Last Look

Now I've read Sugar Skull, named after the macabre sweets we saw our hero, Doug, buying in the last frame of The Hive, it's clear to me that the only thing to do is to go right back to the beginning of the saga and start again, the better to be sure I haven't missed some essential symbol or sign, some deeply buried meaning. My strong feeling is that this series is one of the most vividly drawn and painfully honest expositions of male guilt I've ever read. But I can't be definitive about this. Burns isn't in the business of neat endings. Rachel Cooke Observer