All the Reviews

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Soji Shimada

Honkaku is a subgenre of Japanese Crime Fiction that came into being sometime in the early 1920's. The original definition was "a detective story that mainly focuses on the process of a criminal investigation and values the entertainment derived from pure logical reasoning". The term was coined to clearly differentiate Honkaku mystery fiction from other subgenres and it was used for both local and Western writers, although a distinct Japanese form became increasingly common in the 1950's.

Adding depth to long tradition, the author of THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS, Soji Shimada ... Read Review

Leona: The Die is Cast, Jenny Rogneby

Any readers looking for something different - LEONA: THE DIE IS CAST could be just the ticket. There's so much here in the writing, and the styling that is very brave of this author.

Leona Lindberg is both a highly regarded investigator and an outsider. She has a personality disorder which makes her a tricky person to work with, and an even harder protagonist for a reader to establish a connection with. Her internal dialogue clearly shows she's aware of her limitations, that her interactions with others are flawed, and able to moderate that to some extent. Every now and ... Read Review

A Time to Run, J.M. Peace

There's a lot of crime fiction out there that is all about the investigator and the protagonist, but A TIME TO RUN tips that right on it's ear, setting up a scenario in which an investigator (cop) is the next victim of a mad, dangerous man who makes a sport out of hunting down the women he's abducted.

So, not a book for those readers that find that concept of the randomly selected victim and the barking mad, vicious killer too much. Particularly as this killer is appalling and very clever about it. It's not until a cop goes missing that a very dedicated policewoman sees ... Read Review

Kingdom of the Strong, Tony Cavanaugh

KINGDOM OF THE STRONG is the fourth Darian Richards novel from screenwriter, producer and novelist Tony Cavanaugh. Readers of the past novels will be aware of the background of Richards. A high ranking cop in Victoria for many years, he has a darker side, with a history of ensuring justice for victims even if it means he steps into the role of avenging angel. Readers of the earlier books will also be aware of a tendency towards the barking mad, evil, utterly over the top, random serial killer. Which, frankly, made this reader struggle with them, no matter how compelling a character ... Read Review

Dead Guilty (aka An Act of Reparation), Susan Godenzi

Originally published under the title AN ACT OF REPARATION, DEAD GUILTY uses the complex subject of domestic abuse as a vehicle to explore the ongoing abuse and exploitation of women in very vulnerable situations.

Starting out with the murder of an abusive husband Sean Laidlaw, journalist Lexie Reed stumbles upon the subsequent disappearance of his wife and daughter's from a local crisis shelter. Whilst the police are initially focused on the murder, which was caused a particularly brutal head-injury inflicted by a wood splitter, they are forced by Reed's discoveries to ... Read Review

After the Crash, Michel Bussi

AFTER THE CRASH opens with private eye Credule Grand-Duc preparing to take his own life after spending nearly eighteen years failing to discover the truth behind the miracle of the baby who survived a plane crash. Preparing his papers for handover, and setting the scene for his dramatic final act, he contemplates once more the front page from the local newspaper the day that the crash happened. And suddenly realises he finally knows the answer.

Occurring at a time well before the advent of DNA testing, any chance of establishing the parentage of the baby at the ... Read Review

Drowned Vanilla, Livia Day

Slightly girly, crazy comic crime fiction is not my normal cup of tea, and add a plethora of recipes and this reader should, by rights, be groaning and moaning and whinging. But not with The Culinary Crime / Café La Femme series of which DROWNED VANILLA is the second book. (As opposed to THE BLACKMAIL BLEND 1.5 which is a collection of short stories).

Pitched at a very particular market this isn't indepth, psychological analysis of crime and consequences. If anything more time and effort is devoted to the search for the perfect Ice-Cream recipe than is expended on the ... Read Review

Only the Brave, Mel Sherratt

The third in the DS Allie Shenton series, readers might be best served to have at least read one of the earlier books (this reviewer has read FOLLOW THE LEADER only and that helped make sense of a lot of the sub-plot elements).

Whilst the main plot of ONLY THE BRAVE is the bashing, then stabbing murder of a notorious local identity, his connections to the underworld family that forms a big part of Shenton's background might need a bit of filling from the earlier books to make sense. There are complications aplenty in this death - and not just the missing ... Read Review

Blurline, TW Lawless

The third in the Peter Clancy series, BLURLINE takes Clancy to swinging London and the edges of the "red-top" newspaper world. Granted he headed there with high hopes of getting a job in slightly more salubrious circumstances, but needs must and when the money starts running low, a reputation built on the back of The Truth newspaper in Melbourne isn't going to help when it comes to "serious newspapers".

When Clancy lands himself a job on one of the even lesser of the lesser scandal rags, he ends up posing as a biographer ghostwriter, supposedly helping well known, and ... Read Review