Book Review

Eden, Dorothy Johnston

31/10/2007 - 2:39pm

Sandra Mahoney and her partner Ivan are security consultants, so what she is doing poking around the death by natural causes of a well known politician seems to confuse Sandra as much as everybody else.  In EDEN, the third Sandra Mahoney series book by Dorothy Johnston, Sandra is home alone - Ivan and their daughter Katya are in Russia visiting his relations and it's summer in Canberra.  Sandra had originally planned to spend summer on the coast - with her son, but she's at a bit of a loose end when he heads off to Tasmania with his father, leaving her in hot, slightly dismal Canberra ... Read Review

The Heavens May Fall, Unity Dow (review by sunniefromoz)

25/10/2007 - 1:31pm

The book is a series of vignettes set around a main story.  All the stories centre around women facing legal problems.  The author, Unity Dow, is Botswana’s first female High Court judge and has made a name for herself dealing with human rights issues, particularly in relation to women.  Botswana is a very young country still trying to come to terms with the modern world.  That is where the main interest in the book lies.  How to reconcile a modern British Justice system with old traditional ways and still achieve justice for women is what makes THE HEAVENS MAY FALL so interesting. ... Read Review

In The Woods, Tana French

17/10/2007 - 3:41pm

Is it really only a month or so since IN THE WOODS was released in paperback? There's a lot of talk about this debut book, and you should be listening, the positive talk is highly deserved.

In 1984, in Knocknaree, County Dublin, Ireland, three 12 year old children - Adam, Peter and Jamie (Germaine) are playing. They've been life long friends and they go everywhere together. They are seemingly leading an idyllic childhood, with the housing estate they live in filled with young families and other children, backing onto the wood in which they regularly explore, run and play ... Read Review

Thirty-Three Teeth, Colin Cotterill

15/10/2007 - 6:41pm

THIRTY-THREE TEETH is the follow up to THE CORONER'S LUNCH featuring the elderly, reluctant Laotian National Coroner Dr Siri Paiboun.

In THIRTY-THREE TEETH it is summer in Vientiane and it is hot, bloody hot. Laotians greet each other with that phrase as they steam away in the unrelenting heat. In Vientiane, a much tormented Asian Bear escapes from cruel confines in a local hotel garden just before there is a slow build-up of viciously savaged corpses in Dr Siri's morgue. The injuries that these victims have endured appear to indicate that they have been mauled by a very ... Read Review

Frankie, Kevin Lewis

15/10/2007 - 5:12pm

If "About the Author" in the press release is to be believed, then in FRANKIE, Kevin Lewis is writing about a world not that far from the one he grew up in.

On a cold London evening Frankie, a young woman with a sad past, now living on the streets, has no choice when a drug dealer, pimp and lowlife targets the very young Mary - a recent street kid, still pretty, still not drawn into addiction and degradation. Frankie fights for Mary and the pimp dies. Frankie is now not just on the streets with her own past to deal with, but she's running from the police, from the ... Read Review

The Colour of Blood, Declan Hughes

15/10/2007 - 12:43pm

THE COLOUR OF BLOOD is the second Ed Loy novel by Declan Hughes, the first being The Wrong Kind of Blood, published in 2006.

Ed Loy is a Private Investigator in current day Dublin, Ireland - a place that's part gritty, poor, desperate and part rich, privileged, twisted. Shane Howard is a Dublin dentist, and the son of Dr John Howard, a pillar of Dublin Irish Society, famous in the local area, with a legacy that is maintained by his family. Shane's 19 year old daughter Emily has gone missing and now he is getting blackmail threats and sexually explicit photographs of her ... Read Review

Crow Stone, Jenni Mills

14/10/2007 - 2:58pm

"Corax the Raven - the messenger of the gods. Just when you think life is on track, along comes a socking great bird, squawking news of a divine quest. My advice is, shoot the bloody thing....."

The quote at the start of CROW STONE hinted at something with a very dry, quirky sense of humour and it definitely delivers - on the lighter moments, with good characterisation and a tremendous, taut, tense and frequently disturbing plot.

Katie was a little girl in Bath, living with her overbearing father, her mother left them when she was only a toddler. In many ways ... Read Review

All She Ever Wanted, Patrick Redmond

14/10/2007 - 2:31pm

If you're looking for a disconcerting psychological thriller, with the lead up to the crime as the focus of the story, ALL SHE EVER WANTED could be the book for you.

Tina was a weak, bullied, vulnerable child. Deserted by the father she adored, belittled by a mother that blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in her own life, Tina was a scrawny, ugly duckling child - the object of derision and cruelty by nearly everyone around her. Her only real emotional support, her aunt, tried to care for the girl that everybody else, if she was lucky, ignored. All she ever ... Read Review

Ice Trap, Kitty Sewell

12/10/2007 - 2:55pm

Dafydd Woodruff was a very young surgeon when he made a nearly fatal mistake on the operating table. Shaken to the core by this event, he takes a locum position in the northern Canada wilderness to recover from his guilt and reassess. He spends a year in Moose Creek - just enough time to experience the frontier style life.

Fifteen years later, Dafydd is a consultant surgeon in Wales, trying to start a family with his wife, the marriage struggling under the pressure of infertility, when he receives a letter from Moose Creek. The letter is from a young girl who says she ... Read Review

Ice Moon, Jan Costin Wagner

12/10/2007 - 2:43pm

Recently finished, ICE MOON by Jan Costin Wagner was an unexpected pleasure. It seems that Wagner has a bit of a reputation in his homeland of Germany for turning the "traditional" form of crime fiction on its head and if that's the case then he's done it again with ICE MOON.

Whilst there is murder, and an obviously very disturbed serial killer, in many ways ICE MOON is more an exploration of grief. The book opens with Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa confronted with the death of his young wife from cancer. Returning to work straight away, he is left trying to understand ... Read Review

Cross, Ken Bruen

12/10/2007 - 1:40pm

Jack Taylor is changing. Shattered by the shooting of Cody, the young man who came to him for a chance, Jack feels for Cody like a man would for his natural son. Cody is comatose in hospital and even though he didn't pull the trigger, Jack feels responsible for Cody's fate. This has given him a real reason and he's given up drinking, smoking and drugs. Jack's not pretending - it's hard, and he's not found an exactly “normal” way of resisting a drink, but he's serious and he's really trying.

As usual with Jack he's pulled into strange events and strange places. A young boy ... Read Review

A Stain on the Silence, Andrew Taylor

10/10/2007 - 4:03pm

James and Nicky are a happily married couple, no kids, new big fancy house, everything seemingly idyllic between them. Until the day that James receives a call on his mobile: “Jamie .... It's me!”. The only woman who has ever called him Jamie was Lily Murthington. When James was a young boy his father was killed in a car accident and his mother worked overseas, eventually remarrying. James was bundled off to boarding school where he met Carlo Murthington. Carlo had a younger sister, Felicity and a stepmother – Lily. James spent a lot of school holidays with the Murthington family, but ... Read Review

Dreamquake, Elizabeth Knox

10/10/2007 - 12:49pm

Dreamhunters can catch and broadcast dreams. They are able to enter a sort of alternative reality - “the Place” and hunt and catch all sorts of dreams. They can then bring those dreams back and broadcast them to an audience of people. These performances are entertainment, sometimes relaxation, amusement or even healing. They can also sometimes be very very threatening. In Southland, a location that seems to evoke New Zealand, The Rainbow Opera is a Dream Performance / opera house with a central stage that Dreamhunters project from into small chambers full of their sleeping audience. ... Read Review

And Hope to Die, J.M. Calder

09/10/2007 - 3:39pm

Set in an unnamed USA city, JM Calder's second thriller AND HOPE TO DIE is chilling. The book opens as a package is received by the parents of a kidnapped little girl. Finding out that this little girl is the 4th child taken by the same kidnapper and then discovering that even though the children are released, they have been purposely mutilated is bad enough. Then finding out that the kidnapper's demands aren't for money, but for the suicide of the mother in return for the life of the child, and you're going to be squirming in your chair as you read.

Solomon Glass has ... Read Review

Dragon Mountain, Daniel Reid

09/10/2007 - 2:26pm

Captain Jack Robertson, ex-Military, Pilot and CIA Spy is kidnapped in-flight, picking up the latest shipment of opium that the CIA is using to fund covert operations in Asia. Discovering that he has been kidnapped by the deliciously over the top one-eyed, betel juice chewing minion of his disgraced comrade ex-Chinese Army officer Ching Wei is disconcerting enough. Ching Wei and Jack go back to 1942, when they were both pilots moving supplies from India into Chungking during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Ching Wei was rubbed out of the Chinese Army because of his drug-smuggling ... Read Review

Big Shots, Adam Shand

08/10/2007 - 2:50pm

There's something - possibly it's car crash fascination - but ultimately there's something nigglingly alluring about True Crime books about the recent ructions in Melbourne's Underworld.  Maybe it's the proximity of the goings on, maybe it's the sheer unbelievability of the world that people - who don't live a million miles away from me - live.  It's a lifestyle that doesn't have any similarity with my own, yet it goes on in the same city that I live in.  And Melbourne's not a humongous metropolis... it's Melbourne.

Adam Shand's Big Shots is, I guess, in that style that ... Read Review

The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh

04/10/2007 - 4:36pm

THE CUTTING ROOM is Louise Welsh's debut novel, published for the first time by Text Publishing in Australia in 2006.

Rilke's not exactly the archetypal hero accidental investigator. He's in his 40's; his personal hygiene is a bit offhand; he's an auctioneer for one of Glasgow's less than salubrious auction houses and he's gay with a taste for anonymous sexual encounters anywhere, anytime.

When summoned by Miss McKindless to her recently deceased brother's home, stuffed full with antiques, the likes of which Rilke's firm have never been able to get hold of. ... Read Review

Death by Chocolate, Toby Moore

04/10/2007 - 2:55pm

We have seen the future, and it's a scary place. In DEATH BY CHOCOLATE, being fat in most States of America is now a crime, and Health Enforcement in New York enforce weight licences and track down humonsters for forced re-education. Brown (chocolate's street name) is only available from smugglers and illicit dealers. Illicit eateasy's are hidden all over town, serving burgers, fries and other illegal substances. The boring, day to day existence of Health Enforcement Officers Devlin and Strong is disrupted in a big way when Cupid Frish, pulled over just days before for a random weight ... Read Review

The Fields of Grief, Giles Blunt

04/10/2007 - 1:38pm

John Cardinal is a detective in the small police force, in Algonquin Bay, Ontario a small rural town in Canada. The local mayor keeps reporting his wife missing, when everybody else in town knows exactly what she's up to. Rather than just try to convince the poor delusional husband what's really going on, Cardinal is sitting in a car, with the mayor, outside the local motel, when there's a call over the radio about a body.

As Cardinal pulls up outside the location, a part of him is wondering about the car that looks just like his wife's and a part of him is wondering why ... Read Review

Gagged & Bound, Natasha Cooper

04/10/2007 - 1:27pm

Trish Maguire is a barrister but no expert in libel law, but her head of Chambers desperately seeks help with the weeping, deeply worried Bee Bowman. Bee is being sued by Lord Tick, a new member of the House of Lords, over the use of his little known family nickname in a biography she has written about a young man caught up in the bombing of a bus load of small children. Typically, nothing ever happens in single events though, and Trish is also caught up in the problems of her dear friend Detective Inspector Caro Lyalt who, in the process of applying for a very high profile job ... Read Review

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