Target Lancer is a new political thriller from celebrated crime novelist, Max Allan Collins, and marks the return for one of Collin’s enduring heroes, tough-guy “Private Investigator to the Stars,” Nate Heller (this is the 16th in the Nathan Heller series that started with True Detective in 1983). This time around, Heller is wound up in one of...

American writer, Paul Auster is known (perhaps notorious), for a kind of existential popular fiction often using tropes of the detective genre. Commentators have labelled Auster as a postmodern novelist though he is equally considered a critic of postmodernism. That’s not the debate for this review, but whatever cultural label one applies, any Paul Auster...

Lady, Go Die! (2012), by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane is everything a good detective story should be.  Steeped in traditions of the noir detective thriller, this novel is a fun read and a page turner until the end.  - Mild interpretive spoilers- It’s not often that a novel sequel gets released 65 years after its first instalment.  During the...

Deathless by American fantasy novelist Catherynne M. Valente,  is a re-telling of the Russian folklore cycle of Koschei The Deathless told through the eyes of his wife, Marya Morevna.  From the first to the last lines, Deathless takes its reader deep into fairytale lore with all of its magic, its wonder and its darkness and weaves the tradition of Koschei and...

Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion is an unofficial guide to the TV series, the films, the comics and everything else that has made Joss Whedon one of the most important figures in popular culture. In 2011, online popular culture magazine Pop Matters ran ‘Spotlight on Joss Whedon’ a series of articles where some 60 essays, reviews and opinion pieces...