I, ROBOT By Isaac Asimov

Published : 1950
Pages : 249
Overall Mark : 8.5/10

Dr Susan Calvin recounts some of her more memorable experiences with robots, largely focussing on the innate problems people are faced with by the three laws of robotics. Her stories span from tales of little girls and their pet robots, robots forming gangs or unions, robots choosing self preservation over that of a human, and their sometimes eventual conclusions that they know what’s best for society more than humanity does!

This is an interesting collection of short stories, in which Asimov has clearly thought through the relative merits and problems of his invented three laws. It seems to me that he genuinely believes that they would not work, and that any attempt to make them work would lead to anarchy. The writing is simple and entertaining, and Asimov at no point tries to blind the reader with science but instead leads them by the hand, explaining everything along the way.

ODD THOMAS By Dean Koontz

Published : 2004
Pages : 420
Overall Mark : 8/10

Odd Thomas lives in the little town of Pico Mundo, and possessed the uncanny ability to sense creatures called bodachs, spirits who hang around with those who are either soon to be dead or are soon to kill! When he sees a man named Robert Robertson, aka. "Fungus Man", being followed around town with his own entourage of bodachs, and is then threatened by the man, Odd decides to confide in the Chief of Police who keeps his house under careful watched. But when Fungus Man turns up dead in Odd’s bathtub, he realises that something worse than he could possibly imagine maybe about to happen!

This is possibly one of Koontz’s most original novels - although there is a slight underlying feeling of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone - and clearly this was popular as it has two sequels already. This book flows very quickly and very fluidly, with only one or two chapters that felt like filler, and it has a nice surprise double-bluff ending.

DEJA DEAD By Kathy Reichs

Published : 1998
Pages : 509
Overall Mark : 7/10

Dr Temperance Brennan, the Director of Forensic Anthropology for the province of Quebec, believes that she has a serial killer on her hands. A number of dead female bodies have turned up, mutilated with the hands chopped off and foreign objects inserted into them. Temperance’s belief that the killers are all the same person is refuted by her colleagues and the investigating detectives, particularly Detective Claudel, so she takes it upon herself to investigate the murders with startling results.

This is the first of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels, and a fine first stab at the thriller genre. Although many of the characters don’t seem to possess more than one dimension, Temperance remains a likeable key person in the novel, though sometimes she veers off into sounding like a bit of a desperate case, which doesn’t really suit her character that much.