There's absolutely no doubt that author Matthew Thompson intended MAYHEM to be a fast paced, gonzo styled expose of Australian outlaw Christopher Binse.
Nicely done, BAY OF MARTYRS is a very entertaining outing in what seems likely to be an ongoing series from UK based author Tony Black and local Matt Neal.
Quirky, fun, engaging and hugely entertaining, JINX, PACHYDERM and Catherine Kint are a really good combo - here's hoping there's more intended in the series.
A sensationalised combination of fact, speculation, assumption and extremely over the top fictionalisation, MRS KELLY by Grantlee Kieza is a grand undertaking that seems to be telegraphing a lot more than it actually delivers.
It may now be the mid-20th century but progress in the remote Irish community seems to have stalled somewhere around a hundred years earlier; there’s no electricity, phones, shops or amenities on this unforgiving little island. The stalwart remaining residents of St Brigids are dwindling in numbers and have been resolutely advised by mainland authorities that the end is near. The entire population of St Brigids to be relocated.
Eleanor is a pragmatic working mother of two who sees the sense in buying a rundown Victorian to move her young family into. There is plenty of room in their new home for all of their things and it is certainly in a desirable location. Odd how they managed to snag such a good deal though.
Rural Australia is both developing and narrowing. The selling out of Australia to foreign interests has resulted in multitudes of country towns closing down and officially ceasing to exist. Centralizing the displaced has become the solution to the increasing shortage of food and resources. Generational land ownership comes to a forced end, and for the residents of the bush communities, the country of their birth is becoming unrecognizable.
Miranda Rader once was known as Randi the problem teen. Rejected by her family after a brush with the law, Randi’s life seemed to then be heading down all the wrong roads. Fortunately, the time spent in youth detention becomes the making of her.
Finn Bell made quite an impact on the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Awards with two shortlistings - his first novel DEAD LEMONS in Best First Novel, and PANCAKE MONEY in Best Crime Novel.
Coming not long after Steve Uhlmann and Peter Lewis’ Marmalade Files and hot on the heels of Tony Jones’ The Twentieth Man, Michael Brissenden, another ABC journalist, has penned a thriller.
THE DIRECTION OF OUR FEAR is such an interesting idea - multiple characters living separate lives, getting on with their day to day existences, moving through place and time without knowing each other, or even being aware that there will come that intersecting point ...
The death of Maria Turquand had all the ingredients that would have appealed to the salacious public forty years ago; a beautiful woman, gangsters, drugs and rock stars.
Pursued, bedded and betrayed by her husband the King, Anne Boleyn's story is equally as complex as it is tragic. Anne through both whim and circumstance comes to possess exactly the same ambitions as her bullish husband - to rule absolute, and to provide an heir to the English throne.
Whether or not this should be marketed as YA is debatable, but either way it is a great Scandi-crime novel that almost demands to be read in a single sitting.
Ten years of two families missing their two children of course takes its toll. One couple survives the aftermath of the kidnappings and the other does not. So what will happen now that only one of the two boys is coming home?
Something very clever is being mined from our collective pop culture psyche here, and that is the fascination we have with the last person standing. Plane crashes, shootings, natural disasters etc; it's the sole survivors that fascinate.
... while Gentill is returning to the world of Roland Sinclair, she has shown quite emphatically that she can leave Sinclair behind whenever she wants and go exploring in a wider literary landscape.
Many years have passed since Dr Jekyll suddenly left London society. Lawyer Mr Utterson, seemingly steadfast in his continued assistance to the absent Dr Jekyll, has been busy making plans. Lasting plans, and they include a lady’s affection.
Coming at an eco-thriller from the point of view of the activists, RUBY AND THE BLUE SKY is part thriller, part exploration of "celebrity" culture, and part do good chick lit novel.
The potential here is undoubtedly in plot imagining - the idea behind this is very intriguing, the over-the-top action very reminiscent of gung-ho thrillers, with some good twists and turns.
Known for her Rowland Sinclair historical crime series and her YA Hero trilogy, Sulari Gentill delivers something very different with this new novel. Full review at Newtown Review of Books
In 2005, the Police and Justice Museum in Sydney had an exhibition of police photographs from the early twentieth century. One of these that caught the eye of author Pip Smith was of a man called Harry Crawford, arrested for murder.
When two young people go missing, it's first thought by the police that young love could be the reason why. Amaya and Kamal's respective families both had other plans for their future, and the control wielded over the lives of their children was both archaic and suffocating. Did the two leave their controlling families behind in order to map out their own lives? Or has someone taken them?
Called to attend a crime scene in his own apartment complex, Wolf is faced with a cadaver that is nothing like he or anyone else in his division has ever seen before.
In 2016 the unpublished manuscript of Wimmera won the UK Crime Writers’ Association debut dagger – now it’s published and we can see why. Reviewed at Newtown Review of Books
