Benjamin Chandler

Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

The premise of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar is inherently problematic. When your young narrator admits to being a compulsive liar, the whole narrative threatens to degenerate into a fail-safe ending – it was all just a dream! Substitute ‘lie’ for ‘dream’. Thankfully, Micah Wilkins’s narration is so seductive that readers will find themselves devouring this book in an attempt to piece together the promised, if illusive, truth. Besides, this time Micah promises to tell us the whole truth, and why would she lie to us? That truth revolves around the death of Micah’s boyfriend, Zach. Or was it murder? For that matter, were they even dating, and did she see him the night of his death? Questions pile up alongside the lies, distracting us from the fact that sometimes the worst lies are those of omission.

Barry Maitland’s Dark Mirror, the tenth instalment in his Brock and Kolla series, sees newly promoted DI Kathy Kolla on the trail of a poisoner. Despite numerous references to the Pre-Raphaelites, laudanum addiction and arsenic, Dark Mirror does not exude the gritty Victorian Gothic atmosphere its subject matter and central crime evoke. Instead, the reader is presented with a murder investigation often bogged down by the realities of police work. This sense of realism is countered by some remarkable coincidences; scenes that appear tangential end up having profound consequences.

There is an unfortunate tendency in contemporary fantasy for plots to become elongated, ungainly and unmanageable, much like teenage boys. Thankfully, Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series is an exception, perhaps because the protagonist, Arthur Penhaligon, is not yet a teen-ager himself.