All the Reviews

Slightly girly, crazy comic crime fiction is not my normal cup of tea, and add a plethora of recipes and this reader should, by rights, be groaning and moaning and whinging. But not with The Culinary Crime / Café La Femme series of which DROWNED VANILLA is the second book. (As opposed to THE BLACKMAIL BLEND 1.5 which is a collection of short stories).

Pitched at a very particular market this isn't indepth, psychological analysis of crime and consequences. If anything more time and effort is devoted to the search for the perfect Ice-Cream recipe than is expended on the ... Read review

Commencing a blurb with a question implies that somewhere along the line the book will provide an answer. In the case of CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET? "Why do some people decide to get married when everyone around them would seem to agree that marriage, at least for the two people in question is a terrifically bad idea?" didn't ever seem to be asked, let alone answered.

It is, however, the story of a car crash of a marriage, but not whether or not two people are suited. It is even the story of how one partner does or doesn't cope at the rapid mental disintegration of the other. ... Read review

When Miranda Jack is car-jacked on a motorway in Sydney it's just one more thing to go wrong in a life littered with bad times. As the story progresses and you find out how many hurdles Jack has jumped in her life you'd be forgiven for wondering why she keeps getting up in the morning. When something in her background and training as a journalist makes her seek to empathise with her abductor, that idea of keep them talking and engaged and they may develop some connection with you, it means she finds out quite a bit about Brendan Walsh. Including that they have met before, but not who ... Read review

A debut novel, HIGH BEAM is set in Hobart, Tasmania featuring DI John Mahoney. Mahoney has recently returned to his hometown and is an unhappy man in his personal and professional lives. The death of high profile victim Brad Finch doesn't make him any happier what with time pressures from above, intense media interest and a lot of shady goings on in the world of the Tassie Devils Football Club and the business interests of its board and supporters.

Non-fans of football might find it hard to understand why it is that a football club can be the centre of such power and ... Read review

The first of the Peter Clancy books from T.W. Lawless, HOMECOUNTRY takes Clancy to exactly that - home to the town where he grew up, in outback Queensland to bury his mother. With his credo of never looking back this is the first time he's returned to Clarke's Flat since he left, so for the first time he's forced to confront many of the reasons why he left in the first place. And it's not a comfortable outlook.

There's much that's happened in his home town to him, to his family and to friends and people who are still in town. There's questions around his own father's ... Read review

THE FOURTH REICH is the third in the Mitchell Parker series. FBI Agents, with a decided "Australian" feeling about their banter, Parker's team have a fair bit of history which might mean that starting out with the third book is not absolutely ideal. Not that it's not a very readable book in it's own right, and for this reader, the intrigue of the backstory just meant that the earlier books made it onto the must read list immediately.

In thriller style, THE FOURTH REICH starts out at breakneck pace, and that doesn't give up at any point. Combine that with an intriguing ... Read review

A COMPULSION TO KILL is one of those true crime books that reads like a ripping great yarn. It's an engaging method of delivering history, telling the stories of (in this instance) a range of Tasmania's earliest serial killers, setting them in a vivid example of the landscape in which their actions played out, creating a chillingly realistic version of early white Australia.

As outlined in the blurb it covers a series of cases beginning in 1806 with the first documented serial killers Brown and Lemon, finishing with the unresolved Parkmount case in 1862. The cruelty and ... Read review

A bit of a surprise package, IN THE DYING DAYS is an engaging tale of an ex-cop, private investigator plying his trade on the means streets of ... Canberra.

Starting off with a bit of business about a son looking for his father's story, the action quickly shifts to Canberra in 1975. Barry Flynn is a rather down-market PI, who, courtesy of a solicitor connection, finds himself following a very wealthy, well-connected philandering husband. Weirdly though, this wife isn't looking for evidence of unfaithfulness, rather she just seems to want to know what he's up to - kept an ... Read review

When they say "write what you know" Anne Buist seems to have taken that advice very much to heart, especially when it comes to the clinical and working experience of her central character - Dr Natalie King. Hard to say about the Ducati, history of mental health problems and clothes sense.

MEDEA'S CURSE starts out in extreme acceleration mode with the back story of a contretemps on the steps of the Court, followed by an encounter with Crown Prosecutor (and later sex interest) Liam O'Shea, and the disappearance of a child. The father of the missing child was also the father ... Read review