All the Reviews

The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camilleri

A large part of the attraction of these novels is the wonderfully grumpy, slightly eccentric, marvellously self-involved Inspector Montalbano.  And the food - the meals that Montalbano insists on partaking on a regular basis are frankly, almost obscenely fantastic.  Of course, for the books to be completely satisfactory there has actually got to be a story, and as with all these books, the story here is superbly Italian in its feel.  The financier Emanuele Gargano has disappeared - as has a large amount of money that a lot of local retirees invested with him.  An investigation had ... Read Review

The Ninth Circle, Alex Bell

Reading THE NINTH CIRCLE was a weird experience and that's not just because the subject matter dipped into the supernatural very quickly.  

THE NINTH CIRCLE is partly a mystery and partly fantasy.  When Gabriel wakes up on his own floor he has no idea who he is, where he is, or where the money came from.  He does have some memories of how to function, how to feed himself, how to go out and slowly discover the more intimate details of his life - it's like his own personal past has been knocked out, yet everything else in the world works.  Slowly, via a series of ... Read Review

Maxwell's Point, M.J. Trow

MAXWELL'S POINT is the 12 book in what seems to now be a 14 book series.  Having never read any of the earlier books, I was particularly curious to see whether or not the series could be picked up well down the track without this reader feeling lost, and more than a little confused.  

It did take a few chapters to get used to the sense of humour and the tone of the book.  'Mad Max' is an extremely sarcastic, dryly witty, acerbic sort of a character and the tone and humour is  heavy-handed.  Once you get used to that, and come to understand what the outwardly awkward old ... Read Review

The Watchful Eye, Priscilla Masters

Billed as one of Priscilla Masters Medical Mysteries, this author has written around 15 books, some standalone, some with a central series character. THE WATCHFUL EYE is set, as the synopsis says, in a classic small English village where Daniel Gregory is the local GP.  Recently divorced, with a young daughter of his own, he's essentially a lonely man, kept in the village by his house and his job alone.  But he has a rather odd relationship with many of those patients.  Whilst he is concerned by the plight of little Anna-Louise, he does seem a little ineffectual - more worrying than ... Read Review

Gospel, Sydney Bauer (review by sunniefromoz)

Sydney Bauer’s first book, UNDERTOW was a fast paced thriller and GOSPEL is promoted in the same way.  It doesn’t seem to have quite the same pace and I think it suffers for that.  The first couple of chapters introduce a so many characters that I found it confusing for quite a while.  Bauer’s use of adjectives seemed at times a little unnecessary:  ‘She took  two of the  upturned glasses standing on the crisp white towel  on the black marble counter and poured them both a drink before gliding across the room, extending her long  slender arm and handing him his water.’  It was a very ... Read Review

The Dying Breed, Declan Hughes

THE DYING BREED is the third book in the Irish PI Ed Loy series from Declan Hughes, Ed being an Irishman who went home after living in the US for many years.  A broken marriage and the tragic death of his young daughter are events that shaped him there, but his childhood in Ireland shaped him even more firmly, and a large number of the characters that he works with on a daily basis are connections from the past.  But he's a PI (in a place where that's still a bit of a novelty) and he's ready for his next case (and pay cheque), so he takes on a very odd investigation in THE DYING BREED ... Read Review

Inside Their Minds, Rochelle Jackson

One of the strongest messages you get from a true crime book like INSIDE THEIR MINDS is that no matter how hard we try, no matter how much analysis goes on, there is something about so many of the more notorious criminals in our world that the rest of us will simply never fathom.

Rochelle Jackson looks at some of the most notorious, mass murderer Martin Bryant, sex offender Karen Ellis, serial killer Ivan Milat, serial arsonist Peter Burgess, armed robber and serial escapee Brenden Abbott, child killer Kathleen Folbigg, murdered Matthew Wales and gangland killer Carl ... Read Review

A Florentine Death, Michele Giuttari

Michele Giuttari is a real-life Italian policeman, head of the Squadra Mobile for around 8 years in his own right, so it's not too much of a stretch to believe that his central protagonist, Michele Ferrara, is more than a little autobiographical.  The author has allowed his character to be slightly quirky, but undoubtedly he is the hero of the piece, and given the cases that Giutarri investigated, including the Monster of Florence, the reader has to assume that some of the events aren't that far from real life as well.  

As the bodies are found, seemingly pointlessly ... Read Review

Into the Darklands and Beyond, Nigel Latta

Nigel Latta did a session at the Crime & Justice Festival earlier this year, that to be brutally honest, we all ended up attending more by good luck than our own good judgement (the session we'd booked was cancelled) so we switched.  I can't remember the last time I felt so lucky to switch to a session about subject matter that so isn't something you want to think about.  Not only does Nigel Latta make you think - he makes you laugh - he makes you squirm uncomfortably - he makes you just a bit weepy at points.  Mostly he makes you glad that there are people like him doing the ... Read Review