All the Reviews

Blind Eye, Stuart MacBride

DI Steele deserves her own fan club.  It would have to be a club where swearing, drinking, smoking and fiddling with your bra strap were perfectly acceptable behaviours of course.  You've also got a ready made slogan as fans of the wonderful Logan McRae series from Scottish author Stuart MacBride will be aware.

BLIND EYE is the 5th book in this funny, gruesome, funny, ferocious, unflinching, funny series featuring DS Logan McRae and a passing parade of DIs and DCIs.  DI Steele makes a very high profile return in BLIND EYE, in fact she's in danger of completely stealing ... Read Review

Call Me Evie, J.P. Pomare

Marketed under the banner "incredible new literary thriller", CALL ME EVIE is the debut novel of New Zealand born, Melbourne based writer J.P. Pomare.

Opening in a manner guaranteed to make readers feel maximum discomfort, a young woman is in a bathroom, hacking at her long hair with a pair of small scissors when she's interrupted by an angry man, shouting and finishing the job roughly with a pair of hair clippers. She screams, he hits, neither of them clearly identified, the relationship and the power dynamic not explained. Gradually snippets of detail emerge, the pair ... Read Review

A Few Right Thinking Men, Sulari Gentill

A FEW RIGHT THINKING MEN introduces Rowland Sinclair to fans of Australian historical crime fiction.  Set in 1930's Sydney and Yass, A FEW RIGHT THINKING MEN takes a reader into a world where the affects of the Great Depression are being felt, and the tension between the Proto-Fascists and Communists in Australian society veers dangerously close to civil war.

Not that the central character of this novel, Rowland Sinclair, is feeling any of the Depression affects.  He is the youngest son of an extremely wealthy, influential farming family.  His oldest brother runs the farm ... Read Review

Kittyhawk Down, Garry Disher

Second in the Hal Challis series, Kittyhawk Down is an extremely busy book. Firstly there's the upper class sort of "gated" housing area, the farming area and the housing estates. There's a sinister South African living in one of those big gated houses. There's Monroe, the farmer, who is under increasing financial pressure and a bit of a hot head. There's a local busybody who spends his life reporting people to the relevant authorities and writing snippy letters to the local paper, earning himself the nickname of The Meddler. There's the unemployed, drug using sisters with their ... Read Review

Amongst the Dead, Robert Gott

AMONGST THE DEAD is the third novel in Robert Gott's William Power series.  William is an "aspirational" but failed Shakespearean actor, turned Private Investigator who finds himself in very unusual circumstances in the Top End of Australia during World War II in AMONGST THE DEAD.

William and his brother Brian are called upon by Australian Military Intelligence to find out the truth behind the suspicious deaths in a crack, very secret squad.  William, of course, thinks, that they need him for his superior powers of detection, and because they are to be infiltrated into ... Read Review

The Lost Man, Jane Harper

I'm going to start this review in an odd way, by declaring that I didn't like Jane Harper's second book FORCE OF NATURE as much as I had been expecting to. Initially I thought this was because it read like an idea that Aaron Falk had been hammered into it later on, weakening the plot, motivations and sense of place to the point where they seemed to sort of float along to an inevitable ending. Having now finished Harper's third (non-Falk book) THE LOST MAN, the reasons are clearer.

Harper is at her best when she's writing about people at the absolute and utter edge and THE ... Read Review

Live and Let Fry, Sue Williams

There are times in life when you just need something frivolous, fun and slightly tongue in cheek. Australian readers are lucky to have the Cass Tuplin series from Sue Williams to fulfil that need.

The tongue in cheek bit is the important thing to remember when it comes to Cass Tuplin books - from the titles: MURDER WITH THE LOT / DEAD MEN DON'T ORDER FLAKE and now LIVE AND LET FRY you can kind of gather there's a good old-style fish and chip shop somewhere in the mix here. In this case in the fictional Victorian Mallee town of Rusty Bore, just down the road from Hustle, ... Read Review

A Body of Work, Janice Simpson

NOTE: This review was originally published in 2013 - the book has now been re-released.

A debut police procedural from Melbourne based, ex-Ballarat dweller, JM (Janice) Simpson, A BODY OF WORK makes good use of both of those locations. Brendan O'Leary is now a Melbourne based detective, with family contacts still in Ballarat. His DC Ange Micelli has a very Melbourne background, descended from Italian migrants, an inner city dweller who is very focused on career, feeling a bit of pressure over family versus career. When they are called upon to investigate the murder of ... Read Review

The Sunday Girl, Pip Drysdale

Anybody thinking the cover of this novel with it's bright pink girly styling, means it's going to be on the light and fluffy side, might want to invest in some brown paper, cover the thing, and read it anyway. THE SUNDAY GIRL is not fluffy, girly fiction, even if the opening salvo makes you wonder about return on the brown paper investment. The central character of this tale, Taylor Bishop, is all millennium styled girl: over-sharing, over thinking, brittle and frequently coming across as daft as a brush. She is, in part, the daft idiotic woman of initial perception, but, as the tale ... Read Review