Crime Scene: ADRIAN DEANS Straight Jacket. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
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...
Crime Scene: HONEY BROWN Through the Cracks. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
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...
Crime Scene: KATHERINE HOWELL Deserving Death. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
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,...
Crime Scene: PM NEWTON Beams Falling. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
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...
Crime Scene: WENDY JAMES The Lost Girls. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
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...
Crime Scene: CANDICE FOX Hades. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
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...
Crime Scene: PD VINER The Last Winter of Dani Lancing; LESLEY THOMSON The Detective’s Daughter. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
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...Crime Scene: GARRY DISHER Bitter Wash Road; BARRY MAITLAND The Raven’s Eye: A Brock and Kolla Mystery. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
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...CHRIS WOMERSLEY Cairo. Reviewed by Robyne Young
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...ROBERT HARRIS An Officer and a Spy. Reviewed by Peter Corris
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,...Crime Scene: DAVID WHISH-WILSON Zero at the Bone; STUART LITTLEMORE Harry Curry, Rats and Mice. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
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...
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