Project Status Report: 26th May 2025
Fifth Status Report on the Project 'KEEP THE READING QUEUE UNDER CONTROL', with this month the subtitle of, The Wheels Have Fallen Off.
As always - the last fortnight entries and The Next Up Reading List in full.
This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.
Detective Darren Glass is back, and the stakes are higher than ever.
When the battered body of a young Aboriginal woman washes up onto a beach at Jervis Bay, Australian Federal Police Detective Darren Glass is brought in from Canberra to investigate. Glass quickly ties the murder to the disappearance of a sailor from the nearby naval base, and is forced to partner up with a senior intelligence officer from the Royal Australian Navy.
From the author of MURDER IN MY BACKYARD comes this mystery where a vicar's wife has done her last good deed... Vicars' wives do not usually get themselves murdered....especially when they are as vibrant and caring as beautiful Dorothea Cassidy. But murdered she unquestionably was; and from the outset Inspector Stephen Ramsay is hard put to figure out why, let alone who. And though he did not know her in life, she charms him in her death.
Northumberland detective Peter Porteous is called to Cranwell Lake, where a diving instructor has made a gruesome discovery. In the water lies a corpse – the body of a teenager who has clearly been dead for many years.
After trawling through the missing persons files, Porteous comes to the conclusion that the corpse is Michael Grey, an enigmatic and secretive young man who was reported missing by his foster parents in 1972.
Don’t stoke the flames unless you want to get burned . . .
It’s not going well for Aberdeen's NE Division: half the force is off sick, all leave has been cancelled, someone has firebombed a hotel full of migrants and there’s a massive protest march happening this Saturday.
With officers dropping like flies, Detective Inspector Logan McRae has to kick off a major murder investigation with a skeleton staff of misfits, idiots and malingerers until the top brass can arrange back-up from other divisions.
Everyone is in peril. Everyone is a suspect.
It's 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New Yorkbound, with a full manifest of passengers.
INTELLIGENCE HAS A NEW HOME
A governmental think-tank, whose remit is to curb the independence of the intelligence service, has lost one of its key members, and Claude Whelan-one-time head of MI5's Regent's Park-is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to the Park itself, with Diana Taverner as chief suspect. Has Diana overplayed her hand at last? What's her counterpart, Moscow's First Desk, doing in London? And does Jackson Lamb know more than he's telling?
'Kill us? They've never needed to kill us,' said Lamb. 'I mean, look at us. What would be the point?'
A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive - but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.
'We're spies,' said Lamb. 'All kinds of outlandish shit goes on.'
Like the ringing of a dead man's phone, or an unwelcome guest at a funeral . . .
In Slough House memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process.
London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one.
Cover your arse.
Regent's Park's First Desk, Claude Whelan, is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions himself: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in print; and especially from his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, who's alert for Claude's every stumble.
Twenty years retired, David Cartwright can still spot when the stoats are on his trail.
Radioactive secrets and unfinished business go with the territory on Spook Street: he's always known there would be an accounting. And he's not as defenceless as they might think.
Jackson Lamb worked with Cartwright back in the day. He knows better than most that this is no vulnerable old man. 'Nasty old spook with blood on his hands' would be a more accurate description.
The River twists and snakes and encompasses the world, a rain-wet, neon-lit place of eternal night.
London's Slough House is where disgraced MI5 operatives are reassigned to spend the rest of their careers pushing paper. But when one of these fallen spies is kidnapped by a former soldier bent on revenge, the agents must breach the defenses of Regent's Park to steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade's safety.
The kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as the agents uncover a larger web of intrigue that involves not only a group of private mercenaries, but also the highest authorities in the Security Service.
When Cliff Hardy, an Australian private detective, investigates an apparent sighting of John Singer, who disappeared two years ago, he encounters a series of murders