Sorted on book title (not in series order)
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
Little housework first - Melissa Chan is a pseudonym for Dr Jocelynne Scutt, Australian feminist lawyer, writer and commentator. TOO RICH was published in 1991 by Spinifex Press, and I distinctly remember when reading it originally at the time of publication, feeling somewhat "cause...Read more
You can probably imagine the reaction - firstly the blurb "oh no, extreme dislike segueing into romantic tension AGAIN". The front of the book - Stalker. Arsonist. Killer. "deep groaning". The opening lines where a young homeless girl is dying - not caring what happens to her if her much...Read more
It couldn't ever be said that the loss of his Private Investigator's licence has slowed Cliff Hardy down. In TORN APART, the death of his look-alike cousin in Cliff's house, an arrest for importing illegal drugs, a trip to Ireland, a gathering of Irish Traveller descendants, a brush with...Read more
This is the second book translated from this author and it starts out with a torso in a bag being found on a beach in Sweden. The only clue to the identify of the body is a tattoo, and the body, as well as dismembered, has been horribly mutilated.
This crime is soon connected...Read more
1973, from art school to shared housing in run-down Leeds, and Jude (aka Toto) is a chaotic, wild child, living a reckless, slightly crazy life, thoroughly enjoying her youth, blissfully unconnected with the news of random attacks on woman that keep showing up on the news.
What...Read more
In an interesting twist THE TOWER is the first crime novel from former publisher, journalist turned author Michael Duffy. Set in Sydney, the book will introduce readers to two Sydney police characters, the young Detective Senior Constable Nicholas Troy and the older Detective Sergeant Jon...Read more
There have been a number of Australian crime fiction books recently that are tackling the effects of poverty / deprivation / loss and family breakdown in small towns, on small boys in particular. A TOWN CALLED TREACHERY is following, successfully, in the footsteps of authors like Mark...Read more
Jane McDonald has been working as a contract tracer in Sydney's western suburbs, during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Contact tracers get used to working with a huge range of people and they expect to patiently work through all sorts of issues, making sure that everyone keeps themselves, and the...Read more
There are a precious few Paddy Richardson books tucked within the stacks of unread novels around here - sort of like secreted Easter eggs, to be unearthed and devoured when required. Needing something that would be reliably good recently, TRACES OF RED was just the thing as Paddy Richardson...Read more
THE TRAIN RIDER is book three featuring Darian Richards - ex-cop, now vigilante walking a very fine line between right and wrong. He's also a violent, psychotic killer magnet.
In this case, THE TRAIN RIDER is the name of the book and the serial rapist and killer who Richards...Read more
A murder in the quiet English village of Chippingholt is only the first in a series of trials that will shape the lives of Brenda Scarse and her lover Harold Burton. Who is the mysterious stranger, so closely resembling Brenda's father, who was seen near the scene of the crime? And why does...Read more
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
Winston Churchill
There are some writers who you’d like to read but just never seem to get around to. Until I’d read Transcription, in my case Kate...Read more