All the Reviews

It's odd, the things that can occur to you when you're reading books.  In the case of SILENT FEAR I just could not stop thinking how glad I was to be a reader and not a writer.  Honestly, how do these people come up with such consistently good characters and excellent plots?  Howell makes her life that little bit more difficult by always bringing in a Paramedic thread, mostly with new characters each book, weaving what happens to them on the job into the plot of an excellent crime fiction / police procedural book.  Even allowing for a background as a paramedic, I've no idea how she ... Read review

1945 - World War 2 is over, and TRUTH DARE KILL is another book set in a post-war period that I've read recently.  Set in London, this is the story of Danny McRae, an ex-policeman who has returned from the war after being captured by the Germans, incurring a severe head injury in the process.  As a result he suffers amnesia and blackouts, which has to make working as a private investigator a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Approached by a woman who wants the possible death of her married lover investigated, McRae takes the job.  Partially because he needs the ... Read review

Re-reading any of Pat Flower's excellent books is always a very bittersweet experience.  Reading SHADOW SHOW even more so, as my edition was published after Flower died, from the effects of pentobarbitone poisoning, taken intentionally, in September 1977.

Patricia Mary Bryson Flower was born in February 1914 in Kent, England.  Her family came to New South Wales in 1928, where she lived firstly at Kyogle and then in Sydney.  In the 1940's, whilst working as a secretary for the New Theatre League, she wrote sketches and plays in her spare time.

Whilst she was ... Read review

Not sure what's weirder, talking to fictional characters, or the feeling that you actually know those fictional characters...  Either way, you have to think it's quite a feat for a writer to get you to the stage where you're more than happy to regard her characters as real people. MILES OFF COURSE is now the third book from Sulari Gentill featuring Rowland Sinclair and his band of supporters - Edna, Milton and Clyde and that feeling of connection, of reality and authenticity continues ... in spades.  

The connection is probably helped by the way that Gentill sets her ... Read review

I have been promising myself for a few years now to go back to some of the older classic Australian Crime Fiction books and reread them with a view to noting something about them on the website.  Mostly because all of these books were read a long time before I started writing my own reviews, and I really need something to check my reactions against if I re-visit them again (which I'm inclined to do every now and then).

Hence ARMS FOR ADONIS, which Wakefield Press published in 1994, with an excellent afterword by Peter Moss and Michael J Tolley.  ARMS FOR ADONIS was first ... Read review

BEYOND FEAR is journalist Jaye Ford's first book, billed as an adrenaline-pumped suspense thriller.  Which, if you're reading it with that aim in mind it absolutely is.  The book starts out with one of those scenes that just make you know something bad's going to happen.  Something very bad.  Four thirty-something women are heading off for a regular girls' weekend away, champagne in hand, towards a remote, recently renovated barn deep in isolated country Australia.  Jodie, the main character of the book, is a woman with a secret from her best friends.  So, when these woman are run off ... Read review

It didn't really come as much of a surprise that somebody has taken up the "girl in the cellar" storyline, although in SHE'S NEVER COMING BACK the victim is an adult woman, kidnapped on her way home from work, held in the cellar of the house opposite her own home.

Talking about this book is going to be a balancing act, as without giving away too much, there was just so much about it that simply did not work, that actually worried me.  Worried me to the point where I got my partner to sit down and read it as well, so that we were then able to discuss the concerns that, in ... Read review

There is life after Rebus, even if it comes in a package of polar opposites.  Rebus was an old school cop - murder squad, Malcolm Fox works for the cops who investigate other cops.  Rebus was more than prepared to ignore rules, stretch boundaries and stomp rather resoundingly all over team work.  Fox looks for just that sort of behaviour. Rebus was an unreformed grumpy drunk, Fox is a more carefully controlled man with a broken marriage, his drinking under control.  They are both solitary men, although with Rebus there was something satisfied about his aloneness, Fox's comes with a ... Read review

Before everything comes across just a bit gushy, there was a point somewhere in the middle of the Cliff Hardy series where I seriously lost interest.  Whilst there are some elements of the books that are always going to be the same, somehow the sameness became very obvious, there was something slightly flat about the storylines and, to this reader at least, nothing much engaged my interest.  I never totally gave up reading the series, but most definitely didn't shove things aside as each new book arrived.

And then, a few years ago, things changed.  Around the time that ... Read review