All the Reviews

Australian readers could probably be forgiven for slightly different expectations when sitting down to read a book labelled "The New Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell mystery".  This isn't our Mad Max - this is a particularly English style of Mad Max more than a hemisphere away from our own version.

Peter Maxwell is a History teacher, head of sixth form, and a slightly older man with a considerably younger partner, DS Jacquie Carpenter.  And a baby son Nolan, a love of bicycles, a decidedly cavalier attitude to keeping ones nose out of matters that don't concern you, and an almost ... Read review

NEST OF VIPERS is the second book in the Empress of Rome series. Author Luke Devenish has a resume that seems to hint at an ability to build a fantasy world. A novelist, screenwriter, playwright and Lecturer, Devenish was a Script Producer with Neighbours and a writer on Home and Away. Ancient Rome in Devenish's hands is a complicated, gory, deadly, lustful, obsessive place full of elaborate and complicated characters (maybe that's where the Neighbours and Home and Away comparisons have to stop...although I'd expect that comment's going to get me more hate mail).

NEST OF ... Read review

Originally published in the 1940's the Gervase Fen mysteries are one of those rights of passage for crime lovers.  Or at least they were in my house as I was growing up.  Vintage Books have done us all an enormous favour in turning their attention back to some of the classic books - and this set from Edmund Crispin is a real job to behold.  Now I have read a lot of these books before, but the chance to reread them, without having to rely on falling on fragile old copies in second-hand bookshops is a joy.

And these are still very good crime stories.  Slightly eccentric in ... Read review

MOSQUITO CREEK, the first novel from Robert Engwerda is set in 1855 on the northern Victorian goldfields.  It's a particularly pleasing experience to read about this area of the goldfields, deep in flood, when we've spent such a long desperate period in drought.

Engwerda has done a fantastic job at putting the reader into this location and the time period.  There is a real sense of place and time, evoking the sheer weirdness of the alliances, tension, desperation and transience of the Goldfields.  It's very easy to forget, in this day of easy transportation, just how much ... Read review

Anybody with a passing interest in notorious Australian "identities" in the not so distant past isn't going to take too long to twig on whom Mendoza is based, and that same reader probably is going to be excused for any guesses about the writer who narrates this fictional book.

Basically the story is that a journalist working for The Australian Jewish Times makes a complete hash of a story and ends up being fired by the editor.  Circumstances intervene, things happen, he finds himself interviewing / writing the life story of Sydney gangster Jacob Mendoza.  Mendoza is what ... Read review

THE TROIKA DOLLS is the first novel from new Australian Writer Miranda Darling, and it's a really really interesting debut for a number of reasons.

Stevie Duveen is (according to the blurb) "A new kind of heroine for a new kind of world".  To be honest I'm not sure I know what that means - but I do agree that Stevie's a very good sort of a heroine.  Emotionally and physically fragile, tiny, gorgeous, brilliant, gifted in seven languages and all sorts of combat, Stevie is a strategic analyst working for an organisation that guards, protects and assesses threats to all ... Read review

Tara Sharp is a newish entrant in the Australian amateur investigator / mad cap girl / chick lit style of crime fiction.  With the added extra of a bit of paranormal ability, as in aura reading.

There's been a lot of entrants in this sort of slightly out of control, breathlessly 20-something, girl on the run, living in straightened circumstances, forging a way in the world type books recently, although I'm struggling to think of another one that has that added paranormal feature (that's not to say that there's not lots and lots of them out there).  Tara's not overtly ... Read review

What would you do if your teenage sister just simply disappeared when you were a little girl.  And then reappeared at about the same time as your mother's estate was to be distributed?

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? by Wendy James explores what Susan and Ed Middleton do when Susan's long-lost sister Karen - now known as Carly - reappears in response to a lawyer's advertisement.  Susan isn't sure she'll be able to identify her sister, and Carly is definitely not the same sort of woman as Susan - but there do seem to be some memories they share, some nicknames, or events that gel, ... Read review

I'm one of those people who have vaguely heard of the Kangaroo Gang but didn't really know many of the specific details.  What I never realised was how wide the reach of this gang of thieves was.

KING OF THIEVES is a wonderful tale about the exploits of a brazen bunch of Aussie thieves and shoplifters who hit London and the Continent, with aplomb, starting in the mid 1960s.

It's also one of those books that makes you feel slightly guilty - it's hard not admire this bunch of astounding, brazen, clever, and straight out cunning band of crooks.  One of the ... Read review