Sorted on book title (not in series order)
Brief but beautifully evocative, sparse yet hugely informative, THE THIEF is another example of Japanese noir sensibility. Told in first person, Nishimura is a pickpocket who targets the rich by preference. Working his highly skilled way through the crowds of Tokyo, he's an unrepentant...Read more
Fans of the lighter, softer side of crime fiction should take a look at the THIRTEEN from the MESDAMES OF MAYHEM.
The book was suggested to me by a rather circuitous route (cousin of / who is a work colleague of / who mentioned it to...), which is the only reason I would have...Read more
Every year the Ngaio Marsh Awards for New Zealand Crime Fiction include something that makes this reader marvel at the depth and quality of work coming out of that country. Dame Fiona Kidman came to THIS MORTAL BOY as (paraphrasing her own words) an accidental crime writer, but she has form...Read more
Melbourne in the late 1980s, and journalist Peter Clancy is working for The Truth. Which, for those of us who were around in those days, in that place, conjures up a very clear vision. Booze, coffee, dodgy goings on and journalism from the... well extreme-tabloid end of the scale....Read more
I'm not good with the end of things that I've really loved but when it came to the Caleb Zelic series by Emma Viskic, it turns out there was only so long I could hold out.
The earlier books in the series, RESURRECTION BAY, AND FIRE CAME DOWN, and DARKNESS FOR LIGHT, introduced...Read more
When three 16 year old boys on a school hiking trip run into perilous surf, the only witness is Grace Disher, the teacher in charge of the trip, who reluctantly defers to the first rule of rescue: don't create another casualty and stands helplessly by as the boys disappear.
...Read more
THE THREE DEATHS OF MAGDALENE LYNTON is the first in a new series from New Zealand author Katherine Hayton, followed by THE SECOND STAGE OF GRIEF and THE ONLY SECRET SHE KEEPS. The last of these, THE ONLY SECRET SHE KEEPS, has been long listed in the 2018 Ngaio Marsh Awards which will come...Read more
Fans of big, larger-than-life political thrillers where the threat is enormous, the conspiracy deep seated, and the need for a hero overwhelming could do worse than get on board with the Dan Taylor series.
Book three, THREE LIVES DOWN, could be read as a standalone, although...Read more
THREE MURDER MYSTERIES by Mary Fortune is an absolute little treasure of a book and I feel so grateful to Lucy Sussex for her pursuit of Mary's story and her writing, and for getting this wonderful little book published.
Mary Fortune had over five hundred crime stories...Read more
Alexis Turner walks into a police station to report her assault by a psychologist - the same man that DS Judith Lee has taken a report about in the past. By the end of that same day Turner appears to have vanished, and Lee is dealing with the guilt that she feels over the poor advice she...Read more
THRILL CITY has arrived. The fourth Simone Kirsch book from Australian writer Leigh Redhead has been much anticipated by fans of this fantastic, Melbourne-based, stripper turned Private Investigator series.
Mind you, it's not just Simone that I was pleased to see back, but Chloe...Read more
Whilst THE THRILL OF IT is a work of fiction, it is, as explained in the Author's Note, inspired and informed by the real-life brutal slayings of six older women on Sydney's North Shore by a man who came to be known as the Granny Killer (and god knows that's such a disrespectful moniker it'...Read more
Not your average challenge this: "why not base a large part of your next crime fiction novel around the story of a disappearing camel". Then set it in a Victorian seaside town, with some tenuous connections to a murder victim discovered along the Murray. Luckily Dorothy Johnston seems to be...Read more
THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE isn't the first book it's taken me quite a long time to read, it's not even the one that took the longest to read, but it did take many attempts before I was able to get any traction. This attempt I read the blurb first-up and did a little Google hunting - something I...Read more
Honey Brown moves to the city and suburbs for her new thriller, shedding light into some very dark corners.
Psychological thrillers are an interesting reading prospect. Often very confrontational, the best of these sorts of books should generate a definite...Read more
Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896, dying at aged forty-two after a tumultuous and way too short life. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, he spent much of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and, when he was arrested for forging prescriptions, in...Read more
“Rebecca waited for the ferry staff to give her the all-clear to walk down the gangway. She felt a thrill of anticipation at finally setting foot on the island. There was something else, too, a voice breathing over her in the faint breeze. She liked to think it was saying Welcome home,...Read more
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim...Read more
Ended up listening to this as an audiobook after mildly panicking that the third in the series was about to lob, and I was still struggling to get to this debut on the teetering unread pile. Glad I did.
Fans of this style of novel will be well aware of the buzz around THE...Read more
TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT arrived recently, intended probably for my science fiction reading partner, but something in the blurb made me want to snaffle it first, and I'm very very glad I did.
This is one of those books that come along every now and again to tip the...Read more
Nobody could be more startled than me when declaring that A TIME OF SECRETS was a most enjoyable book to read. Startled because ostensibly it looks, feels, smells like a romance. With an historical bent, and some mystery within.
Certainly in reading this book the romance is...Read more
There's a lot of crime fiction out there that is all about the investigator and the protagonist, but A TIME TO RUN tips that right on it's ear, setting up a scenario in which an investigator (cop) is the next victim of a mad, dangerous man who makes a sport out of hunting down the women he'...Read more
I've gotten a bit out of wack, but I think TO KILL A CONMAN is the third in the Quake City Investigations series (following on from SHOOTING MESSENGERS and THE POSSUM FUR PLOT). Either way it didn't matter, having read the first this one just flowed on, with central character PI Danny...Read more
I can almost feel a collective intake of breath when many crime fiction fans read a blurb that includes mention of "a brave dog". So right up front, the dog's fine. In other news, this is a very interesting novel that uses a mostly female viewpoint for a story that has a past as well as a...Read more
Iluka, perched above the Pacific Ocean, is a beautiful, isolated, place, home to Ana and her family. Her grandfather's sanctuary, somewhere more complicated for her mother and Ana. It is, however, a place where creativity abounds, and Ana's aunt runs an artists' retreat there, her...Read more
Astrologer, fortuneteller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must in one week solve a mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years. Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, the supreme woman? With...Read more
Honkaku is a subgenre of Japanese Crime Fiction that came into being sometime in the early 1920's. The original definition was "a detective story that mainly focuses on the process of a criminal investigation and values the entertainment derived from pure logical reasoning". The term was...Read more
Obviously when you're a young ex-con you would restart your life outside using the skills that you learnt in jail. It made enormous sense that young ex-con Brendan Lavin would start a bakery under those circumstances. It also made sense that because the bakery is struggling to survive he'd...Read more
Too Easy continues an absolutely terrific series that falls on the noirish side of comic farce. Full Review at: Newtown Review of BooksRead more
Set in 1951, Indochina, TOO FAR FROM ANTIBES is the story of Jean-Luc Guéry and his quest to find the truth behind his brother Oliver's murder. An avid reader of detective fiction, Guéry has a very firm picture of how investigations should proceed, although the likelihood of him being able...Read more