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

Crossing The Lines, Sulari Gentill

"In the beginning she was a thought so unformed that he was aware only of something which once was not."

Edward McGinnity is a successful novelist who wants to write a novel about a crime writer. His character’s name is Madeleine d’Leon, a writer of the popular period crime novels. Madeleine wants to write a modern crime novel. Her novel’s character is also a writer.

"She called him Edward McGinnity. His friends would call him Ned."

Sounds simple so far, it’s not. Crossing The Lines is a work of Meta Fiction and the characters of Edward ... Read Review

All The Tears in China, Sulari Gentill

By the time a series reaches book number nine, there are many elements that a reader can expect, and ALL THE TEARS IN CHINA delivers on them with aplomb. Rowly and his band of colleagues are as close as they always were; Milton is still quoting other people's poetry with Rowly providing the attributions; Clyde is still the sensible one; Edna is obsessed with something (this time it's her newly discovered interest in film); Rowly is still quietly in love with Edna (and he will be beaten up by various lurking types with metronome like regularity); and this little band of artistic types ... Read Review

Cedar Valley, Holly Throsby

“On a normal morning, a lone police car would be parked out the front of the station, waiting for something illegal to happen.”

Cedar Valley, Holly Throsby’s second novel, begins with the arrival of two strangers on the first day of summer in 1993. One, Benny Miller, has come to live in a house which an old friend of her recently deceased mother has offered to her. The other, a man dressed in a suit, tie and jumper, clothes which are wholly unsuitable for a hot Australian summer. When the man sits down outside Cedar Valley Curios & Old Wares and quietly dies ... Read Review

Crime Scene Asia : when forensic evidence becomes the silent witness, Liz Porter

There's a quote on the back of this book from Stephen Cordner, Professor of Forensic Pathology, Monash Universay Australia:

"The forensic science and medical evidence in Crime Scene Asia is fascinating in itself, as are the accounts of the police investigations. But what sets it apart is seeing how that evidence is used in court by the prosecution and then challenged, or alternative forensic evidence is introduced by the defence. The reader hears from the experts, but also experiences the lawyers facing each other on a tightrope trading blows...

... Read Review