Just Finished Reading
Finished off:
The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts by Robert Thorogood (audio)
The Man Comes Around by Caimh McDonnell (audio)
This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.
Friday Update: The Reading Queue (11th September)
Nothing much changed last week so no post, but I've managed to get a few things ticked off in the last fortnight - mostly catching up on reviews which you can see on the All Reviews listing.
#JustFinished
Shot by Shelley Burr (Netgalley)
Private investigator Nomi Pace and her research assistant, Simon Noone, have an unusual partnership: She hunts murderers. He was one.
It’s 1987, Christmas in Manhattan, five years since a head injury wiped Simon’s memories of his life as a serial killer. He’s retreated into a quiet, careful existence, but it’s hard to atone for a past he can’t recall.
We gather marks. Our bodies, our stories, our histories and our world are made of infinite visible and invisible moments. We make marks to record, to remember, to honour, to protest. We mark time, for no matter how many times the sun sets, always it rises in a new dawn.
the end of the world was marked with beautiful light
we should have known
Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.
When the police won’t believe you, what can you do but take matters into your own hands.
The small town of Roberta on the Lake, Michigan is shaken to its core when a group of former high school baseball players are murdered one by one. One of the team members, Oscar, who has since moved back to his birth country of Australia, returns to his blended family with his sister Clementine to mourn the loss of his best friend, Jack—the first murder victim, beaten to death in his private study with his own baseball bat, Definitely a crime of passion—and definitely someone Jack considered a friend, as only friends were invited inside his study.
Saigon, 1968, on the eve of Tet. The Vietnamese New Year draws near, and the city waits, restless and uneasy, the air thick with rumours of ceasefire and the taste of betrayal.
Smith has served his time in the secret world – an Australian case officer grown weary of the lies that pass for intelligence, and the loyalties that dissolve at first suspicion. When a colleague is murdered and leaves behind a single word in a blood-stained notebook, Smith finds himself drawn back into the game he thought he’d abandoned.
Child protection worker Dana Gibson is called to attend a fatal shooting at the pub in Helidon where a bikie gang war has exploded. Seventeen-year-old Savannah and her younger sister, Maddie, have been caught in the crossfire, and the rural town finds itself divided between two cultures – the commune on the edge of town where Savannah's family live and an outlaw motorcycle gang.
Tara has only been half-alive since her best friend Ally disappeared decades ago. When her past reappears, Tara is forced to revisit places and secrets she would do anything to forget.
Tara has come a long way from the world in which she grew up. She routinely conceals her past, until a deepening new relationship weakens her defences. A shocking confrontation follows, unearthing how powerfully she is still haunted by the disappearance of her best friend Ally, who left high school one day and never returned.
‘I’m a seventy-three-year-old woman, Tristan; I am practically invisible. I’m exactly the sort of person you need to pull off this caper. Oh my God, I can’t believe I just used the word “caper” in a sentence referring to myself!’
Tristan Barclay, art historian, minor TV celebrity and Belvedere Tours leader, is reluctantly embarking on his final tour of European art and culture. But this will be no ordinary excursion to see the old masters – Tristan is secretly planning a ‘grand gesture’ of his own, one that will shock the world.
A popular young girl disappears without a trace, her skeletal remains discovered three years later in the ashes of a burned-out house. There's a suspect and compelling circumstantial evidence of his guilt, but no concrete proof. When he isn't indicted, he returns to mock the girl's family. And this isn't the first time he's been suspected of the murder of a young girl; nearly twenty years ago he was tried and released due to lack of evidence. Chief Inspector Kusanagi of the Homicide Division of the Tokyo Police worked both cases.
When a man is discovered dead by poisoning in his empty home his beautiful wife, Ayane, immediately falls under suspicion. All clues point to Ayane being the logical suspect, but how could she have committed the crime when she was hundreds of miles away?
As Tokyo police detective Kusanagi tries to unpick a seemingly unrelated sequence of events he finds himself falling for Ayane. When his judgement becomes dangerously clouded his assistant must call on an old friend for help; it will take a genius to unravel the most spectacular web of deceit they have ever faced...
When a man's body is discovered at the base of some cliffs in the small resort town of Hari Cove, the police at first suspect a tragic accident, a misstep that cost the man his life. However, when the victim is found to have been a former policeman and that the cause of death was actually carbon monoxide poisoning, they begin a murder investigation.
She Lied First, Dinuka McKenzie
The first standalone psychological thriller from the author of the Detective Kate Miller series is compelling reading.
This statement might initially surprise some readers because there is much in the plot of She Lied First that could seem all a bit too murky, bordering on overblown. There is much to intrigue and bamboozle in this story told from a variety of viewpoints over a shifting timeline, littered with characters for whom keeping secrets is second nature.
A Beautiful Family, Jennifer Trevelyan
There's something almost mesmeric about A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY. A seemingly gentle story about a summer vacation in the mid 1980s, sunbaked, old fashioned, quiet, New Zealand based, told through the eyes of 10 year old Alix. It's a time of Walkman's, Dolly Magazine, cassette tapes, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles. Although there's an air of simplicity and innocence about all of this (and nostalgia for those of us who were there at the time), there's also something bubbling along under the surface.
A Spy in the Blood, Paul Warner
This is, mostly, the story of "super spy" Mark Wolfe, and the family circumstances that take him from the job behind the "HR" desk he's been relegated to, to a dangerous mission of his own undertaking in war-torn Afghanistan. Why? The powers that be have recruited his daughter as a spy, sent her off on a mission of her own, and then, as she goes missing, supposedly from an aid project she's working on, declare she's turned, a double agent, untrustworthy, a danger to national security.