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FURT BENT FROM ALDAHEIT - Jack Eden

Author Information
Book Title: 
Furt Bent from Aldaheit
Author Name: 
Jack Eden
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
ISBN: 
9781927182536
Series: 
Osgood Sneddon
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Thriller
Sub Genre: 
Noir
Location: 
New Zealand
Australia
Publisher: 
Pear Jam Books
Year of Publication: 
2011

His name isn't Furt Bent, and he isn't from Aldaheit. He's the persona that Osgood Sneddon invented for himself to rise above the mundane, and extricate himself from trouble when a moment's misunderstanding lands him on the wrong side of the law. Specifically, he falls on the wrong side of Hubbard - and that's the wrong place to be. Detective Inspector Hubbard is poisonous, profane and effective, and he doesn't let the truth get in the way of a result. Furt Bent, shaped by the folly of youth and the front yards of Australasia's nastiest prisons, becomes his nemesis.

Book Review: 

You know how the rule goes, you're not supposed to barrack for the "bad guy", but seriously there's no way I wasn't totally and absolutely on Osgood Sneddon's side from the start. I mean Osgood? No wonder he uses the jokingly dubbed alias of Furt Bent from Aldaheit. Which is just silly, even if you can pronounce Aldaheit and goodness knows I changed my mind a 1000 times about how to.

When I wasn't being thoroughly and completely entertained by FURT BENT FROM ALDAHEIT that is. It's a book that combines good pace and action with a dry and quite dark sense of humour, highlighting a central character, who despite being a delinquent thief and troublemaker, is somebody that you just kind of have to end up liking. A Lot.

Having a little peak around post reading the book I believe some of the action could have been inspired by some true life events in New Zealand, which is rather intriguing, as a lot of the action is quite out there. Sneddon is not your run of the mill kid as he manages to survive in the very dangerous world of crime and prison using a combination of wit, brains and sheer gall. A determined, resourceful and relentless survivor, he's a kid that packs a hell of lot into a very short life. There are other characters built into the story, the obvious one being DI Hubbard, and whilst that supporting cast are believable people, they are inevitably a supporting cast. This book is all about Osgood Sneddon and it does a very good job of that. FURT BENT FROM ALDAHEIT was an unexpected, and very engaging pleasure to read.

(Read as an ebook from Amazon)
 

BY ANY MEANS - Ben Sanders

Author Information
Book Title: 
By Any Means
Author Name: 
Ben Sanders
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
ISBN: 
9781869508777
Series: 
Sean Devereaux
Categorisation
Category: 
Thriller
Location: 
Auckland
Publisher: 
Harper Collins
Year of Publication: 
2011

Friday rush hour. Auckland City. A lone shooter fires across a packed street and kills a man. Detective Sergeant Sean Devereaux is assigned the case. He's not complaining. His Friday nights are seldom better spent.

But the inquiry is not straightforward. Witness accounts are conflicting. The dead man appears to be an unintended victim, with the true target unknown. It's a homicide that leaves police with no initial suspects, and no apparent motive.

Book Review: 

BY ANY MEANS is the second book from NZ author Ben Sanders. Sanders is a fan of writers such as Michael Connelly and Lee Child, which I suspect you can probably tell from his style. Rapid fire, with an opening that will really make you sit up and take notice BY ANY MEANS has a number of intriguing elements to it. It's a complex, shifting plot which moves through viewpoints rapidly. It has a lone wolf style of central character in Sean Devereaux, who despite being a cop, basically plays a solo part in resolving not just the opening shooting of the book, but, it seems, just about everything else that ever happens in Auckland. What little sense of partnership there is, is unusual for a cop, as ex-cop John Hale, current fugitive from justice himself, jumps in and out the action. And you'd be best placed to pay attention at those points - there is an awful lot going on that both these men are trying to stay on top of.

Given that this is the second book, and I know nothing at all about THE FALLEN I've a sneaking suspicion I should have read it first. There were points in BY ANY MEANS where I really thought I was missing something - that there's obviously something about both Devereaux and Hale that I just don't know. I really must go seek out that first book and see if I've made a bit of a mistake in reading them out of order.

On the upside, when Sanders is writing terse, pointed, sharp and tight action BY ANY MEANS is a seriously good thriller. That style does get a bit patchy in places, and it's when the terseness gives way to wordiness, where there's just a sneaking suspicion that the music and popular culture references are getting in the way of the plot, things do bog down a bit. There's also some very complicated plotting going on here and whilst things eventually do come full circle, back to the reason for one of the best opening's of a book I've read in a long time, it did seem, sometimes, that I was caught up in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

By Any Means

Submitted by Karen on

Category: 
Crime Fiction
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
Sub Genre: 
Police Procedural

Friday rush hour, Auckland city. A lone shooter fires across a packed street and kills a man. Detective Sergeant Sean Devereaux is assigned the case. He's not complaining - his Friday nights are seldom better spent.

But the inquiry is not straightforward. Witness accounts are conflicting. The dead man appears to be an unintended victim, with the true target unknown.

ISBN: 
9781869508777
Series: 
Sean Devereaux
Publisher: 
Harper Collins
Year of Publication: 
2011

The Fallen

Submitted by Karen on

Category: 
Crime Fiction
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
Sub Genre: 
Police Procedural

When local cop Sean Devereaux, who enjoys skating close to the edge, does a favour for his attractive neighbour, he unwittingly exposes a web of deceit and corruption.

As he investigates the murder of a 16-year-old Epsom ‘princess’ in his day job, his after-hours efforts have him stumbling into the aftermath of a scam involving senior colleagues, and he is soon enmeshed in an escalating cycle of kidnapping, murder and violent mayhem.

ISBN: 
9781869508760
Series: 
Sean Devereaux
Publisher: 
Harper Collins
Year of Publication: 
2010

Ben Sanders

Submitted by Karen on

Author Information
Sanders, Ben

Twenty-year-old Ben Sanders’ fascination with crime fiction has paid off. Born and bred on Auckland’s North Shore, Sanders has been hooked on Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Cormac McCarthy and Pete Dexter since the age of thirteen, and now he’s put his interest in these big-selling authors to work. A keen writer since his teens, Sanders is also passionate about music; he wrote his first novel while listening to the tunes of R.E.M, Nick Cave, Grant-Lee Phillips, and The Mutton Birds and even found time to study engineering at the University of Auckland.

Traces of Red

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
Category: 
Crime Fiction

Rebecca Thorne is a successful television journalist, but her world is thrown into turmoil when her Saturday night programme is axed because of falling ratings. Not only will she lose her job but her big story on the convicted triple murderer Connor Bligh, whom Rebecca believes is innocent, has to be abandoned.

Rebecca's lover Joe, a married man and the barrister representing Bligh, also thinks Bligh is innocent – or does he? And if he loves Rebecca so much, why is he prepared to cast her off?

ISBN: 
9780143565765
Location: 
New Zealand
Publisher: 
Penguin Australia
Year of Publication: 
2010

Hunting Blind

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
Category: 
Crime Fiction

On a perfect summer's day, at a school picnic beside a lake, a little girl goes missing, leaving a family devastated and a community asking questions. 

Seventeen years later her sister, Stephanie, is practising as a psychiatrist. A new patient's revelations force her to re-examine her sister's disappearance. Why are their stories so similar?

Unable to let the matter rest, Stephanie embarks on a journey to find out what happened to her sister.

ISBN: 
9780143203643
Location: 
New Zealand
Publisher: 
Penguin Australia
Year of Publication: 
2010

Furt Bent from Aldaheit

Submitted by Karen on

Category: 
Crime Fiction
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand

His name isn’t Furt Bent, and he isn’t from Aldaheit. He’s the persona that Osgood Sneddon invented for himself to rise above the mundane, and extricate himself from trouble when a moment’s misunderstanding lands him on the wrong side of the law.

Specifically, he falls on the wrong side of Hubbard - and that’s the wrong place to be. Detective Inspector Hubbard is poisonous, profane and effective, and he doesn't let the truth get in the way of a result.

Location: 
New Zealand
Publisher: 
Pear Jam Books Limited
Year of Publication: 
2011

Jack Eden

Submitted by Karen on

Author Information
Edent, Jack

The novel Furt Bent from Aldaheit was inspired by events in 1971 when, at age 19, the author founded a newspaper in a country town near Auckland. He published a story on the innocence of a farmer found guilty of a double murder, and was visited by investigating officers for whom the story was an embarrassment.

Eden left the town, and his newspaper, and headed north to the Hokianga where he met several Vietnam War draft dodgers (subject of new novel Jetsam's Caress). He continued in journalism, working on several community and daily newspapers in New Zealand and Australia.

COLLECTING COOPER - Paul Cleave

Author Information
Book Title: 
Collecting Cooper
Author Name: 
Paul Cleave
Author's Home Country: 
New Zealand
ISBN: 
9781439189627
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Location: 
Christchurch
New Zealand
Year of Publication: 
2011

People are disappearing in Christchurch. Cooper Riley, a psychology professor, doesn’t make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn’t make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he’s asked by Green’s father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them knows is that a former mental patient is holding people prisoner as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs.

Book Review: 

Are you allowed to do one word reviews?

In which case it's ... wow.

If we're not allowed could I just add terrific, twisty, tricky, tantalising, taut and maybe tremendous.

It's really embarrassing that sometimes it can take an age to get to read a book that you knew you wanted to read the day before it came out. COLLECTING COOPER was always going to be an interesting book because Theodore Tate is a tremendous character, and Cleave doesn't always do follow-up books. But if he'd like to do a third, or really any book whatsoever, I've given myself a stern talking to and will make sure I get to it ... the day after it comes out!

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