Crime Scene: JANE HARPER The Dry. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
There is a very good reason for all the buzz around about The Dry, another great debut thriller from an Australian writer. In a country with a lot of mythology built around rural connections, it has always come as a surprise how much of Australia’s rural-based...
Crime Scene: ZANE LOVITT Black Teeth. Reviewed by Chris Maher
Zane Lovitt, winner of the 2013 Ned Kelly Award, has produced an original Melbourne take on the noir crime novel. Black Teeth is peopled by loners. A protagonist who suffers breathless anxiety in public, his neighbour who cloisters herself away in her flat, an absent...
Crime Scene: ANN TURNER Out of the Ice; LA LARKIN Devour. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Two Australian thriller writers have each set their latest novels amid the beauty and danger of Antarctica. Antarctica is one of the planet’s last great wilderness areas – for some, a place ripe for plundering, for others, an area that must be protected. Ann...
Crime Scene: BRIAN STODDART A Straits Settlement. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
A third Le Fanu crime novel in under two years will keep Brian Stoddart’s growing army of readers happy. When the story opens in the 1920s we find Chris Le Fanu undertaking higher duties as Acting Inspector-General of Police for the Madras Presidency with continuing...
Crime Scene: ANNA WESTBROOK Dark Fires Shall Burn. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Inspired by the true events surrounding an unsolved murder, Dark Fires Shall Burn is set in Sydney’s Newtown in the aftermath of World War II. The title of Anna Westbrook’s debut novel is wonderful. Based around a stanza from the Australian poet Dorothy...
Crime Scene: LS HILTON Maestra. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
A new femme fatale is born in Maestra, an addictive erotic thriller set against the glamorous backdrop of the European art world. Meet Judith Rashleigh: sexy, educated, poised. By day she is employed as a junior art expert at British Pictures, one of London’s best art...
Crime Scene: LUCY SUSSEX Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The mothers of the mystery genre. Reviewed by Emma Ashmere
The groundbreaking Women Writers and Detectives is a jam-packed rethink of the history of crime/mystery/detective fiction. Melbourne-based Lucy Sussex has won awards for her own crime and sci-fi stories, and for the neo-Victorian ‘puzzle novel’ The Scarlet Rider. Her...
Crime Scene: MEG AND TOM KENEALLY The Soldier’s Curse: Book One, the Monsarrat series. Reviewed by Chris Maher
Literary icon Tom Keneally has teamed up with daughter Meg to launch a detective series set in Australia’s brutal past. Readers can feel totally confident in the veracity of the convict-era setting of The Soldier’s Curse. Although Booker laureate Tom needs no...
Crime Scene: MARTIN MCKENZIE-MURRAY A Murder Without Motive: The killing of Rebecca Ryle. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
A Murder Without Motive is an intriguing and compelling true crime with much to say about the Australian suburbs and the national psyche. Martin McKenzie-Murray, the Saturday Paper’s chief correspondent, has written a gripping true crime story about a murder that...
Crime Scene: LUCY SUSSEX Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and The Mystery of the Hansom Cab. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, written in the mid 1880s, was a world-wide publishing phenomenon. The story of its publication deserves a book like Blockbuster!. Lucy Sussex is a renowned crime fiction expert, researcher and editor, originally from New Zealand, now from...
Crime Scene: CATH FERLA Ghost Girls. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Steeped in the smells and sounds of Sydney’s Chinatown, weighted by the sinister atmosphere of a private world of terrible crimes, Ghost Girls is a remarkable debut novel. The combination of plot, character and setting in Ghost Girls is perfectly balanced, and the...
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