Search Results for: look-at-the-evidence

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Look at the Evidence is a collection of reviews from a wide variety of sources – including Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly – about the most significant literatures of the twenty-first century: science fiction, fantasy and horror: the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. It covers the period between 1987 and 1992.

Sir Herbert Sterron is found dead, hanging by the neck from a curtain cord. He had good reason to want to kill himself, so nobody is unduly surprised.

But then hints of foul play start to emerge: Sterron’s wife, Griselda, was desperately unhappy with the marriage; and shocking evidence is uncovered that incriminates not just the County Sheriff but a Catholic priest.

Now what looked to be a straightforward suicide is turning into something quite different – a complex case of murder . . .

A group of strangers are forced to take shelter in a remote house – and then the murders begin…

‘A new Ellery Queen book has always been something to look forward to’ Agatha Christie

‘Ellery Queen is the American detective novel’ Anthony Boucher

When Ellery Queen and his father take shelter from wildfires in an isolated manor, they don’t expect their detective skills to be required. But the next morning a body is discovered. The suspects include a society beauty, a highly secretive valet, and a pair of conjoined twins.

When another murder follows, and the only clue is a torn playing card, Queen must use all his powers of deduction to unpick a web of alibis, motives and evidence, before the killer strikes again.

‘Murder on Christmas day’ is the newspaper headline no one wanted to read…

A true classic from the golden age of crime fiction.

‘Brilliant’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

When a small-town schoolteacher is discovered dead, beheaded, and tied to a T-shaped cross on December 25th, Ellery Queen is intrigued enough to take a closer look. But when he arrives, Queen is met with too few clues and too little evidence to produce a satisfactory verdict, even for a master sleuth such as himself, and so returns home, defeated.

But when an identical murder occurs – followed by several more – Queen discovers a horrific connection to a strange cult. This is a disturbing puzzle unlike anything he’s encountered before, and it will take all of his powers of deduction to uncover the killer.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world.

Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively.

125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

After millennia of relentless war, the union of alien races called the Weave was on the verge of winning a decisive victory – thanks to their new allies from Earth, who in a mere handful of centuries had proved masters of combat. But then the birdlike Wais scholar Lalelelang found disturbing evidence that Humans might not adapt so easily to peace – that natural Human aggression would next be turned against the Weave, unless they were once again confined to fight amongst themselves.

When her field research revealed the existence of a secret group of powerfully telepathic Humans called the Core, it looked as if Lalelelang would be the first victim in a new war between Humans and their allies. But just as her fate was sealed, a lone Core commander took a chance on her intelligence and compassion, gambling the fate of Humanity on the possibility that together they could both find an alternative to a galaxy-wide bloodbath…

The first novel in the acclaimed VAN DER VALK series – now a major new ITV series starring Marc Warren

‘Masterful’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘Freeling’s Inspector Van der Valk is less rugged than Rebus, less parsonical than Dalgliesh, more Morse than Frost, and more Maigret than any of them. Marvellous’ – Anita Brookner

‘Freeling is a joy to read’ TLS

‘You’re in for a treat’ COSMOPOLITAN

A woman, Elsa, is brutally murdered in her Amsterdam apartment. Her ex-lover, Martin, is seen outside the building around the time of the crime. The witness who saw him? A policeman.

It looks like a straightforward case – but police inspector Van der Valk is not convinced. Despite all the evidence – and the fact that Martin originally denied he was at the apartment – he believes Martin is not guilty of murder. Instead of charging him, Van der Valk takes him on a tour: a tour of the investigation; a tour of Martin’s own past; and a tour into the darkly obsessive world of Elsa…

Alex was a pioneer. Like all pioneers he had problems. He had more problems than most; when things start to go wrong in space they go wrong in a big way. One by one the perils of the void took their toll of his companions. Alex was alone, alone with a vision, the vision of a town, home.

Only thoughts of home kept him alive. He remembered trees, houses, shops, churches, peoples…above all people. At last he reached earth…or perhaps it wasn’t earth? Things had changed unbelievably. Perhaps he had changed. How long had he been away? How far had he drifted? There was a sinister possibility that this wasn’t home at all. If the things that looked like people weren’t people but aliens, what was he to do?

Alex was a realist. He knew what space could do to a man’s mind. He was disinclined to trust the evidence of his own senses. A mine that has had far more than it can take can produce from very peculiar perceptions…

It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear-PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon-allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities-augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true-towards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?