All the Reviews

Personally, and not just because the idea of Lycra and clicking around in those weird riding shoes makes me shudder, the idea of being sent to the Siberia of the Mountain Bike Police certainly sounds like a rather extreme punishment. Especially as Tony 'Rocket" Laver is adamant that the bloke he shot fired first. And he was a serial suspect in a series of armed robberies. So you might think that Laver is justified in being more than a bit miffed at the political machinations that are overt in his demotion.

Although he can't really blame just the demotion for his rocky ... Read review

The Hanne Wilhelmsen series from Norwegian author Anne Holt is another one of those Scandinavian series that have been translated completely out of order. For reasons which, as usual, escape me completely. So <insert standard whinge about how profoundly annoying that is>, and onto BLIND GODDESS which is the book that started the whole thing off.

It would be bad enough to discover a battered body when jogging in the morning, but you'd doubt lawyer Karen Borg would also have been expecting to be called in as defence counsel for the Dutchman who is found wandering, ... Read review

Look, let's just admit that I'm a huge fan of this series and get it over and done with. Love DI Steel, love her glorious over the topness, love McRae's constant sooking and all being put upon. Love the madness of the world in which they have to try to operate as functioning police members, love the supporting cast, love the gallows humour. Love the whole damn thing. Even love those that don't quite live up to the other books in the series (and let's face it - we're talking bees d's worth of not living up to that which came before).

I'll therefore plead to some lacking in ... Read review

I was sent this book to read for a review, and I've now made numerous attempts to read it and I just can't.

It's not just that the wait for something to happen seems interminable, I think the fundamental problem I'm having is with the relationships. 

Alex is gorgeous, a successful and supposedly wonderful man, who is looking for love.

With his sexy secretary, friend and occasional bit on the side, well by his side.

Even after he meets Hope on an online dating site and plunges headfirst into love, marriage and the whole damn thing. ... Read review

In TAMAM SHUD: THE SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY, Kerry Greenwood has taken the opportunity to look back. At a case that continues to remain unsolved since the body of a man showed up on a beach in Adelaide in 1948. At the traces of the investigation that remain. At a much loved father. And finally, at some of her own crime fiction, written around the same case. This approach is undoubtedly going to make this book quite a polariser. It's obvious that some readers will love it, and some readers will loathe it. I suspect both of those camps are going to take up their position with comparable ... Read review

THE PRICE OF FAME is firstly RC Daniells' first crime fiction book (she writes fantasy under her fullname Rowena Cory Daniells), albeit with a hefty paranormal subtext. It wasn't a book that I was particularly clamouring to read, what with being mildly allergic to anything paranormal.

To be fair though, THE PRICE OF FAME, doesn't start out really pushing the paranormal aspects. Sure there are increasingly odd goings on, and not just moving shaving kits, a cat that appears out of nowhere, water droplets that won't go away, strange feelings and odd dreams. There's also a ... Read review

A standalone novel from the author best known for his Bob Skinner series, THE LONER was a real surprise package.

Styled as an autobiographical account of the author's friend, journalist Xavier (Xavi) Ailsado, THE LONER is partially the recollections of the central character, partially the observations of the narrator. It's an affectionate telling of Xavi's life, from his beginnings in Scotland, the son of a local mother and a Spanish refugee. His father and grandparents having settled in Edinburgh after they were forced to flee from Franco's regime. It's a story of family ... Read review

I really think that whenever I feel like a bit of a whinge about the way life is these days, I should read a book like EUGENIA. Eugenia Falleni was a woman born into a large Italian Family, who grew up in New Zealand, and spent most of her all too short life in Australia, living most of it as a man.

Mark Tedeschi QC looks at what happened to Eugenia in her early life, a rape and subsequent birth of a daughter which complicated her life even more, how she functioned in day-to-day life, her first marriage and the death of her wife for which she was charged with murder, ... Read review

You can't help thinking that this is an interesting idea for a book, the story of one of the most famous real-life spies, told from the point of view of Philby's own life. Now the book and it's publicity material is quite tricky about the background of this book. Whilst there's nothing there to indicate whether or not this is a true story or fictional, it's written in a way that implies that the whole thing is the true story of Kim Philby's early years.

YOUNG PHILBY is however, a novel. It expands on what is known about Philby's life after Cambridge University (where he, ... Read review