It's always very pleasing to see a new local author popup on the shelves of the local bookshops, and Michael Duffy will be a name known already to many newspaper readers and listeners to Radio National. It was particularly pleasing to find a previously unknown (to me at least) connection to The Saints'. To hear The Tower's theme, The Saints' recording of Sydney crime song 'Water and Wine', go to http://www.cityofsharks.com(link is external)
From the Blurb:
Young detective Nicholas Troy is basically a good man, for whom homicide investigations are the highest form of police work. But when a woman falls from the construction site for the world's tallest skyscraper, the tortured course of the murder investigation that follows threatens to destroy his vocation.
Opening Lines:
The woman was falling close to the building, down the face of the enormous, unfinished skyscraper. She fell in silence, turning slowly, through the mist and light rain.
Young detective Nicholas Troy is basically a good man, for whom homicide investigations are the highest form of police work. But when a woman falls from the construction site for the world's tallest skyscraper, the tortured course of the murder investigation that follows threatens to destroy his vocation.
Hampered by incompetent colleagues and organisational politics, Troy fights his way through worlds of wealth and poverty, people-smuggling and prostitution. He has always seen Sydney as a city of sharks, a place where predators lurk beneath the glittering surface. Now he uncovers networks of crime and corruption that entangle the city, reaching into the police force itself.