By K.S. Merbeth

Orbit, out now

Bounty hunter Clementine is doing what she needs to in order to survive in the post-apocalyptic wastelands – but when she captures the ultimate prize, things don’t work out quite as she expects…

They used to say that there were eight million stories in the Naked City, and K.S. Merbeth is proving that there are plenty in the post-apocalyptic world that she created in Bite. If you’ve read that first novel, you’ll have an idea of what you’re in for with this – characters whose morality and respect for life are not exactly the same as ours. That’s deliberate understatement – our heroine/narrator Clementine shoots someone without compunction at the start of the book, and we learn that she’s been something of a living weapon since childhood. (She doesn’t have a fist that lights up in the dark though!)

You don’t need to have read Bite prior to this, although that book’s central characters do have a role to play in this (both in the set-up and execution), as Merbeth repaints the landscape quickly. This is a far more assured book than its predecessor, helped perhaps by having a narrator who is somewhat older, and the relationship between Clementine and Jedediah Johnson (whose name is possibly a nod to the old Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson about someone else versed in survival tactics) is credible against the backdrop Merbeth presents.

Merbeth has created an internally consistent, twisted future world, whose inhabitants will constantly surprise you if you apply the codes that we try to live by in 2017. More please!

Verdict: A dark future Western with more than a few twists. 8/10

Paul Simpson