All the Reviews

Don't be put off by LIARS by James O'Loghlin. It's a biggish book at 464 pages, but it fills that size admirably. Engaging, addictive, and intriguing, it's small town setting is used to build a complex story, with personalities, connections, backgrounds and people that are anything but.

Set in the fictional location of Bullford Point, a seaside town on the NSW Central Coast that seems very real. Quaint and slow paced, it's facing big changes with a major real estate development planned, and tension between incomers and long-term residents; and those long-term residents ... Read review

Another one of those periodical restarts of a favourite series, some of which actually get off the ground, some of which linger in the piles of unread books, mostly due to lack of time / organisation (which I'm working on).

THE BAT is the first of the Harry Hole series, which is now up to 13 books in total, a few of the later ones I've not had a chance to read yet. Released originally in 1997 I vaguely remember my first reading of THE BAT, some time after that, and was startled to find a Scandinavian writer setting a book in Australia. At the time I also remember it ... Read review

FALLEN ANGEL was released in 2019. I hate how behind I'm getting with my all time favourite authors, Chris(topher) Brookmyre being very unfairly on that accidental list. His take on people being people, particularly when some of them are flat out horrible people, is always drily delivered, pitch perfectly scathing, funny and flinch-inducingly pointed.

In the case of this novel you've got a couple of family groups, English well to do's with their own villas around a shared pool in Portugal. In 2002 Max Temple is a famous scientist, known for his take-down of a delusional ... Read review

DEATH OF A COUNTESS is set in May, 1957, London. In the aftermath of WWII, a group of friends are gathering for a party. Displaced people, they survived the worst of Hitler's concentration camps, so this party is a chance for them to celebrate their liberty, as well as to reconnect with their pasts and their culture. The second in the Midnight Heroes series, featuring Detective Andrew Perry, this is an historical novel that can be read as a standalone.

The tagline of the novel spells it out "Post-war London should have been safe. It wasn't", and one of the attendees at ... Read review

Watched Sam Neill's appearance on the ABC's version of "The Assembly" at the same time that I read this most unexpected, delightful, memorable memoir from a man who does tongue in cheek really well, but can never quite hide the humanity, kindness and thoughtfulness of the true self. An unusual sort of timeline in that it does take you down some of the expected pathways of memoir - childhood, growing up in various countries, the move to New Zealand, his family life, his acting career, his love of wine and so on. Interwoven with that, is unsurprisingly, the cancer diagnosis he now deals ... Read review

Sometimes a little gem pops into your listening orbit, THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE by Gu Byeong-mo being just such a surprise. Borrowed from the libraries audiobook list on a whim, narrated by Nancy Wu, there some just something about this that worked for this deeply fussy listener. 

Set in Korea, this is the story of a sixty-five-year-old contract killer who has experienced loss, grief and many complications in her life, not just because of the job she's done for many years. Nearing the end of her career, her life is starting to lose meaning. It's really down to her and ... Read review

KILL YOURS, KILL MINE (aka SEVEN SISTERS) is a standalone novel from Katherine Kovacic, a beautifully written, powerful, provocative take on the concept of justice and vengeance, coming from a place of grief, guilt and the failure of the justice system. It's based around the deaths of women at the hands of domestic partners, and their sisters, left behind to pick up the pieces and make sense of the past.

Mia is a psychologist with a practice specialising in grief counselling. It's called "The Pleiades", named for the seven sisters of Greek mythology, companions of the ... Read review

The second novel in the Schalk Lourens series, SHADOW CITY uses his home of South Africa as one location for the story, introducing a new character, Sergeant Jackie Rose to lead the action in Sydney. The story begins with the discovery of the body of a battered and tortured young woman in a food court in Sydney's Chinatown. To Jackie Rose, initially it looks suspiciously like yet another drug murder, but there is an odd tattoo on the young girl and some complications when it comes to identifying her. 

What Rose doesn't know is around the same time, in Cape Town in South ... Read review

To be honest - read the blurb on this and nearly made it a hard pass. But I do love Only Murders in the Building, so I am relieved I paid no attention to my initial reservations, started reading and a few chapters in, was highly amused and very engaged.

On one hand it's all a bit silly - Eleanor Dash is a breathless, disorganised, needy writer who finds herself on a book tour surrounded by a busload of groupies (known as the BookFace ladies), a number of other authors somewhere on the unpleasant to unmemorable scale, an ex-flame, an ex-boyfriend (two different men), a ... Read review