All the Reviews

Everyone is going to be talking about EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE, because it's fiendishly clever, dryly funny (well as funny as a crime novel with a very high body count is going to get), complicated without being overly so, different, and well, relatable, in a weird sort of way.

Right from the very start our narrator, Ern Cunningham, has a lot on. Professionally he self publishes "How To Write" crime books, with his advice based on Ronald Knox's '10 Commandments of Detective Fiction' from 1929 (well worth googling although they are all (with one edit) ... Read review

Set in small-town New Zealand, Boy Fallen is beautifully written and elegantly plotted crime fiction.

Auckland Detective Brooke Palmer returns to her home town of Taonga to support her best friend Lana when the body of Lana’s teenage son is found at the base of the local falls. Full review at Newtown Review of BooksRead review

Given the juxtaposition of this review, and my recent one for THE STONING, I probably should mention that Aoife Clifford was the author I was discussing rural noir versus rural crime with. To my eye, Clifford is one of the great writers of rural crime in Australia at the moment, and she's right when she says the difference between her books and the more noirish styled ones like THE STONING is her self-professed affection, and sense of hope for the small towns that she sets her action in.

WHEN WE FALL is the story of Alex Tillerson and her mother and the small coastal town ... Read review

Auē: 1. (verb) (-tia) to cry, howl, groan, wail, bawl.

Nō tō mātau mōhiotanga kua mate, kāore i ārikarika te auē o ō mātau waha (HP 1991:19). / When we knew that she had died we howled our eyes out.

https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/524

Understanding the meaning of the verb auē doesn't quite cover the visceral, gut-wrenching capacity of it in the way that the novel AUĒ depicts it. The characters in this novel experience it in all sorts of ways ... Read review

I was one of those girls, right up the back of the venue, watching The Angels. The band mostly keeping to the shadows, statues in the dark, playing hard driving, LOUD, guitar based rock and roll. In the spotlights, at the front, more often than not, hanging from the scaffolding, dressed in all sorts of costumery / theatrical and impossibly gorgeous, was Doc Neeson. Teasing (antagonising) the audience, throwing himself around with (what turned out to be) no regard for his personal health at all. In those days, ridiculously tall, utterly mesmerising with his wild hair, wild / driven ... Read review

The fourth novel in the Fiji Islands Mysteries series, DEATH SENTENCE is slower, more measured, and reflective than the earlier entries, which makes sense, given the subject matter.

For those new to the series, it's based around the investigative team of DI Joe Horseman, a famous rugby player, returned to his homeland and working in the local CID alongside Susie Singh, a dedicated and passionate investigator in her own right. Perhaps because of the different ethnicities of these two characters - Horseman of long-standing Fijian background, and Singh, who is Fijian Indian ... Read review

The first in the Mantra-6 series (Nitrate has been released now), the author of BRIMSTONE, Russel Hutchings, is a former SAS Warrant Officer with over 20 years' service in the Regiment. That experience shows very clearly in the authority of the action sequences, and the way that operational details are laid out, and the feelings and experiences of operational staff described. In this case central character John Devereaux, is a SAS Warrant Officer, on secondment to ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service).

Everything operational in this novel says vivid experience, ... Read review

THE WAY IT IS NOW is another new character from Garry Disher, mining some familiar territory for him, in that we've got a cop who is struggling with his past, present and future. Even for a youngish man, Charlie Deravin has been a cop for years, and there's a lot of backstory to his life. Missing mother for 20 or so years, believed murdered; tricky relationship with his father, and his new wife, the woman who was there at the breakdown of Charlie's parents marriage. A brother who blames their father, but stays close to Charlie. Who now has his own failed marriage, a university aged ... Read review

When Paddy Moriarty and his dog Kellie disappeared into thin air, an investigation was launched, a search undertaken, but this is sinkhole territory, and it's Larrimah and it seems nothing is ever straight-forward in these parts.

Oddly enough, you'd think in a town of 11 people somebody would have seen / known something of where Paddy and Kellie went, but in this case not only is what happened to Paddy a total mystery, it turns out most everything to do with Paddy is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, buried in layers of minding your own business.

There's ... Read review