by NRB | 29 May 2014 | Crime Scene |
This is crime fiction with a humorous bent. In Straight Jacket Adrian Deans gives life to Morgan Tanjenz, an enigmatic and compelling leading man to whom everything is a game. Tanjenz is a lawyer living in the affluent suburb of Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore. A...
by NRB | 13 May 2014 | Crime Scene |
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 reaction in...
by NRB | 3 Apr 2014 | Crime Scene |
Deserving Death is the seventh novel in the Ella Marconi series from ex-paramedic Australian author, Katherine Howell. This is a series that just keeps getting better and better. It’s not just solid plotting and good characters that make this novel work so well,...
by NRB | 18 Mar 2014 | Crime Scene |
The second book in the Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly series, Beams Falling is an exciting crime thriller that works on many levels. Although a complete read on its own, Beams Falling benefits from the background of the first book in this series, The Old School, in which...
by NRB | 6 Mar 2014 | Crime Scene |
Wendy James’s sixth novel is a thrilling Jack-in-the-box that centres on an unsolved murder from the 1970s and its impact decades later on those left behind. Is the past something we can ever truly put behind us, or do our old traumas continue to linger over our...
by NRB | 18 Feb 2014 | Crime Scene |
There’s a constant sense of danger as concurrent stories of past and present creep towards each other in this intricate and gritty novel. Hades is not the kind of book to snuggle up in bed with at night – it would undoubtedly give you nightmares. This disturbing...
by NRB | 23 Jan 2014 | Crime Scene
The not always benign power of memory, and the vagaries of coincidence: these two recent British crime novels are shining examples of the flexibility of the genre. Every now and then crime novels come along that bend the genre and take it into new possibilities. The...
by NRB | 5 Nov 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Garry Disher introduces a new character and Barry Maitland continues his successful Brock and Kolla series. 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...
by NRB | 10 Oct 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Award-winning novelist Chris Womersley delivers a provocative portrait of the artist as a young art thief. There is a sense of anticipation and foreboding present throughout Chris Womersley’s third novel, Cairo, as its teenaged protagonist Tom Button, with a...
by NRB | 8 Oct 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The Dreyfus Case, notorious for its betrayals and anti-Semitism, inspires this new thriller from the author of Fatherland. In the Acknowledgments to his new novel Robert Harris thanks his wife: … who has been obliged to share our house with successive waves of Nazis,...
by NRB | 17 Sep 2013 | Crime Scene |
Frank Swann PI moves through the wild and sometimes dangerous world of 1970s mining-boom-town Perth, and in the law courts of Sydney, Harry Curry rests his case. In Zero at the Bone, the second book in this series, Frank Swann has moved more sideways than on. Working...
by NRB | 20 Aug 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The winner of the 2013 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award, this impressive historical crime novel gives a hard-edged depiction of the mindlessness of war. The historical crime novel is a sub-genre and a tricky one. The writer has to satisfy, as it were, two separate...
JUNE WRIGHT Mother Paul series. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm6 December 2024June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone [ … ]
ANDREW O’HAGAN Caledonian Road. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey5 December 2024This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is [ … ]
IAIN RYAN The Dream. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith3 December 2024Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and [ … ]
MARINA YUSZCZUK Thirst. Reviewed by Ann Skea28 November 2024Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in [ … ]