Track of the Week: Harrison Crump, I Need Your Love (Crump Daddy Club Mix)
Peak time on a dance floor is an awful lot of fun, but nothing can stay completely pear-shaped forever. A smart promoter knows that eventually, at 2 or 4 or 6 a.m., what you're going to need is a guy who specialises in search and rescue. And if that guy's smart, he'll play this track or something very like it, something to bring the floor down and the people on it home.

The last twenty people on a dancefloor get the best part of the night: wrung out, exhausted souls happily doodling around to warm-bath house. Harrison Crump's got it all going on here - rich, knowing vocals, an unhurried rolling bassline, and a chiming top line that lifts the spirits. Beautifully designed.

Book of the Week: Children of the Company, by Kage Baker
Thank God for a week off at Christmas, because the advent of a new Dr. Zeus novel inevitably leads to re-reading the entire series. And not in the huffy way it's necessary to re-read as many Robert Jordan novels you think might remind you of what the hell everyone was up to a geological era ago when the last one was published, either.

No, with Baker it's a positive treat to return to previous novels, because her plotting is razor-sharp and her continuity borders on the scandalous. Which is saying a lot, considering that she's telling the stories of immortal cyborgs who work for the shady yet ever so profitable company Dr. Zeus, saving treasures like extinct species and lost artworks throughout history. Things are moving inexorably towards the year 2355, when suddenly no further information is available to the operatives in the past, and even without her zippy writing style and black sense of humour I would be all agog to find out what's going to happen next.