This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.

 

 

How well do you really know your family?

Emma Matheson is a happily married woman—so happy that she's organised a surprise party for her husband on the night of their wedding anniversary.

When Nathan doesn't turn up to the party, Emma knows something has gone terribly wrong.

All of a sudden, her life is upended. She realises that while some secrets bind families, others destroy them.

As it turns out... they weren't so happy after all.

Best mates Teddy and Alice are hired hands with flexible moral boundaries. Whatever the mess, they can be relied upon to fix it with no questions asked. But sometimes it's not as simple as cleaning up.

Lyrebirds are brilliant mimics, so if they mimic a woman screaming in terror and begging for her life, they have witnessed a crime. But how does a young, hung over PHD student and a wet behind the ears new detective, convince anyone that a native bird can be a reliable witness to a murder, especially when there is no body and no missing person?

And what happens when they turn out to be right?

A sound froze her blood. A woman. A woman screaming in pure terror. Screaming and sobbing—begging—out here, in this desolate place.

The gripping story of Australia's first female crime writer and her career-criminal son

When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent herself. The Victorian goldfields were just the place.

It’s January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand’s rugged King Country.

It’s a bittersweet he’s working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother’s house, and he’s increasingly feeling like an outcast in his childhood town.

But mostly he’s haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the summer before - then vanished without trace.

IT IS THE EARLY 1980’S.

Greg Bowker is a young senior constable forcibly transferred to a one-officer station in a remote and dying Mallee town.

Welcomed by a brutal combination of heat, dust, isolation and primitive amenities, the new officer expects to waste years of his career in ‘purgatory’.

He is greeted with warmth by the community but becomes increasingly worried by the behaviour of two delinquent teenagers, one of whose family history hides a secret he cannot resist investigating.

The Grapevine, Kate Kemp

A slow burner novel, THE GRAPEVINE is the tale of a murder from the perspective of its fallout in a small suburban community in Canberra, in 1979.

It's also a breathtakingly clever takedown of much of what remains flat out stupid - xenophobia, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the restrictions placed on women. Done so cleverly in fact, that it may take a while for reader's to get to grips with what's going on in THE GRAPEVINE, which leads the reader oh so gently, persuasively into a false sense of the mundane, the suburban, the predictable. 

Able, Dylan Alcott

I listened to Alcott read this memoir himself so that was a bit of a joy in and of itself, there's something about the infectious tone of his voice that's very engaging, and pretty funny in places. He's got a dry sense of humour that's for sure, but in ABLE he doesn't shy away from the complications of a life spent with some physical restrictions as the result of a tumour on the spine that he was born with. In 1990. Sheesh, the things this man has achieved in his lifetime make me wonder what the hell I've been doing for all my years.

Three Boys Gone, Mark Smith

When three 16 year old boys on a school hiking trip run into perilous surf, the only witness is Grace Disher, the teacher in charge of the trip, who reluctantly defers to the first rule of rescue: don't create another casualty and stands helplessly by as the boys disappear.