This is the first book that I’ve read from Michael Cobley. I was drawn to it by reviews such as “An absolute cracker of a space opera” and “Here is a space opera which unashamedly honours the roots of the genre”. Also, it’s good to know that there are other related books by the same author in the Humanity’s Fire trilogy.
That said, I found the book overly complex, with a vast array of characters and numerous distinct plot lines that took hundreds of pages to come together. Too often, we were introduced to characters who then seemed to disappear completely. For example, two women in Captain Pyke’s close-knit crew, Dervla and Win, were introduced as integral members of his team. Once captured, the team took on impossible challenges to save them – but unfortunately, we never heard about Win again!
The most memorable character(s) of the book was the drone Rensik Estemil. Hugely intelligent and an effective fighting machine, he somehow got trapped in a mesh box (Faraday cage?!) – but escaped by casting off a mini-Rensik drone which saved the day.
Roadside Crosses is a thriller by Jeffery Deaver, featuring one of his regular characters, Kathryn Dance. However, her signature skill of kinesic analysis (the ability to read body language, making her an ace interrogator) isn’t really needed in this story – much of it is set in CyberSpace. The story includes Michael O’Neil, Kathryn’s colleague whom she has admired from afar for several books. It also introduces Jon Boling, an IT expert who is brought into the inner circle of Kathryn’s team to assist with the investigation.
This is another in the Harry Bosch series. He teams up with a rookie detective Lucia Soto to investigate the death of a mariachi band member (who succumbed to complications from being shot ten years earlier). We later discover that Soto has connections to the area and a background investigation runs in parallel into a horrific fire that killed a number of children (and from which Soto escaped).
This is another in the SF Masterworks series and I’m not alone in thinking it’s brilliant:
This book tells the journey taken by the author in his attempts to find and interview all the remaining astronauts who have walked on the moon. Twelve men in history have known what it is like, and at the time of his writing, only nine were alive. The book describes the impact such an event had on the lives of the men.
This is another Harry Bosch thriller by Michael Connelly. This one is set at a period of time when Harry is married to Eleanor, but the marriage is in trouble. A bad time, then, to be assigned to a highly sensitive case which could trigger riots in the discontented city if handled injudiciously. 
This is the 2015 Jack Reacher thriller which I received in a lovely hard back edition for Christmas. I was lucky to hear 
Randall Munroe’s excellent Thing Explainer is on the shelves at 
The author is probably more widely read as the illustrator of 
This book is part of the SciFi MasterWorks series, so I had high expectations, especially as it was written by the lauded Philip K Dick. However, this book is different to others that I’ve read by him – it starts very slowly, seemingly in a normal family in a sleepy American town. Only much later does the plot encompass a more science fiction element, and a more sinister reason behind the daily puzzle that Ragle Gumm must complete is revealed.
This book is part of the Science Fiction MasterWorks series, which hints at its pedigree, although the series covers a broad range of SciFi styles. This one tells of adventures in space, where we follow the trail of John Truck and his ship the My Ella Speed.
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