All the Reviews

A Year to Learn a Woman, Paddy Richardson

A YEAR TO LEARN A WOMAN is the second novel and first crime fiction offering from New Zealand writer Paddy Richardson.  Travis Crill is a serial rapist - convicted and jailed for a series of bizarre attacks.  Claire Wright is a freelance journalist, living alone with her young daughter after the sudden death of her older husband.  When Claire is first contacted to see if she would be interested in writing the story of Crill for a very much needed large sum of money, she finds she can quickly overcome her initial reluctance to look closely at a man like him.  But understanding Crill's ... Read Review

Beautiful Death, Fiona McIntosh

Now a little housekeeping before we go too far.  Beautiful Death is the second DCI Jack Hawksworth book, published under the author's real name of Fiona McIntosh.  The first, Bye Bye Baby, was published under the pseudonym Lauren Crow.  Fiona is a well known Fantasy writer in Australia, and these two books are her first foray into crime fiction.

DCI Jack Hawksworth has a good working relationship with his team - they are a close group who have worked together on dreadful cases before.  The team, and his superiors are more than used to Jack getting the personal and the ... Read Review

Echoes from the Dead, Johan Theorin

This book is just classic Swedish / Scandinavian crime fiction.  Slow, involved, intricate, revealing and complex, ECHOES FROM THE DEAD concentrates very much on Julia, and her father, and their slow and careful repairing of a relationship which was torn apart at the time that Julia's son disappeared.

Julia hasn't coped at all since her son's disappearance and she's at a particularly low ebb in life when her father calls her back to the small, closed in island on which the boy disappeared.  Julia's father, Gerlof, lives in a home now, but he's still connected with the ... Read Review

A Darker Domain, Val McDermid

Val McDermid has tackled some social history that is obviously very dear to her own heart in A DARKER DOMAIN, and it has to be said, she's done it with considerable style.  Not only does this book give you a fascinating glimpse into the social chaos and personal pain caused by the Miner's Strikes in early 1980's Britain, it carries the story of three unfathomable disappearances.

Cold Case squad detectives DI Karen Pirie and DS Phil Parhatka are initially looking into the disappearance of Mick Prentice - reported missing 22 years after he supposedly broke ranks and joined ... Read Review

The Final Bet, Abdelilah Hamdouchi

Remarked upon often as the first Arabic detective story translated, THE FINAL BET is a very slim volume that has a strong central message.  The book really isn't particularly about Casablanca the place, or even the people.  It's very much targeted straight at the way that the Moroccan legal system functioned at the time that it was written - and you can pick that thread up very clearly even without reading the afterword by the translator of the book - Jonathan Smolin.

Othman has often thought about killing his elderly wife.  The marriage is complicated by the difference ... Read Review

Cold Blooded Murder, Malcolm Brown

Malcolm Brown is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, where he covered (amongst other things) courts, royal commissions and coroners' inquests for more than 30 years.  As well as editing COLD BLOODED MURDER, he has contributed a number of chapters, with remaining sections coming from a range of other journalists all from the region in which the crime was committed.

The book is broken up into chapters about a number of recent notorious crimes in all parts of Australia.  A number of these crimes are particularly well known - the Snowtown, South Australia "bodies in ... Read Review

Arctic Chill, Arnaldur Indridason

There are some authors who are on my buy immediately list.  Some of these books I can happily hoard - waiting until just the right moment to sit and enjoy them.   And there are the ones that are buy and read immediately.  ARCTIC CHILL has definitely been one of those books.  As soon as it arrived in the house it danced around before my eyes until I could finish what I was reading and start this one.

And you know when you've picked up a fabulous book because you find yourself sitting in the car, reading it - "it's no problem I can wait in the car while you run in and do ... Read Review

The Scent of the Night, Andrea Camilleri

A large part of the attraction of these novels is the wonderfully grumpy, slightly eccentric, marvellously self-involved Inspector Montalbano.  And the food - the meals that Montalbano insists on partaking on a regular basis are frankly, almost obscenely fantastic.  Of course, for the books to be completely satisfactory there has actually got to be a story, and as with all these books, the story here is superbly Italian in its feel.  The financier Emanuele Gargano has disappeared - as has a large amount of money that a lot of local retirees invested with him.  An investigation had ... Read Review

As Darkness Falls, Bronwyn Parry

A difficult setting, and a difficult task for the debut novelist.  Bronwyn Parry does a fine job with bringing a small Australian bush town to life and this is the great strength of the read.  You can taste the dust in the air and truly really picture everyone talking out the sides of their mouths (so thus to avoid the blowflies).  Where it would be a stretch is in calling this a  a crime novel, or even one of romantic suspense as there is no real mystery to solve or any pretense in constructing one.   As a developing relationship drama it serves very well, and will draw the reader in ... Read Review