Seven Devils, Elizabeth May & Laura Lam

Having had a great run of sci-fi recently (thanks entirely to C's book-picking skills), a correction was inevitable. Seven Devils, an unusually two-handed affair, delivers this in spades. Its sole distinction is a primarily female cast in what's routinely a male-led genre, but everything else is wholly unoriginal, a poor copy of a copy of a copy. A poly-galactic evil empire, a despotic ruling family, the inevitable sequence of run-ins with scions of said family, lazy archetypal characters that include the plucky one, the clever one, the tortured-by-their-past one, etc. On top of this, it's also profoundly stupid. It has zero consideration or even awareness of scale, with the protagonists hopping between galaxies in minutes, and across which the empire has a mere *hundreds* of colonies. The empire is also said to have killed many billions of people (and aliens), but a key plot device is a so-called super-weapon that kills *individual* enemies (though, via another MacGuffin, ultimately kills more). Further, despite this background of proper genocide, the lead characters somehow find time to agonise endlessly about their individual transgressions. While the authors are clearly investing their own worthy opinions into the characters, they're oblivious as to whether those views plausibly stack up against the horror of the world described. They patently don't, and the novel fails at every turn, talking about Big Issues while floundering around in a breakneck series of weightless and faux-clever episodes. Other crimes include adding "diversity" by having a character speaking with Oor Wullie-style Scottish vernacular (to indicate they come from solid working-class stock), having regular occurrences of convenient, dig-me-out-of-this-plot-hole technology to get around plot ridiculousness, and, I kid not, "auras".

While I am entirely behind the socially-aware, feminist ideas that the authors clearly started from, this is a poor vehicle for promoting them. Vapid, lazy, inconsistent, and just plain stupid. Avoid this book.

Baghdad Central, Elliott Colla

Having seen the TV series, and being a fan of the crime subgenre "crime drama in an exotic / foreign locale", this was a shoe-in.

It's set in the "wild west" of the aftermath of 2003's falsely-prosecuted and calamitous invasion of Iraq, as the invaders try to rebuild the society they shattered for the sake of its tyrannical leadership. Its moral centre is Muhsin al-Khafaji, a man that the Iraqi state has already robbed of his wife and son, and for whom the US and UK invasion threatens to take much more. After being mistaken for a culpable member of the previous regime and brutalised in prison, he is co-opted into the process of rebuilding Iraq's police service. But, with a growing insurgency, collaboration with the invading coalition is precarious for al-Khafaji and for those around him. Especially when some of them are profiteering from the chaos, while others are using it with a very different endpoint in mind for Iraq.

Overall, this is great. It got a little too complicated for me to completely follow as it approached the end. But everything else works, so this was easy to forgive. I thought that one of its best aspects were the distressing vignettes describing daily life for Iraqis after the invasion. In just a page or two, each one is a study in how lives can be made powerless and desperate by the fallout of war. Alongside the central narrative, they provide a searing commentary on the stupidity, venal arrogance and unforgivable recklessness of "Gulf War II".

Having now read this book and watched its (excellent) adaptation, it's interesting to compare and contrast. On screen, the powerful vignettes are lost, presumably because the faster, rolling narrative of TV doesn't favour brief tangential interludes. But the plot is nicely straightened-out, facilitated by the addition of a snarling British antagonist to stand-in for the worst aspects of the invasion. While I should perhaps be offended - especially when the leading American characters are presented as honourably making the best of their government's mess - this change feels about right: letting us carry the can for a national stain we brought on ourselves.

The Golden Scales, Parker Bilal

Another day, another crime story set in an exotic foreign locale. This time the Cairo, and surrounds, familiar to its author, Bilal, the alias of Sudan-raised Jamal Mahjoub.

It's an efficient mix of crime sparked by modern money rubbing up against much older cultures, framed around a missing child and a missing footballer. While there's a certain familiarity for the reader in working out how the two strands are entwined, this is offset by solid writing backed-up by Bilal's personal experience.

I'll definitely be following up with its sequels.