Karen Chisholm
The 4th book in the excellent Cate Austin series, because I'm an absolute idiot, I've missed the 3rd. Now will have to restack the teetering stacks!
From the Blurb:
When Ellie goes missing on the first day of Schueberfouer, the police are dismissive, keen not to attract negative attention on one of Luxembourg’s most important events.
Karen Chisholm
Wanted a change of pace and something from the true stacks.
From the Blurb:
Ever since the First Fleet dropped anchor, Australia's ports have been a breeding ground for many of Australia's most notorious criminals, and a magnet for local and overseas crime syndicates.
Karen Chisholm
Third book from 2 time Ned Kelly Award winner - I've been hoarding this just a little, until I could sit and do a one / two sitting read. Perfect for the last weekend of holidays then.
From the Blurb:
If Detective Frank Bennett tries hard enough, he can sometimes forget that Eden Archer, his partner in the Homicide Department, is also a moonlighting serial killer . . .
Karen Chisholm
Somewhere in the middle of the month - actually remembered to post some best of's for 2015. Other than that, this is a combination of books read, read and reviewed, and reviews caught up with, because I didn't really keep track of what was what. I was on holidays - from computers and PM tools if nothing else.
Reviewed in December:
Karen Chisholm
It's always a Good New Year when you open a book from Adrian McKinty and from the starting paragraph you're hooked.
From the Blurb:
It’s just the same things over and again for Sean Duffy: riot duty, heartbreak, cases he can solve but never get to court. But what detective gets two locked-room mysteries in one career?
Andrea Thompson
Due to be published Jan 2016.
Review to come!
Karen Chisholm
Technically I'm not here - we're taking a few weeks off from computers to try to recharge battered batteries. It's been so bloody hot here we've nearly melted and nope it hasn't rained. Not a bloody drop.
Which has meant some reading time in amongst the hourly trips outside to make sure the poultry at least are surviving this appalling weather.
American Blood, Ben Sanders
Karen Chisholm
I'm mathematically challenged at the best of times, and never more so than when greeted by the need to come up with a "list" of a certain number. Okay so that's probably less to do with maths and more to do with a pathological hatred of arbitrary rules. So let's just go with this being the best of list of all the books (currently at 147 or so) that I was fortunate (in the main) to have read in 2015.
Karen Chisholm
Read this one over the weekend. Review to come.
From the Blurb:
BRISBANE, 1984. Jim Harris is a hard-drinking Australian detective on his way to a nervous breakdown. Every day, he works alongside corrupt cops and dangerous crooks. That is, until a brutal murder case unravels his career, bringing past indiscretions to light. Alone, afraid, and out of control, Harris makes a pact with himself: Four days to locate the killer. Four days to take revenge. Four days to find redemption.
Karen Chisholm
Reading this for a series review at Newtown Review of Books.
From the Blurb:
When Rowland Sinclair is invited to take his yellow Mercedes onto the Maroubra Speedway, renamed the Killer Track for the lives it has claimed, he agrees without caution or reserve.
But then people start to die.
The body of a journalist covering the race is found in a House of Horrors, an English blueblood with Blackshirt affiliations is killed on the race track. and it seems that someone has Rowland in their sights.
Karen Chisholm
A big November, with a welcome back to Andrea Thompson who is posting reviews and blogs now around her busy day job(s), kids, fostering animals, coffee drinking day to day activities :)
Reviewed This Month:
Karen Chisholm
Didn't get a heap of reading done over the weekend (went to see The Dressmaker yesterday which took a big chunk out of the day), but I did start this one last night.
From the Blurb:
You can run from everything but your fears.
Three years after a gang brutally murdered his wife and son, Sergeant Cam Fraser has returned with his daughter Ruby to the country town where he was raised - a town too small for trouble. But then a body is found on the school grounds, badly burned and unrecognisable. Who in Glenroyd could possibly be a murderer? And why?
Andrea Thompson
My first Simon Beckett! Half way in, really intrigued as to when the bubble will burst for the main character.
Summary from Random House Australia:
Somebody!' I half-sob and then, more quietly, 'Please.' The words seem absorbed by the afternoon heat, lost amongst the trees. In their aftermath, the silence descends again. I know then that I'm not going anywhere...
Karen Chisholm
A change of setting and some very high paced action.
From the Blurb:
A high-octane thriller with a heart-stopping conclusion about a mysterious American woman who disappears into the Cambodian underworld, and the photojournalist who tracks her through the clues left in her diary.
Karen Chisholm
From the "should probably have already read this" but now reading for next f2f bookclub meeting...
From the Blurb:
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.
Karen Chisholm
Debut from Kiwi based writer Ray Berard, which came with a very big rap from Craig Sisterson.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
2nd book in the DI John Mahoney series, set in Tasmania.
From the Blurb:
Tasmania is in trouble.
While mainland Australia surges through the backwash of the GFC the island state is struggling. Political infighting, bureaucratic ineptitude and a lack of investment have curtailed progress. Too many people are lodging on ‘Struggle Street’.
Karen Chisholm
The 3rd Cormoran Strike novel, and the 2nd that I've read in the last week :)
From the Blurb:
When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman's severed leg.
Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible--and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.
Karen Chisholm
Another busy October with slightly improved reading numbers.
Read and Reviewed this Month:
Crime Fiction
Television reporter Callie Brown likes safe places with good coffee. But she joins friends from the past on a trek into New Zealand’s most brutal wilderness, in the hope of healing a broken heart.
What she doesn’t know is that someone wants them all dead.
Karen Chisholm
Having just had a week of holidays (well partially holidays / partially off-air because we hit the limits of our Internet data cap and have been desperately trying to avoid being shaped which meant no non-essential online activity), got a fair bit of reading done! Stand by for more on this book in December.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
Set in Australia, written by an English author, from the world of international diplomacy.
From the Blurb:
Diplomat Jess Turner is the British Consul in Canberra. When a British businesswoman is brutally murdered in a Queensland resort, Jess travels to Brisbane to liaise with the police, and help the victim’s next of kin, her journalist sister, Susan.
Karen Chisholm
A debut novel steeped in archaeology and librarianship, very much from the cosier end of the crime fiction scale.
From the Blurb:
Yearning for her former life as an archaeologist, Australian librarian Dr. Elizabeth Pimms is struggling with a job she doesn’t want, a family she both loves and resents, and enforced separation from her boyfriend.
Karen Chisholm
One of those books that I could have sworn I'd read, but then couldn't find a note of it anywhere. Got into it and realised, nope, hadn't read it.
From the Blurb:
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
Karen Chisholm
Another from this past week's reading (got a lot of catching up done) - this from NZ based author Katherine Hayton.
From the Blurb:
Elisabet wakes with amnesia. The care offered to her by a husband she doesn’t remember descends within weeks into aggression and violence.
Lillian lies hogtied in an underground cell. Forget about escape; unless she can manage the necessities of life she’ll be dead within days.
Karen Chisholm
There's nothing like a new Wyatt to make a reader very happy.
From the Blurb:
Wyatt needs a job.
A bank job would be nice, or a security van hold-up. As long as he doesn’t have to work with cocky idiots and strung-out meth-heads like the Pepper brothers. That’s the sort of miscalculation that buys you the wrong kind of time.
So he contacts a man who in the past put him on the right kind of heist. And finds himself in Noosa, stealing a painting for Hannah Sten.
Karen Chisholm
No idea what to expect with this one but felt like something a little different. Got that.
From the Blurb:
The Euganean Hills golf community in northern Italy is a golfer’s paradise. With a perpetual smell of freshly cut grass, rolling green plains, and bright blue skies, it seems nothing could go wrong for the tight-knit group that lives there.
Karen Chisholm
Latest thriller in the Dan Taylor series, which I will admit to really liking.
From the Blurb:
Dan Taylor has survived two attempts on his life. The rest of his team are missing, and now a terrorist group has stolen a radioactive isotope from a top secret government project.
Can Dan survive long enough to prevent a nuclear disaster on British soil?
Karen Chisholm
Having got out of order on these, now going back to read the first of the Ash Henderson books.
From the Blurb:
The tabloids call him the Birthday Boy. He snatches girls just before their 13th birthdays. One year later the family get a homemade card in the post - 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!' scrawled in blood-red ink above a Polaroid photograph of the missing girl. Detective Constable Ash Henderson is seconded to the investigation.
Karen Chisholm
Debut book from Australian author for review at Newtown Review of Books.
From the Blurb:
Introducing Stella Hardy, a wisecracking social worker with a thirst for social justice, good laksa, and alcohol.
Karen Chisholm
I started this a while ago and had to put it aside due to scheduling, but it stayed with me. Now real life is intruding on finishing it in a most annoying manner.
From the Blurb:
Oliver Ryan is a handsome and charismatic success story. He lives in the suburbs with his wife, Alice, who illustrates his award-winning children's books and gives him her unstinting devotion. Their life together is one of enviable privilege and ease - enviable until, one evening after supper, Oliver attacks Alice and beats her into a coma.
Karen Chisholm
Bit of a self-indulgent pluck from the middle of books that I should be reading.
From the Blurb:
A jilted bride weeps on an empty beach. A local doctor is attacked in an isolated churchyard. Trouble arrives at a bad time to the backwater village of Morfi, just as the community is making headlines with a visit from a high-ranking government minister. Fortunately, where there's trouble, there's Hermes Diaktoros, the mysterious fat man whose tennis shoes are always pristine and whose investigative methods are always unorthodox.
Karen Chisholm
Recently launched, ‘Provocare’ is a multimedia verse thriller created by Meg Vann, writer; Mez Breeze, interaction designer; and Donna Hancox, research lead for Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). It is the first work to be commissioned and produced for ‘Queensland Writers on the International Stage’, an Arts Queensland funded programme created by QUT and The Writing Platform.
Karen Chisholm
September Monthly Summary (told you I had a cunning plan). Although the posting itself is late because of RIDICULOUSLY early fire weather with extreme heat and gale force winds. In October.
Good grief.
Not much reading last month - time off in an attempt to get some things organised before himself headed off on a work trip.
Karen Chisholm
Author that lives in Brisbane, who has written a book set in a particularly brutal part of the New Zealand wilderness.
From the Blurb:
“The Maori call this place Ata Whenua—Shadow Land.”
Television reporter Callie Brown likes safe places with good coffee. But she joins friends from the past on a trek into New Zealand’s most brutal wilderness, in the hope of healing a broken heart.
What she doesn’t know is that someone wants them all dead.
Karen Chisholm
Overnight it was announced that Henning Mankell has died. Diagnosed with cancer early last year, he seemed to move behind the scenes after he wrote a diary about the experience. We knew he was ill, we probably all realised that he was unlikely to survive, and yet, 67 seems too young. Too young particularly, to remove a writer of such thought-provoking and insightful books as those that Mankell has penned.
Karen Chisholm
Paul Cleave became the Crown Prince of antipodean crime writing when his thriller FIVE MINUTES ALONE was named the winner of the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel on Sunday night.
Karen Chisholm
irst from a long, hot weekend of reading. Did I mention hot. It's OCTOBER and it's stinking. Sigh.
From the Blurb:
"Do you think it's possible to live again, Monsieur? ... I mean ... is it possible to die and then ... live again in someone else?"
Karen Chisholm
Got quite a bit of reading done over the weekend what with the heat and daylight saving meaning I had an extra hour of a night to get a few things done. He's off to Amsterdam middle of this week though so I'm not promising this can / will continue.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
One more from over the long weekend.
From the Blurb:
Travelling from England to Australia in the late nineteenth century, Abigail Sergeant and her brother, Bertrand, are looking forward to their new life.
Leaving behind the prejudices that would likely have seen Bertrand committed to an institution before he reached adulthood, Abigail hopes their new life will offer freedom and security.
Karen Chisholm
Another from the week off - am really behind with this series, so hope to start the second soon.
From the Blurb:
At night Armand lay in bed with a sadness in his heart that ballooned until there was room for nothing else.
He thought with horror of the lying-down room...
Paris; in the stifling August heat, Commandant Serge Morel is called to a disturbing crime scene. An elderly woman has been murdered to the soundtrack of Faure’s Requiem, her body then grotesquely displayed.
Karen Chisholm
The final from the week off's reading, a book I've been looking forward to very much.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
Have taken a week away from the computers so a bit of "whatever I want" reading is being fitted in around farm chores.
From the Blurb:
Mumbai, murder and a baby elephant combine in a charming, joyful mystery for fans of Alexander McCall Smith and Rachel Joyce.
On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries.
The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved.
And the second is a baby elephant.
Karen Chisholm
As is always the way when we take a week off in Spring to get started on fire season preparations, there's an arctic blast that drives freezing cold winds through. No rain of course, but lordy it's cold out there so we all (me / him when he's not in the shed doing mysterious things, Meg the old dog, Mambo the Puppy, and Injira the new terrier, 2 hiding cats) are in front of the fire. They're snoring. I'm reading. There is red wine.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
Needed some non-confrontational reading this weekend so perfect time to return to the first of the memoirs of Clive James.
From the Blurb:
'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney.
Karen Chisholm
Second from a weekend's reading of taking it very easy.
From the Blurb:
Terry Pratchett’s fantasy classic Wyrd Sisters, a novel in the Discworld series, is the story of Granny Weatherwax, the most highly regarded non-leader a coven of non-social witches could ever have.
Karen Chisholm
THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD, in association with WORD Christchurch and The Press, is pleased to reveal that whodunit and who-won-it will be announced at a great event at the Court Theatre on 4 October.
Karen Chisholm
First from this NZ based, Swedish born author.
From the Blurb:
Karen's life is abruptly thrown into chaos when her flatmate is gunned down in front of her in the street where they live.
Within days she is forced to take drastic action to ensure her own safety. She criss-crosses New Zealand to evade the killers, changes her appearance and settles into a small community as 'Cara'. But danger still stalks her and she is forced to make dramatic choices in the face of threats and brutal violence.
Karen Chisholm
Didn't get a lot read this weekend again because, visitors and out and about on Saturday night. But started out with this one on Friday.
From the Blurb:
Myanmar’s Shwedagon Pagoda stands a hundred metres high; its exterior coated with gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and topaz. This opulence pales in comparison to the pagoda’s centrepiece—a single seventy-six-carat diamond perched atop the pagoda’s spire since 1871.
Karen Chisholm
From the Ned Kelly nomination list, and the winner of the 2015 Best Adult Davitt - this one's been sitting here for a while now for re-read / review.
From the Blurb:
'I guess it started with the mothers.'
'It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.'
'I'll tell you exactly why it happened.'
Pirriwee Public’s annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. One parent is dead. Was it murder, a tragic accident...or something else entirely?
Karen Chisholm
I know, I've tried to do these monthly summaries before and lost interest but I have a plan. No really. Stop laughing. Right, so August was another interesting month at AustCrimeFiction. Only 14 books from myself this month, with a few reviews from last month, and some added by Robert Goodman as well - so in date within category order:
Karen Chisholm
This debut from the 2014 Ned Kelly S.D. Harvey Award for Short Story writing is for review at Newtown Review of Books.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
The second from a quieter reading weekend than usual (honestly whoever came up with this idea of having to work around the place...)
From the Blurb:
When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. On the site of the French capital's former slaughterhouses, the blood is just starting to flow, and Sirsky finds himself chasing the butcher of Paris, while his own mother faces an uncertain future.
Karen Chisholm
I should be reading lots of other things, but damn it, I'm reading this.
From the Blurb:
Karen Chisholm
In a darkened bar, up a wide old stone staircase, deep in Trades Hall Melbourne on Saturday night we gathered for the 20th Anniversary of the Ned Kelly Awards.
These awards were special for a few reasons - they were back in Melbourne, it was the 20th Anniversary of the Neddies (as they are affectionately known) and ACWA had a few surprises up its various sleeves. And I don't just mean the winners of the awards.