Sorted on book title (not in series order)
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...Read more
Didn’t know you were in the mood for a legal thriller? Legal thrillers can be terrific reading sorbets when you are longing for a bit of law and order in your crime fiction reading. BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT fits the bill in spades.
Elliot Rook always knew that one of the...Read more
Flames crackle and stability just went up in smoke.
When Elizabeth’s happy new life goes up in flames and mortal danger is knocking down her door once again, she struggles to stay sane. Only when she falls into the trap her aunt’s killer has set for her does she realize the danger...Read more
The second book in the Women of Our Time series, and follow up to the outstanding GIRL FROM THE TREE HOUSE, BEYOND THE TREE HOUSE again features Elizabeth and a number of her multiple personalities. Elizabeth has DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and for more on how she survives with...Read more
After a few attempts, managed to finish BIG LITTLE LIES over the weekend. There's a reason this has been a bit of a chore explained below.
Funny and quite cleverly constructed, BIG LITTLE LIES is about every day lives. If you're a mother, an ex-wife, a daughter, a second wife or...Read more
Any book that promises the possibility that love will ruin everything has to get a boost in the To Be Read stakes. Karen and Ray are classic loners - disconnected from "the norm" for more reasons than just that she's an armed robber and he's a kidnapper for hire. They are of a "certain...Read more
A new Pufferfish novel will always be a thing of joy - whiteboard lists or no whiteboard lists and BIG RED ROCK fits the bill perfectly. Of course you will need to have a love of self-deprecating wit that's so dry you'd swear it originated in Uluru rather than Hobart. You will need to like...Read more
There are probably more, but immediate reactions on getting a book of short stories, is that there are precious few Crime Fiction short story collections by Australian authors around (I'm probably about to be proven totally wrong!). But there's something very engaging about a good...Read more
There are probably more, but immediate reactions on getting a book of short stories, is that there are precious few Crime Fiction short story collections by Australian authors around (I'm probably about to be proven totally wrong!). But there's something very engaging about a good...Read more
Music and popular culture provide the backdrop to this long-awaited new Billy Glasheen novel.
It’s no surprise that Peter Doyle, authority on popular culture, slide guitarist, university professor and social historian, has written a series of novels that...Read more
Remember when you were a kid and The Adventurous Four, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven were just the ticket for an exciting read (okay so you have to be of "a certain age" for that to apply), but I still remember how satisfying those books were. An adventure, a puzzle that had to be...Read more
One of the very best things about reading the entrants in the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards is just how varied a bunch of books they were. BIRNAM WOOD is a eco-thriller, set on New Zealand's South Island, serving up a hefty dose of challenges for the reader to be going on with.
The...Read more
Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret…
Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and...Read more
Something went wrong in the reading universe a while ago and I missed that this had been sitting in the unread list, when I picked up and enjoyed the second in the series - A SONG FOR THE DYING.
Which weirdly turned out...Read more
Mikael is a young man, half Finnish, half New Zealander, who never really knew his father, or the story of his mysterious death. In search of answers - about himself as well, he teams up with Pekka Wall, an acerbic editor and translator of famous science fiction novels, as eccentric as his...Read more
The second in a series set in London and a debut legal thriller show some of the exciting variety of Australian crime fiction on offer. Review at: ...Read more
Bitter Wash Road is the latest police procedural from Garry Disher. Introducing a new protagonist, and set in the isolated South Australian wheatbelt, this is a book that delves deep into corruption, influence and power. Full review at ...Read more
BLACK BUTTERFLY is the third Secret Service novel featuring tall, dark, suave spy about town Lucifer Box. Although it will come as a bit of a shock to readers of these books to discover that Lucifer has gotten old, fast approaching retirement. Good grief! Old age comes to Lucifer Box ......Read more
The fourth book in the Georgie Harvey and John Franklin series, this series is set, in the main, around Daylesford and the goldfields area, with BLACK CLOUD mostly in Korweinguboora, one of my all time favourite place names (and locales). When I was a kid my grandfather loved heading out to...Read more
BLACK ICE is the first of German author Hans Werner Kettenbach's novels to be translated into English, and it's taken me from it's original publication date of 2005 to read it. Which is good in one way as there appears to have been more books since then. Which are now on my immediate buy...Read more
Leah Giarratano, forensic psychologist, crime fiction writer and consummate storyteller has just released her third novel - BLACK ICE. As with both of the earlier books, Giarratano takes the reader deep into a specific world of crime and criminal behaviour, the theme in BLACK ICE is illegal...Read more
I reread THE BLACK PATH last weekend. I did that because despite originally having read and reviewed it a while ago, it was one of those books that every time I spied it on a shelf, I was drawn to thinking about again. And I wanted to find out why.
At the time that I...Read more
THE BLACK PATH is the sort of book that you need to read with your preconceptions and expectations firmly locked in a drawer. Having not read the second book in the series yet, I know something happened to Rebecka in that book, but the details aren't important to understanding, from the...Read more
Not so long ago, you couldn't move for serial killer novels, and a lot of readers (including this one) were over them. Since then the "popularity" does seem to have waned, and there's a marked tendency to make that those that do show up - very good indeed. As it was with BLACK RIVER which...Read more
Having really enjoyed the first Jack Susko book, A DEADLY BUSINESS, it was music to my ears to find that the second book was on its way. THE BLACK RUSSIAN sees not just the return of Jack - but the return of all of Jack's problems - financial and personal.
In THE BLACK RUSSIAN...Read more
Disco from the late 1970's / early 1980's being a formative part of my early years, some of the sheer enjoyment that BLACK SAILS, DISCO INFERNO provided could be put down to nostalgia, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Based on the ancient story of Tristan and Isolde,...Read more
The author of this series of now 2 novels, is a bestselling historical fiction writer, and you can tell just how impeccable her research is, even without reading the author's notes at the end of both novels, expanding on the thinking, and investigations that went into the construction of...Read more
It often pays not to read the blurb of a novel - can't help thinking something that's based in the "fascinating world of Victorian funeral customs and featuring Sydney's first female undertaker", may not scream read me to your average crime fiction reader. If there is such a thing....Read more
“They called us the “children of the forest,” we descendants of the people who had inhabited the woods of Calabrian massif for millennia, we who’d transformed it into a place of evil, we who’d given up the Aspromonte to conquer another world.”
“...Read more
When THE MIDNIGHT PROMISE won the Ned Kelly Award in 2013 it was impossible not to agree wholeheartedly with the judges' decision. That book telegraphed clearly here was an author to be followed closely. Three years on, BLACK TEETH is worth the wait. Unusual, dark, often funny, always...Read more