As soon as the Flynn brothers lifted their Glocks, Dan was in trouble. Silence descended like a cloak of doom. No confusion crossed his mind... it was clear he would die in the next few seconds. In all his years of facing danger, he often wondered how he would react when faced with imminent death. He was about to find out. He hurled the contents of the pepper shaker into their eyes. The brothers grabbed at their faces. Dan lifted the table in front of him, and charged. Crockery, eating utensils, the bottle of wine, and a vase filled with flowers crashed onto the floor as Dan morphed into a one man wrecking crew. Gunshots... searing pain in Dan’s ribs stopped him, but only for a moment. One brother collapsed under the timber tabletop; the other fired. Dan heard a cry behind him as he whirled in a circle – his karate kick smashed into the gunman’s face and sent him flying across the floor. The gun slid out of reach. Stomach pain burned and registered in Dan’s brain, but somehow he pushed the hurt away. With one brother disarmed, he turned his attention to the one who fired into the obstruction on top of him. Bullets crashed through the timber. Dan wrenched the table away, and kicked the gunman in the face. They wrestled with the gun until turned, it fired into Flynn’s chest. Dan jumped up and held the smoking weapon in his hand. One down... the other gunman moved towards his weapon. Dan shot him. Blood saturated Dan’s shirt and dripped onto the floor. Now pain grabbed at his bloodied stomach. A fractured rib moved. Something warm and bubbly formed in his mouth and forced him to spit; a red glob broke up on the floor. His vision blurred, blood bubbled from his mouth making it difficult to breathe. He crawled to Diane, who lay on the floor in a pool of blood. He felt for her pulse. None... too late. He wiped at his lips, and pulled his wife to him and buried his face on her chest. Their blood mixed as if they were destined to be together, even in death.
Murder on Display, Reece Pocock
If there's one thing I'm a huge fan of it's dialogue that's realistic. Crisp, authentic and realistic. That and plots and the behaviour of characters that are consistent.
MURDER ON DISPLAY is obviously based sort of loosely (very loosely in some parts) around true events in the not-too-distant past in Adelaide. A number of different elements from a number of different true life cases appear to have sort of been melded together to create the story of an Adelaide cop, DS Dan Brennan.
Therein lies a lot of the problem with MURDER ON DISPLAY as I'm not 100% sure which story was the point of the book in the end. Was it the piles of bodies building up in the Adelaide Hills (? some sort of Truro / Snowtown combination perhaps), something about the homosexual sub-plot (? the Family murders), or the attack on Brennan in a restaurant that killed his wife (by that time I'd given up drawing the lines with real-life crimes)?
Whilst I've got no problem at all with fictionalising facts, especially when it's pretty obvious that's what's going on, the problem is that you've got to tell a solid story along the way. Perhaps avoid some of the overblown crime fiction clichés doing the rounds like the unsupportive boss. But probably what didn't work for me most of all was some of the weird comments made by characters along the way - there seemed to be some sort of dissociative syndrome going on at points that just lost me completely and left me battling to maintain interest. Especially as problems with the dialogue and plot had already given me way too much to struggle with already.