NICE TRY - Shane Maloney

Australian author Shane Maloney wields the pen like no other writer imaginable, stripping each social veneer away in such a terribly effective fashion that we cringe as we recognize the creatures dwelling beneath.  The Murray Whelan novels, of which NICE TRY is number three, are bitingly funny in the best and worst of ways.  They pick, poke and eviscerate, yet manage to champion how we handled the past that has somehow thus carried us to our present.  Maloney sets his novels in the past, but only just, so that our memories are at least a little foggy about the finite details of the political decisions of that day gone yet we still manage to largely recall the main events.   

NICE TRY ages Murray to a point where he is less the avenging hero and even more so now a man doing the best he can in a bad situation, keeping a loose hand on the tiller when it comes to morality decisions.  Effective results are what he specializes at, and it is not as though the world has been changed by what he sometimes has needed to do.   It is impossible not to enjoy these novels for the incisive and laugh out loud hilarious monologues of Murray, and while the crime plot of NICE TRY has been more carefully constructed than has those of the series priors, whodunit is still not the question of the day.   Enjoy the sharp mind of Shane Maloney.