Sorted on book title (not in series order)
Fast paced, heaps of action, a lot of lurking baddies, a flawed hero and comparisons with the work of Tom Clancy and Matthew Reilly are going to be coming in droves.
NO FREE MAN is the debut thriller from ex-RAAF member Graham Potts, taking it's protagonist, Stepan Volkov...Read more
NO GOOD DEED is a very welcome Australian crime fiction book, written by one of the leading local writers in Katherine Kovacic, set in the stinking hot outback, featuring Rena - a 60something retired geologist on a trip through the area that is partly fulfillment of a long standing plan,...Read more
Fans of Stuart MacBride's novels will be particularly familiar with the way that he likes to keep his police characters, in particular, at the end of their tether, under pressure from all sides, and frequently having a bit of a dummy spit by way of a coping mechanism.
NO LESS...Read more
Harris Derwent has run the full gamut of disappointment and loss in his nineteen years and is not sure if he’ll ever find the means to turn things around. Running from one disaster to the next, it takes a bullet to slow him down and even the circumstances in which Harris came to be injured...Read more
NO LOVELIER death is the ninth and latest entrant in the DI Faraday series of novels from Portsmouth based author Graham Hurley. If you're a fan of British Police Procedurals, then chances are you already know about these books - if not, you're in for a treat.
NO LOVELIER...Read more
A thriller that features surfing and a special operative anti-terrorism order, based on Eastern mysticism, is not exactly "expected territory" even with the best will in the world. Which makes NO MAN'S LAND by Australian author Roland Fishman an interesting prospect.
For...Read more
'He said that they’d let me go on purpose. That they could easily find me if they wanted to. He said that they didn’t want me. That I was too much trouble. He said if I went to the cops, he’d know. If I told Sonya, he’d know. If I talked to friends or teachers, he’d know. He told me to...Read more
Small towns and close knit communities are under scrutiny again in Nikki Crutchley's second novel NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU. Not part of a series with NOTHING BAD HAPPENS HERE, this second outing is built around another interesting and complicated female character Zoe Haywood. Haywood has...Read more
It's hard not to admire the bravery of an author that opts to write a crime novel in a strong, first person voice. A lot of a reader's enjoyment of that novel may then be hanging on their like, or dislike, of the central character. In the case of crime reporter Syeeda McKay we have a very...Read more
I cannot explain it either. One look at the blurb of this and you'd think I'd be backing away at the fastest possible rate. A couple of chapters in and I was wondering what on earth I thought I was reading.Read more
Eve Sylvester is a young, very naive girl with a lot of tragedy in her life. Raised partly in the foster care system, she's been restlessly moving around most of her life, when a chance meeting with a young Australian man overseas leads to a yacht journey home. It's a short lived period of...Read more
It is just possible that a book about a middle aged, female, technical writer working for a software company might, just, perhaps be set in a world that feels more than a little bit comfortable (sans daughter of course). I will admit that when NO SAFE PLACE arrived I was more than a little...Read more
When your protagonist is a member of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and her partner is a trained drug-sniffer cat (yes, I said cat), you know the book isn’t going to be heavy on the gritty realism. NO SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES is pure fluff so you do have to suspend disbelief to an...Read more
Constance appears as a fully formed resourceful character with an interesting background and the holder of some firm convictions. No flies on this officer, Con relies on no one but herself and is pleasantly surprised if any of her colleagues in the Met are actually non-biased and useful. ...Read more
NO TIME TO LOSE is Matt Baak's debut novel, set in the high-tech, high octane world of bank robberies in the current day. Which are considerably less about fronting the bank waving a gun around, and more the very high-tech way in which time locks, centralised security, and automatic systems...Read more
Four Pufferfish novels were never ever going to be enough for dedicated fans of this wonderful, quirky Police Procedural from Tasmanian based author David Owen. There was always a real sense of disappointment that Owen didn't appear to have been given the opportunity to publish more of...Read more
It's hard not to have certain expectations of crime fiction when it's written by a former Victorian Assistant Police Commissioner, as unreasonable or unfair as that may seem.
The first expectation is that the plot should have a strong sense of realism about it. NO WITNESS, NO...Read more
I came away from this book with a very strong sense of a culture that is profoundly different from my own, despite the idea that the main character Pablo Martelli seems to spend as much time driving great distances as we do. I also came away from this book with a profound sense of...Read more
Lovers of Precious Ramotswe, Kurt Wallender, Rebus and Kay Scarpetta may wish to look away now. Toby Clements in his second book THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE, rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in.
When Junior Tutor at Cuff College Oxford, Tom Hurst, joins the faculty of the...Read more
Another series that I really should be doing a better job keeping up with as Barbara Nadel writes about Turkey in a way that's vivid, believable and extremely entertaining.
A NOBLE KILLING is the 13th book in the Inspector Cetin Ikmen series, although it might be fairer to...Read more
NORFOLK tells a story that has particular resonance in Australia at present - asylum seekers arriving by boat. The substance of the story is covered by the blurb, but in essence, desperate people quickly overwhelm the idyllic community, and government responses are heavy handed enough to...Read more
New Years Eve often involves some reflection, some celebration, and some odd goings on. For Aimee, Melinda and Lou, starting out their celebration with an illegal Chinese lantern ceremony. Filling each lantern with their own resolution, the women light them and they lift off, after which...Read more
As an unrepentant, welded-on, dedicated Christopher Brookmyre fan I do have to ration these books a bit. So NOT THE END OF THE WORLD has been lurking here for quite a long time, although I was a little startled to learn it was originally published in 1998. Not because it's been lurking for...Read more
The first book in the Sergeant Frank Hardy series, NOT THE FAINTEST TRACE is an historical crime fiction novel, set in New Zealand in around 1869-1877. Based around the Taranaki Wars, a land war from New Zealand's past that I will confess to having known absolutely nothing about, the novel...Read more
I forgot NOTHING BAD HAPPENS HERE was a debut novel as you'd never know it from reading it. Set in the sort of small town in New Zealand that caters mostly to the summer tourist trade, journalist Miller Hatcher is sent there when the body of a tourist who went missing a while ago is...Read more
A murderer is identified by a team of oxen. A dead man rises from a watery grave to indict his killer. A phantom hearse gliding through Melbourne’s slums foretells violent death. A seamstress turns detective to avenge her friend’s homicide. A locked-tent mystery. ...Read more
Between 1865 and 1910 Mary Fortune wrote over 500 crime stories, set in the Victorian goldfields, Melbourne and the outback. Published initially in newspapers and the like, they form the first detective fiction series written by a woman, although she was published under a series of pseudonyms hiding both her real identity and her gender from the wider world.Read more
Part of a series of novels placing real life historical events in a modern setting, NOTORIOUS deals with one of England's past mysteries - the Princes in the Tower, and the enigma that was Richard III. The modern setting revolves around a world famous arty family, the Snows. Belle is a...Read more
When I read this back in January I posted a review. Or at least I thought I did. Imagine my surprise when I found it here in the draft queue. Whoops.
NOW WE ARE DEAD is a spinoff from the Logan McRae series featuring the glorious DS Roberta Steel. I say glorious in a "slightly...Read more
There must be such a delicate balancing act involved when you're writing crime fiction about some of the worst possible crimes. In NOW YOU SEE ME Bedford has tackled the question of child abuse and child murder, and she's opted, bravely to do that in a most unusual manner.
The...Read more