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The Mother Paul Series, June WrightMy review of RESERVATION FOR MURDER, FACULTY OF MURDER and MAKE-UP FOR MURDER has been posted: June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange outstripped sales of Agatha Christie in Australia. Full Review at Newtown Review of Books |
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Birnam Wood, Eleanor CattonOne of the very best things about reading the entrants in the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards is just how varied a bunch of books they were. BIRNAM WOOD is a eco-thriller, set on New Zealand's South Island, serving up a hefty dose of challenges for the reader to be going on with. The story is built around members of the Birnam Wood "collective" - a group involved in eco-activism through guerrilla gardening. As the blurb puts it:
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String Theory, Bing TurkbySTRING THEORY is the 2nd in the Guitar Store Mysteries, and the first I've read. Which I think might have been a bit of a mistake. This worked, in that it was fun, a bit silly, and a bit of giggle in places, although it did take me a while to figure out who was who and how it all fitted together. Maybe the first book, DEAD MAN'S AXE will fill in those gaps when I get to it on "MtTBR that can be seen from the moon....". Set, unsurprisingly, in and around Dana Osborne's guitar store, where she would be happy just hanging out, talking music with an eclectic range of ... Read Review |
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Life & Crimes, Andrew RuleCatching up with true crime reading meant I also had to pick up LIFE & CRIMES by Andrew Rule. A different tone from his sometime writing partner, John Silvester, Rule's style is more, I don't know, measured. Certainly he's less inclined towards calling a spade a bloody shovel, but instead applies a forensic, detailed and dispassionate telling whilst still managing to achieve a readable, pacey style of narrative. Reading this one at the time that I did had a particularly poignant overlay as the story of the Easey Street murders is included, at the same time as the ... Read Review |
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Naked City, John SilvesterI've gotten behind with my true crime reading, so what better way to kick an interest back into gear than a meander around "the cop stations, courthouses, back alleys and gangster mansions of Melbourne" through the skewering eye of journalist John Silvester - a man with a fine turn of sarcastic, pointed phrasing if there ever was one. This collection (published in 2023) goes back over some well known cases, brings in some new stories, and provides some of Silvester's observations on the good, the dumb and the ugly of Melbourne's crime fraternity. He doesn't pull any ... Read Review |
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Present Tense, Natalie ConyerThe author of this series was born in South Africa, but has lived in Sydney, Australia for a long time. PRESENT TENSE is the first, followed by SHADOW CITY (https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/shadow-city-natalie-conyer). Based around veteran cop Schalk Lourens these books are gritty and dark, tackling aspects of South Africa's past and present in a clear, concise and unflinching manner. Having read the second book first, PRESENT TENSE provided the details for a lot of the important parts ... Read Review |
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Cutler, David Whish-WilsonCUTLER, the novel, features Paul Cutler, the former undercover operative, now working "off the books" in the dangerous and unpredictable world of investigator for hire. In this story he's tasked with finding the truth about the disappearance of an Australian marine scientist, whilst on a Taiwanese distant water fishing vessel, working in the incredibly murky and dodgy world of deep sea trawling and fisheries.Read Review |
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Murder Mindfully, Karsten DusseFirst few chapters - what on earth am I doing reading this. Next few chapters - okay I'm getting this, this is .... different. Next few chapters - what do you mean you want something ... can't you see I'm busy. Why do I keep hearing Henning Wehn's voice in my head? All of the book, this is making me laugh. A lot. I probably shouldn't be - I mean there are people locked in boots, there is a chipper on the side of a lake, there's guns and cars going boom, and a law firm full of people who survive (which doesn't seem right). ... Read Review |
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The Chilling, Riley JamesThis was one of those fortuitous picks from the library (I know I should be attending to the visible from space TBR here, but something about this book appealed when I heard a whisper about it, and sometimes giving into a little bit of temptation is... good for morale). Anyway, I saw this and thought it sounded just the thing for a bit of late night reading. Proved to be exactly that, kept me awake and reading, and finding excuses the day after to keep reading. Based around MacPherson Station in Antarctica (which I think is fictitious but don't take my word for anything ... Read Review |
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The Cryptic Clue, Amanda HampsonFor somebody who claims to prefer the darker end of the Crime Fiction spectrum, I've been thoroughly enjoying some cosies recently. Although I did originally try to "read" this one via the audio book, but that didn't work, so I switched to the printed form and found myself happily enjoying the 2nd of The Tea Ladies series - THE CRYPTIC CLUE. Anybody who hasn't picked up the first book - THE TEA LADIES - would find no problems in catching up with the main characters in this series - Hazel, Betty and Irene, although their backgrounds are more thoroughly explained in the ... Read Review |
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Madame Brussels, Barbara MinchintonThis is the biography of Caroline Hodgson, the woman who became known as Madame Brussels. She was a legendary brothel keeper in nineteenth century Melbourne, with a laneway in the city now named after her, and yet even during her life, she was an enigmatic and private woman who kept a very low profile, given the high-profile opposition against her. Born in Prussia into a struggling working-class family, she made her way to Melbourne in 1871, alongside her husband, a member of a well-to-family with a story of his own. When he abandoned her to work as a policeman in remote ... Read Review |
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Outback, Michael Davies"A brand new novel that continues the legacy of ‘Master of the Genre’ Desmond Bagley by the co-author of Domino Island." Insurance investigator Bill Kemp made his first appearance in Domino Island - the story of that novel is best told here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Island, but in a nutshell it was first published posthumously in 2019, based on a draft discovered in the author's papers, curated to life ... Read Review |
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The Chancellor, Kati MortonI read and reviewed this book in September / October, posted the review on StoryGraph and then promptly nuked the wrong account there and lost it. So in lieu of the carefully constructed comments I made there, let's have a go at something coherent here. This biography was written by an author who, whilst connected to Angela Merkel's circle and the author of a number of high profile biographies, didn't actually interview Merkel or get any input directly from her. So this is an observational biography as opposed to a detailed memoir (which Merkel is writing ... Read Review |
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Dish, Rhys NicholsonListened to this on audio and loved it. Rhys is one of my favourite comedians, love their honesty and openness, and willingness to talk about the things that make life complicated. Particularly appreciated the idea that somebody with an eating disorder would include recipes in a book like this. I mean I can't attempt any of the recipes personally, but they were there, and the instructions were perfect. (Yes this is tongue in cheek in style, yes there are some messages and, heavens to betsy, some opinions, dotted throughout so no don't listen to it if you don't like their ... Read Review |
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The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone, Gareth Ward & Louise Ward“When we opened Sherlock Tomes people warned us that we’d made a terrible mistake. People warned us that e-readers were taking over. People warned us that we’d never compete with the evil Amazon. The one thing they didn’t warn us about was the murders…” Introducing...the Bookshop Detectives!
I hear a rumour that the joint authors of this book are also the joint owners of a rather quirky little bookshop in their native New Zealand, so no guesses where the idea for the two main characters of this novel came from. Gareth and Eloise own ... Read Review |
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Last One to Leave / Find Us, Benjamin StevensonBit of explaining first - LAST ONE TO LEAVE and FIND US are available as stand-alone ebooks / novellas. They are also available together in printed form under the title FOOL ME TWICE. I read the two separate novellas, but will combine the review here. Starting out with LAST ONE TO LEAVE - it's a murder mystery set within a reality competition. Which frankly, given that all reality shows border on criminal in my eyes, worked before I'd even started. The idea of this one is that there are seven complete ... Read Review |
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Partners in Crime, Stuart MacBrideThis is gathering together of two DI Steel short stories, one featuring DS Logan McRae (Stramash) and the other (DI Steel's Bad Heir Day) has her giving Constable Guthrie a day to remember. DI Steel's Bad Heir Day is set around Christmas with her manically buying / wrapping presents, sorting out a missing person, and dodging the eulogy of somebody who's offered to leave her a lot of cash - if she can say something nice about them. Problem is, the recently deceased's a villain and Steel's conflicted. Well pissed off really. And when DI Steel's pissed off the nearest to her ... Read Review |
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Guilty By DefinitionIf everyone has a book hidden somewhere in them, it seems, these days, it's probably going to be a crime fiction book. It seems inevitable now that "celebrities" will show up at, touting their wares - some with considerably more success than others. Susie Dent, famous for her appearances on Countdown, and in this household, Cats Does Countdown, is a lexicographer and wordsmith. Her non-fiction books on words, and language, are particular favourites around here, so GUILTY BY DEFINITION jumped more than a few 100 places in the queue when it became available at my local ... Read Review |
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A Town Called Treachery, Mitch JenningsThere have been a number of Australian crime fiction books recently that are tackling the effects of poverty / deprivation / loss and family breakdown in small towns, on small boys in particular. A TOWN CALLED TREACHERY is following, successfully, in the footsteps of authors like Mark Brandi and Stephen Orr, all three of whom have delved deeply, and sympathetically into damage, and resilience. Life is very hard for eleven-year-old Matty Finnerty. Mother dead, father's absent even when he's around, and his grandfather is slipping further and further into dementia, he's not ... Read Review |
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The Mystery of the Crooked Man, Tom SpencerThis was one of those fortuitous pickups in the Audio section of the library's BorrowBox app. Probably based on the reference to Magpie Murders in the blurb, which was a TV series I thoroughly enjoyed. It might also be because of the description of the main protagonist:
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