Picador

JOE CINQUE'S CONSOLATION - Helen Garner

Author Information
Book Title: 
Joe Cinque's Consolation
Author Name: 
Helen Garner
Author's Home Country: 
Australia
ISBN: 
0330364979
Categorisation
Category: 
True Crime
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2005

In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at thir house.  Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan.  Nobody warned Joe Cinque.  He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin.  His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder.

Book Review: 

Read this book for our f2f bookclub meeting this weekend.  Unfortunately I'm going to miss that gathering now, so I'm waiting to hear what reports himself brings back from everyone else - as I think it's going to be quite a discussion.
 
JOE CINQUE'S CONSOLATION isn't a "traditional" true crime book.  What starts out as feeling like a genuine attempt on the part of the author to understand the case, the participants (victim and perpetrator(s)), quickly becomes an analysis of why this is such an elusive and frankly, bizarre case.  Anu Singh, the woman ultimately convicted of the manslaughter of Joe Cinque, is a very elusive figure in this book, and the reader quickly becomes as frustrated as the author seems to have been in trying to understand this woman's motivation and thinking.  This frustration extends to her family who also seem to spend more time trying to cover up, rather than understand what on this earth makes a drama queen like Anu Singh "suddenly" decide that her boyfriend has damaged her health and somehow or other he has to be included in her supposed suicide.
 
Not just because the author (who declares this bias and its reasons) got very close to Joe Cinque's mother in particular, it's very hard not to feel some sympathy for his family.  Despite two court cases, despite so many people circling around this young couple, despite so many supposedly intelligent and responsible young people who knew that something was up, somehow Joe Cinque died horribly.  It's very hard to put down this book and not wonder very very hard about Anu Singh, her family, and all the things that were totally left unexplained by this book.  It's very easy to understand why this is such a frustrating book - it's one of the most frustrating cases I've ever read about.

The Letter Girl

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
Australia
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Hard Boiled
Pulp

Jet Black has left her barmaid duties behind to run some valuable merchandise to the next city.

The merchandise? Drugs? Stolen Goods? Nope, something much much better. She's managed to get hold of the world's only copy of Julius Caesar's long-lost masterpiece, Dr Analogia. All she has to do is deliver it to a black market dealer known as the Polymath and she'll finally have made herself a fortune.

But there's a catch or two along the way.

ISBN: 
0330361325
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
1999

Last Days, The: the apocryphon of Joe Panther

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
Australia
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Hard Boiled
Pulp

Joe Panther is a man with many secrets. Dangerous secrets. He is a drug dealer. He is a killer. He is a private investigator. Above all, he is the messiah, fallen on hard times.

When a young woman is found crucified and decapitated in a melbounre inner-city church, the police suspect the local priest, a man with dark secrets of hiis own. The priest hires Panther to clear his name.

Soon Panther becomes both the hunter and the hunted.Nothing is as it seems-not even, perhaps, Panther's own sense of self.

ISBN: 
0330360590
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
1998

Shot

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
Australia
Category: 
True Crime

My ear tracked the sound...the slow roll of rubber on blue metal, the stealthy crunching undergrowth sound of something prowling.

When Gail Bell was seventeen, she was shot in the back. Coming home from evening class later than usual one night, she took a short cut through the dark streets of new estate, unaware she was being watched. When a car began following her, she felt a jolt of fear. Then the car stopped and out of the eerie silence came a cracking sound as a bullet struck her from behind.

ISBN: 
0330364413
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2003

The Poison Principle

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
Australia
Category: 
True Crime

When Dr William Macbeth poisoned two of his sons in 1927, his wife and sister hid the murders in the intensely private realm of family secrets.

Like the famous British poisoner Dr Crippen, Macbeth behaved as if he were immune to consequences; unlike Crippen, however, he avoided detection and punishment. Or did he? Secrets can be as corrosive as poison, and as time passed, the story of Dr William Macbeth, well-dressed poisoner, haunted and divided his descendants.

ISBN: 
0330362682
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2001

The Unknown Terrorist

Submitted by Karen on

Author's Home Country: 
Australia
Category: 
Thriller

Blurb About the Book

Gina Davies, aka The Doll, is a 26-year-old pole dancer at the Chairman's Lounge in Sydney's Kings Cross. She's a flawed woman, racist, obsessed with money, who finds her life suddenly being destroyed by the things she has up until that moment most firmly believed in.

Special Interests: 
Terrorism
ISBN: 
9780330422802
Location: 
Sydney
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2006

THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST - Richard Flanagan

Author Information
Book Title: 
The Unknown Terrorist
Author Name: 
Richard Flanagan
Author's Home Country: 
Australia
ISBN: 
9780330423557
Categorisation
Category: 
Thriller
Sub Genre: 
Terrorism
Special Interests: 
Terrorists
Public Policy
Location: 
Sydney
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2006

From the internationally acclaimed author of Gould’s Book of Fish comes an astonishing new novel, a riveting portrayal of a society driven by fear. What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she becomes a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack.

Book Review: 

Feeling somewhat cocky that I owned a copy of our f2f book for this month I was more than happy to finally get a chance to read THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan.  No matter that it turned out that the book club book was another one altogether (might make a note of that book later on), I really really really enjoyed THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST.

This book beautifully illustrates the way that somebody's reputation, life and future can be trashed comprehensively by one little mistake compounded by somebody else's blatant personal interest.  Not wanting to give away too much, basically the story is about a young woman, with a bad start in life, who has a plan and an aim and is working her way towards that.  Okay so the job (exotic dancer / stripper / whatever you want to call it) might not be the sort of job that everyone would be comfortable doing, but our central character, Gina does what she does well - with the aim of putting away enough money to buy a house and make a life for herself.  A trip to the beach, a brief encounter with a young man who saves her best friend's little boy from the surf, and long story short, Gina ends up spending the night with him.  Waking up the next morning on her own, wandering across the road to get a coffee, looking back to find her one night stand is the target of a massive intelligence / police raid, Gina's life rapidly spirals downwards.  Not helped by the CCTV footage that shows her kissing him - a man she quickly comes to know is a suspected terrorist.  Enter the slimy self-serving and rather revolting journalist, and Gina's suddenly a wanted woman - you'd swear one of the most dangerous women in Australia.

There's absolutely nothing subtle about the scenario being explored in THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST - but there is a lot of subtlety in the outcomes.  The journalist's behaviour is, unfortunately, not hard to envisage.  Gina's not quite as predictable - whilst it would have been possible to hammer an agenda a little too strongly, Gina's sympathetic but at the same time she's stupid and frustrating and contributes just a little to her own fate - early on when she could have just gone to the authorities and surely had a hope of sorting out the whole mess, she dithers and dives and goes into hiding and from that point on, you know that things are getting worse and worse for her.  Having said that, there's room for a reader to feel real sympathy for her decisions (bad and good), there's a real feeling of the powerlessness of being a nobody, slightly on the fringes of "polite society" up against the tide of media influence, public reactivity and hysteria.

One of the blurbs on the back of this book really caught my eye ... an excerpt of which deserves to be repeated:  "THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST should be required reading - with eyelids pinned open, if necessary, and forced to look..." David Masiel WASHINGTON POST.  I suspect there will be some whose will find the scenario in this book difficult to swallow (and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find accusations of certain political sympathies on my own part). Regardless of where you stand on the issue of terrorism and the treatment of terrorists, THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST is surely a poignant reminder of the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and a stark example of the ills of trial by media.

THE SHAPE OF WATER - Andrea Camilleri

Author Information
Book Title: 
The Shape of Water
Author Name: 
Andrea Camilleri
Author's Home Country: 
Italy
ISBN: 
0330492861
Series: 
Montalbano
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Police Procedural
Publisher: 
Picador
Year of Publication: 
2004
Book Review: 

THE SHAPE OF WATER is the first in Camilleri's series of books featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano. Set in Vigata, a fictional seacoast town in southern Sicily, The Shape of Water finds Montalbano investigating the death of a local influential in the very insalubrious surrounds of "The Pasture".
 
The Pasture, once a goat grazing site is now the place to pick up a drug deal or a prostitute. Montalbano is already a bit suspicious about Luparello's death but when pressure starts being applied by a politician, a judge and a bishop he digs his heels in and insists that an investigation is required despite a verdict of death from a heart attack.
 
Not only does Camilleri give you a great feeling for the local area, Montalbano is a wonderfully eclectic, grumpy character who works amongst a great array of slightly offbeat policemen. And this is a novel from Italy, so there's food and a passionate love affair, made all the more interesting by the distance between Montalbano and his love Livia, who lives in Genoa.
 
The translation of this book flowed really well and there's a handy short glossary at the end explaining the meaning of some of the phrases and slang used.
 
There are other books in this series that have been now been translated and they are all well worth catching up with, even if you read this series out of order they stand up well. You miss a little of the developing relationships between the characters but not enough to lessen the enjoyment.
Subscribe to RSS - Picador