Crime Scene: ARNALDUR INDRIDASON Black Skies; QUENTIN BATES Cold Comfort
Iceland’s economic crash gives texture to two crime novels. Arnaldur Indridason is a well-known and best-selling Icelandic author, many of whose novels have been translated into English. His books are police-procedurals, usually featuring detective Erlendur Sveinsson...JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL Forecast: Turbulence
These stories of family trauma find their echoes in the elements. In ‘Moon River’, the chapter of memoir that comes at the end of this collection of short stories, there is an image of the Brisbane River swollen and raucous in flood. It occurs six months after the...KATE FORSYTH Bitter Greens
An imaginative interweaving of magic, fairytale and history. Kate Forsyth is well known for her conventional fantasy novels – particularly for the Witches of Eileanan and Rhiannon’s Ride series. She’s also a poet, an author of several children’s fantasy books and a...EMILY PERKINS The Forrests. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
Families and their enduring effect on individuals give the author of Novel About My Wife a deep well to draw from. Dorothy and Evelyn, the sisters at the heart of Emily Perkins’s novel The Forrests, are so close in age and similar in...SOFKA ZINOVIEFF The House on Paradise Street
This timely novel of estranged sisters and a family consumed by history gives a compelling insight into contemporary Greece. The house on Paradise Street, Athens, is home to three generations of the Perifanis family. Told alternately by Maude (or Mondi, as the Greeks...Crime Scene: ANN CLEEVES The Glass Room
Murder and malice at a writers’ retreat. This is the fifth novel in a series featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland police. Like many of the more successful English crime series, these books depend heavily on a sense of continued character...CHARLES DICKENS Oliver Twist. Reviewed by Sandra Leigh Price
Nearly 200 years later, Oliver Twist is still a great read. As it is the 200th anniversary of his birth, I decided to revisit Dickens, and read, for the first time, Oliver Twist, which was originally published between 1837 and 1839 in serial fashion. The first...WENDY JAMES The Mistake. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
There’s more than one side to this story of a mother accused of murdering her child. It’s impossible to read Wendy James’s fourth novel and not think of the real-life case of Keli Lane, jailed for the murder of her baby Tegan, whose body has never been found. In...Crime Scene: CAROL O’CONNELL The Chalk Girl
‘Before Lisbeth Salander, there was Kathy Mallory.’ So it says on the front cover of The Chalk Girl, and so it is. Set in New York, the first Mallory novel was Mallory’s Oracle, published in 1995; The Chalk Girl is the tenth. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was...LINDY CAMERON Redback
A girls’-own-adventure with the lot. A beautiful-yet-deadly commander of a crack retrieval team; terrorists of US, European, Arabic and Asian strains; high-tech comms systems implanted into earlobes; assault helicopters; conspiracies; multiple explosions … Add a frank...ROBIN HOBB City of Dragons, Book Three of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
The dragons and their attendants have found Kelsingra, but can they keep it? Robin Hobb’s The Rain Wild Chronicles series began as a one-off novel, Dragon Keeper (2009), which was cut into two, producing Dragon Haven (2010) as well. City of Dragons was meant to...
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