pacy

Crime writer Ian Rankin’s novella opens with a body in the foyer of a gleaming new residential high rise. Overlooking London’s Hyde Park, the building’s flats are affordable only to the super-rich. The residents – who are now murder suspects – include an art dealer specialising in modern sculpture; the wife of a gangster who is wanted by police; a princess from an unnamed Gulf state, plus her phalanx of bodyguards; a Russian multimillionaire; and, in the penthouse, a property mogul who may or may not be up to his neck in…

No doubt to Alan Titchmarsh’s great relief, the horticultural arm of the post-apocalypse flick is finally entering the growth phase, with the likes of Annihilation, The Last of Us and now this lightweight effort from Chinese director Lin Zhenzhao. The hubris here is that mankind has overcompensated for the desertification of the planet with cutting-edge research to promote plant growth, accidentally creating a super-species of sentient flora that has choked the Earth, and whose roving vines hunt down people to snack…

The Ghost Theatre begins with a London rooftop chase worthy of Mission: Impossible. Our young heroine, Shay, hurtles above Eastcheap and St Peter’s Hill, St Paul’s Church a landmark in the near distance. “She came down with a crash, sending a flock of pigeons skywards in a soft explosion of feathers. They spread like a fountain and she repeated the catechism under her breath: The gods are birds and the birds are gods. She let its cadence guide her feet. The gods – step – are birds – step – and the birds – step – are gods…

One of the problems with having a runaway success with a side project is that it tends to cast a shadow over the rest of an author’s work. You feel that John Banville may sometimes resent the way that people have rushed to embrace Benjamin Black (although I’m sure his bank manager isn’t complaining). Joyce Carol Oates’s mysteries written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith outsold all but a handful of the (many) books published under her own name. Stephanie Merritt (also an Observer critic) has written a series of superior…