GUILT - Melissa Chan

Not sure if I've developed a bit more tolerance for the issue based style of this series, or whether or not it's balanced out a bit better in this book than it was in TOO RICH.

What it could actually be is a bit more of a plot, which helps immensely with the shouty / tell don't show problems of the first book. The issues are all still here, and this time they are not muddied by the silliness of the surrounding plot points, with the focus being on a rather convoluted series of deaths, that you know are obviously going to be connected up at some point.

There's still the inexplicable cop / determined independent Feminist detective pairing, which simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever. On any level, and I think that's probably contributing to the biggest problem of this book - somebody's bumping off high profile blokes left right and centre and the investigation is down to an amateur with family connections to one of the victims and a few token police efforts?

Leaving aside my whinging, the one thing I'm really finding interesting about these books is how far Australian crime fiction (female or male writers / issues based or not) has come since the early 1990s.