Sorted on book title (not in series order)
Sixteen novels in and are we tired of hearing about the troubled Charlie Parker? No, indeed we are not. He has marvellous entertaining friends too. THE WOMAN IN THE WOODS is brilliant, and its hard to fault at all a series that bundles you so successfully through the emotional washing...Read more
A short story that is officially flagged as 9.5 in the Vera Stanhope series, this is another one of those serendipitous pickups from the BorrowBox catalogue when I was looking for a short story to fill in a bit of time.
Set up as the precursor to THE RISING TIDE, it introduces...Read more
An historical mystery that mixes fact and fiction, THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE is set in Adelaide in late 1948. It's a story about female police officers built around the factual case of the Somerton Man, a notorious tale that has captured much speculation for many years until recently...Read more
Sherryl Clark is an author with a keen eye for a fascinating central female character, and Lou Alcott is one out of the box. A Melbourne based Private Investigator with a prominent organised crime figure for a grandfather, she's a disillusioned ex-cop with a major attitude when it comes to...Read more
Rediscovery is exactly the word that needs to be applied to this small, but incredibly packed offering from renowned Senior Research Fellow Lucy Sussex.
Sussex has to be one of the greatest proponents of the discovery and telling of the tales of the earliest female writers -...Read more
Launched into listening to this on audio without really doing any blurb reading or background checking of any type. Basically grabbed it because we'd recently watched THE MAGPIE MURDERS which we'd loved, and, well it was there.
One of those reinvention style novels, where the...Read more
A Novella in the "Censored City" series, WOULD SHE BE GONE packs a big punch in a short, sharp delivery. A dystopian future awaits, where the Librarian Algorithm enforces censorship of stories and words that could cause trauma or crime (not a future I can get on board with at all). In this...Read more
Reading the blurb of WRATH the final statement seemed like a pretty brave one - "A novel about a mistake we could all make and redemption". Especially when you know that the inspiration of the book is the real-life story of a 24-year-old Tennessee man who was executed for murdering...Read more
I can't tell you how pleased I was to finally get to read THE WRECKAGE. I've been a fan of this series since it's inception, with only one minor disappointment in the last book which headed off into shock tactics a little too overtly for my liking. THE WRECKAGE, however, is a terrific...Read more
Originally published in Norway in 1995, Gunnar Staalesen's The Writing on The Wall is set in Bergen Norway in the early '90s. Private Eye Varg Veum returns from the funeral of his ex-wife's most recent husband to find the distressed mother of missing 16 year old girl Torild waiting to see...Read more
He is a record collector — a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others.
Like the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to...Read more
Okay, so Ed Loy is a bit of a lone wolf character. He's also obviously been endowed with some sort of minor super-powers. You know the sort. No matter how much of a kicking he takes, no matter how much battering, beating, brawling and bashing goes on, Ed keeps on keeping on. He might...Read more
I've got to start rationing this sort of thriller. I'm starting to develop a bit of a twitch when there are any loud bangs anywhere, and don't get me started on the reaction when anybody a bit furtive-looking is walking towards me on the streets of the local towns.... Although I will admit...Read more
THE WRONG WOMAN is the first foray from J.P. Pomare overtly set in the US, and it was, for this reader, utterly seamless in its evocation of an American feeling small town. Helped a lot by the central character ex-cop, now Private Investigator Reid being from this particular community, and...Read more
An historical mystery set in 1943 New Zealand, featuring soon to be retired DI John MacBride, WRONGDOINGS is a book that's centred, unsurprisingly given the timeframe, around the fallout from war.
DI MacBride is a veteran of WWI service with the NZ Expeditionary Force, a man on...Read more
WRONGFUL DEATH is the ninth book in the Anna Travis series from Lynda La Plante. Which therefore requires a confession. I started to struggle with this series around book 4 (DEADLY INTENT), and never managed to finish book 5 (SILENT SCREAM) or book 6 (BLIND FURY). So on the upside, I did...Read more
It's been quite a wait for the latest WYATT novel - The Fallout was published in 1997. I for one was rather excited to hear the news that there was a book on the way last year and I've been somewhat impatiently waiting for it to appear since then. As with all these greatly anticipated...Read more
The Wych Elm is one of those releases that I’ve had circling in my library pile for ages and keep meaning to come back to. All the opinions I’ve heard in the year and a half or more since its release have been positive and fresh off the back of viewing (and reviewing) a Tana French TV...Read more
I was so looking forward to THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST, and yet, somehow, it's arrival in my ebook queue came as a hell of a surprise. So, needless to say, everything else got swept aside and I settled in for what I hoped would be some days of engaging espionage thriller reading.
...Read more
A YEAR TO LEARN A WOMAN is the second novel and first crime fiction offering from New Zealand writer Paddy Richardson. Travis Crill is a serial rapist - convicted and jailed for a series of bizarre attacks. Claire Wright is a freelance journalist, living alone with her young daughter...Read more
The world is a pretty awful place at the moment and there's no way I will stomach listening to a book that casually talks about animal cruelty. So this was a DNF with extreme nope.Read more
Good idea at the heart of this novel from NZ author Jennifer Barraclough. Hilda is a reclusive, single woman, living in a ramshackle cottage on the North Kent marshes with her rescue cats. Her father has recently died, and her brother Dunstan is struggling with that death, the breakdown of...Read more
You can't help thinking that this is an interesting idea for a book, the story of one of the most famous real-life spies, told from the point of view of Philby's own life. Now the book and it's publicity material is quite tricky about the background of this book. Whilst there's nothing...Read more
Bill Bateman, author of the Vince Hanrahan series, was a rural based GP himself, and that shows. Both in his affection for the town, the people and the depiction of the day to day life of the slightly harried GP, but mostly in the way that some presentations are never quite what they seem...Read more
In Zero at the Bone, the second book in this series, Frank Swann has moved more sideways than on. Working as a PI, he finds himself dragged into the suicide of geologist Max Henderson, whose wife Jennifer enlists Swann’s services to find out the reasons for his death – there is no doubt...Read more
Set mostly in Phnom Penh, ZERO HOUR IN PHNOM PENH is based in the early 1990's, at the end of the civil war that tore Cambodia apart, in the wake of the appalling Khmer Rouge regime. UN peacekeeping forces are on the streets, gunfire is regularly heard, and PI Vincent Calvino is looking for...Read more
Unbelievably violent, amazingly confrontational, searingly honest and profoundly emotional, ZULU is one of those books that you may have to read through spread fingers, but it is almost impossible to put this book down until it screeches to an ending that will make you shudder....Read more