Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers (Corvus, £14.99)
Powers's first novel in five years is the sequel to his 1989 The Stress of Her Regard, which featured much derring-do with the Romantic poets Byron, Shelley and Keats  and with vampires. The current novel also features vampires  principally John Polidori, author of the very first vampire story  and the pre-Raphaelites Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne. John Crawford is a vet whose liaison with a prostitute seven years earlier produced a daughter, Johanna. Polidori's vampire spirit is intent on kidnapping Johanna for his own evil ends, and the novel follows Crawford's attempts to resuce his daughter, thwart the evil Polidori, and save London from vampyric hordes. Powers's sense of time and place is impeccable, and his characters  real and imaginary  leap off the page as the story gallops towards a thrilling finale. A long time coming, Hide Me Among the Graves has been worth the wait.

VN by Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot, £7.99)
Just when you think that the robot theme in SF has been done to death, along comes VN. Amy Peterson is a five-year-old in a loving family, with an android mother and a human father. When her android grandmother assaults her mother, Amy instinctively attacks and eats granny  and comes to the realisation that she is far from a normal child. Amy is a von Neumann self-replicating humanoid robot who, with her grandmother's identity lodged in her head, goes on the run. Ashby delves into the morality of creating artificial life, examines the use to which humans might put androids, and along the way questions our relationship with the "other". VN is a clever book with a wonderful ending by a writer who is well versed in AI technology, who can evoke sympathy with a few well-turned phrases and tells a satisfyingly complex story.

Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton (Macmillan, £20)
Detective Sidney Hurst is called in to investigate when a highly influential clone, a member of the North family dynasty that owns a vast interstellar business empire, is found stabbed through the heart. The killing mirrors a similar slaying 20 years earlier, when another member of the dynasty was killed by a woman who, she claims, was the sole survivor of an extraterrestrial attack. Cue an expedition to the planet of St Libra  where Hamilton unfolds his trademark rigorous exploration of an alien world  in search of an answer to the enigma. Great North Road is vast, weighing in at over a thousand pages, and the author controls a cast numbering more than 50, multiple complex plot-lines, speculation on the science of wormhole technology and cloning, and arrives at a dénouement that is far more than just the resolution of a murder mystery.

Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher (Angry Robot, £7.99)
Seven Wonders is Christopher's follow-up to his well received debut Empire State, and while it's not a straight sequel it does share that novel's surreal, noirish big city setting and a penchant for superheroes. Tony Prosdocimi lives in San Ventura, a city "policed" by a cabal of superheroes (the Seven Wonders of the title) whose arch enemies are the Cowl and his sidekick Blackbird. When Tony finds himself endowed with superpowers, he decides to do the job the Seven Wonders have left undone and confront the Cowl himself. What follows is an artfully plotted and thrilling action-adventure with some satisfying set-piece confrontations and amazingly rounded characterisation.

 Eric Brown's Ghostwriting is published by Infinity Plus Books.