor has travelled back to 1965 with Amy and Rory, they've taken a train from Philadelphia to New York City and walked into a world of alien abductions and clinical trials run on a city wide scale.  There is something in the water, a hidden ship is 100ft above the city and the Doctor, Rory and Amy are all dying from a disease that makes you ultimately explode with heat.

An excellent straightforward Doctor Who adventure, fighting aliens to save mankind, but with a twist of reflection on our right to experiment on animals.

The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman

The brutal religious zealots the Redeemers have raised a monstrous boy who carries the name of Thomas Cale.  It isn't the birth name that was ripped from his as a child but that of a martyr.  The Redeemers take young children and indoctrinate them to become soldiers in their holy war against the Antagonists in the trenches on the Eastern front.  The boys are routinely brutally physically punished to the point of near death, fed rancid and disgusting food, indoctrinated by an endless round of sermons and rules, isolated from the outside world including any members of the opposite sex and exposed to terrifying lessons such as the burning alive of transgressors.

Cale is utterly brutalised but something of a human spirit lies under the trained killer, and it comes to the fore when he comes across a Redeemer dissecting a girl, kills him and saves Riba, another girl in the room with him.   So begins a wild escape across the desolate Scablands to the fortified city Memphis, home of the Materazzi people, with the archer Vague Henri and sniper Kleist.  Hoffman introduces a fascinating cast of peoples, costumes and places whilst never losing hold of character and the driving force of a great plot of intrigue, warfare, fundamentalism, coming of age and first love that leaves you wanting more.

I love the very first sentence of The Left Hand of God.  It is a single word: Listen.  It is a word that recalls fireside stories, being read to as a child, a word that can be a brutal order or a gentle call to hear.

Choke Chain by Jason Donald

12 year old Alex and his younger brother Kevin Thorne are a pair of brothers growing up in 1980s South Africa.  They are poor but white and although the book is set pre the breakdown of apartheid their world is changing.  Their brutal, devious and selfish but charming father Bruce teaches them how to con and bully their way through a world where his brand of violent chauvanism is beginning to be replaced by values of social justice and mutual respect.  As their parents' marriage splinters under the force of Bruce's (a play on brutal?) savage narcissism the brothers and their mother Grace struggle to cope and the climax of the story is a tragedy that warns against answering violence with violence.

As first person narrator it is Alex's voice we hear most clearly, and follow his coming of age as he moves from trying to emulate his father to finding another way.  The evocation of pre-apartheid South Africa, the institutional racism and bigotry, the patchwork of languages and the heat of Pretoria, cool of the Drakensburg and humidity of Durban is extremely powerful.  Alex's narrative is couched as a series of anecdotes, much in the way Bruce would tell stories, but these are not witty and entertaining, they are painful recollections of brutality and humiliation, and of Alex's sense of his failure to protect his little brother.

Some people may see Bruce as a sterotypical bad guy but he isn't, Donald has written an elegant and devastating account of what it is like to grow up choked in the shadow of such a powerful personality.  This is one of the hardest and best books I've read in some time.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

Moore does it again with the League fighting occult foes in swinging 1960s London.  We open as dissolute rock god Baz is murdered by black hooded figures.  The Nautilus breaches off the white cliffs of Dover and Captain Nemo's daughter helps Mina Harker, Orlando and Allan to land where they catch a bus to London.  They are in pursuit of old enemy Haddo, who is indeed dead, but a sinister plot for a wicked spirit to find a new body is afoot.  Great psychdelic drawings and use of contemporary fashions and drugs with Moore's usual twisting of reality, not the best League adventure but still interesting.

iBoy by Kevin Brooks

Tom Harvey is walking to meet Lucy, to him the prettiest girl at his school. She was the girl next door but still lives close by in her flat in their home in the sky: Compton House tower block on the impoverished Crow Town high rise estate. A stolen iPhone is thrown from the window of Lucy's flat and shatters Tom's skull, finding a weak spot in his skull and plunging him into a coma. However, rather than the impact killing him something amazing happens, the chip of the iPhone embeds itself into the neural pathways of his brain. He wakes wired into the global networks of mobile phone, internet and television superhighways that invisibly cross the land and he has control of electrical fields. But something terrible has happened to Lucy and he begins to exact a terrible revenge on those who have hurt her.

On one level therefore this is a good adventure story about an ordinary boy who becomes a superhero by freak accident, the stuff of comic book legend. However, Brooks also subtly interweaves into his text concepts of social injustice, the impact of single parenthood on the lives of young boys, gang warfare and violence as power into the fabric of this book, so you come away having learned much about the moral ambiguities of revenge, justice and hate.