By Tim Lebbon

Titan, out March 21

Trying to find her missing boyfriend, Angela Gough stumbles on secrets that can frighten even the most hardened…

There’s a rule that most SF films follow whereby you establish the size of your intergalactic spaceship by comparing it with something that the viewer knows well; if that object dwarfs them normally, and that object is dwarfed by the spaceship, you get a sense of scale. In this fast-paced and well told first novel in a new trilogy, Tim Lebbon does much the same with the fear factor – our heroine encounters one of the real bad figures from the London underworld (and for some reason The Long Good Friday kept coming to mind) and she, and the reader, is left in no doubt that this is a seriously scary figure. But what if there’s something out there that can scare the shit out of him?

Relics postulates an underworld beneath the underworld, where trade in the titular objects is lucrative but dangerous – and it involves forces that you really don’t want to get on the wrong side of. Lebbon opens the door slowly for us, revealing bits and pieces of the worlds that have stayed hidden, and imbuing the whole book with a sense of mounting dread, as Angela presses forward, sometimes against her better judgement, wanting to know the answers yet fearing what she’ll learn.

It’s not a book for the faint of heart – there are some truly terrifying moments, and a dinner party that might even put Hannibal Lecter off his meal – but you find yourself wanting to power through it… and get the next instalment as soon as possible.

Verdict: Dark and dread-full: a great start to the trilogy. 9/10

Paul Simpson

Check out the blog tour for Relics, including an interview here on Sci-Fi Bulletin on March 30