All the Reviews

Antidote to Murder, Felicity Young

ANTIDOTE TO MURDER is the second Dr Dody McCleland book from WA based author Felicity Young. If this is a series that you are yet to catch up with, then all I can say is get to it. Immediately.

Set in Edwardian London, McCleland is a qualified doctor, fighting a society that has some very confronting attitudes towards women, in particular. To remain working as a doctor, McCleland has to battle daily against mindless prejudice and power games. To simply survive many more women are fighting a similar battle. Particularly any poor woman who is unlucky enough to be single, ... Read Review

Blind Goddess, Anne Holt

The Hanne Wilhelmsen series from Norwegian author Anne Holt is another one of those Scandinavian series that have been translated completely out of order. For reasons which, as usual, escape me completely. So <insert standard whinge about how profoundly annoying that is>, and onto BLIND GODDESS which is the book that started the whole thing off.

It would be bad enough to discover a battered body when jogging in the morning, but you'd doubt lawyer Karen Borg would also have been expecting to be called in as defence counsel for the Dutchman who is found wandering, ... Read Review

Murder With the Lot, Sue Williams

MURDER WITH THE LOT is set in the fictional Mallee town of Rusty Bore, featuring Cass Tuplin, fish and chip shop owner, mother, and self-appointed private investigator. The story is told all from Cass's viewpoint, a viewpoint which is somewhat skewed towards a ... how should we put this ... less than realistic outlook. Not only is the Mallee still deep in the middle of the drought that just about broke everyone's spirit, but Rusty Bore is a town that's been hit particularly hard. Loss of people to the "Big Smoke" just down the road, loss of passing traffic, loss of money and even ... Read Review

Eugenia, Mark Tedeschi QC

I really think that whenever I feel like a bit of a whinge about the way life is these days, I should read a book like EUGENIA. Eugenia Falleni was a woman born into a large Italian Family, who grew up in New Zealand, and spent most of her all too short life in Australia, living most of it as a man.

Mark Tedeschi QC looks at what happened to Eugenia in her early life, a rape and subsequent birth of a daughter which complicated her life even more, how she functioned in day-to-day life, her first marriage and the death of her wife for which she was charged with murder, ... Read Review

Young Philby, Robert Littell

You can't help thinking that this is an interesting idea for a book, the story of one of the most famous real-life spies, told from the point of view of Philby's own life. Now the book and it's publicity material is quite tricky about the background of this book. Whilst there's nothing there to indicate whether or not this is a true story or fictional, it's written in a way that implies that the whole thing is the true story of Kim Philby's early years.

YOUNG PHILBY is however, a novel. It expands on what is known about Philby's life after Cambridge University (where he, ... Read Review

The Dunbar Case, Peter Corris

I'm really not sure how Peter Corris, or Cliff Hardy manage to keep up the pace, but I'm very very relieved they do, as the New Year tradition of a new Cliff Hardy book, a couch and the Test Cricket on the radio has become rather important over the last few years.

One of the most interesting aspects of THE DUNBAR CASE is the nature of the investigation - uncovering the mysteries of a nineteenth-century shipwreck isn't the sort of case that you'd expect to find in a modern day PI style novel. But as is often the way, it doesn't really matter what Hardy is called upon to ... Read Review

Deadly Code, Lin Anderson

DEADLY CODE is the 3rd book in the Dr Rhona Macleod series, a series, which up until now I've really enjoyed, but for some reason this one didn't work. Mind you, terrific sense of place, very atmospheric what with Macleod off in the remote Scottish Isles battling the evil menace of a cult of Scottish extremists. Or I think that's what they were. The big problem was that the plot was a bit too silly at points. Not that the idea of extremists of any kind is a bad concept, but not where there needs to be so much coincidence and frankly, a whole heap of heavy lifting to get Macleod into ... Read Review

The Silver Dagger, Jame McLean

Sometimes I wonder if a book gets filed under "will get around to that" because of some sort of subconscious reaction to the blurb. I'm going with that. Makes me feel somewhat less daft than if I confessed that I put THE SILVER DAGGER down on a stack of unread books and then promptly forgot about it. It's not age, just poor stack management... really.

Anyway, the rediscovery of this book did give me a little pause for thought.

"Robert Carrana doesn't have much pity and he certainly has no compassion. What he does have is a passion for vengeance, a brutal heart ... Read Review

Making Money, Terry Pratchett

Less of a review - more of a note to self. If Terry Pratchett published the doodles from the notepad on his telephone table I'd probably read that, so MAKING MONEY was no trial at all, even though it's probably not one of the better of the Discworld novels.

Maybe that's because there was a decided lack of wizards, maybe it's because Moist Von Lipwig isn't quite as flamboyant or, well let's say it, lunatic as some of the central characters in other books. Maybe it's also because the plot isn't quite as convoluted, layered, twisty, and, well lunatic, as others. ... Read Review