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Liars, James O'Loghlin22/10/2024 - 10:51amDon't be put off by LIARS by James O'Loghlin. It's a biggish book at 464 pages, but it fills that size admirably. Engaging, addictive, and intriguing, it's small town setting is used to build a complex story, with personalities, connections, backgrounds and people that are anything but. Set in the fictional location of Bullford Point, a seaside town on the NSW Central Coast that seems very real. Quaint and slow paced, it's facing big changes with a major real estate development planned, and tension between incomers and long-term residents; and those long-term residents ... Read Review |
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Madame Midas, Fergus Hume17/10/2024 - 4:27pmGrowing up around Ballarat not quite as long ago as MADAME MIDAS is set, it was really amazing to see how much of the layout of the city remains and how many of the locations are easily identifiable. Which probably meant that I ended up reading this book paying a lot more attention to the setting than I did to the plot. That's not to say that MADAME MIDAS doesn't have a plot that isn't bad, what with a caddish Frenchman trying to have their way with the charming, intelligent and very wealthy Madame Midas. Given that it was first published in 1888, it's probably no surprise ... Read Review |
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The Bat, Jo Nesbo09/10/2024 - 2:07pmAnother one of those periodical restarts of a favourite series, some of which actually get off the ground, some of which linger in the piles of unread books, mostly due to lack of time / organisation (which I'm working on). THE BAT is the first of the Harry Hole series, which is now up to 13 books in total, a few of the later ones I've not had a chance to read yet. Released originally in 1997 I vaguely remember my first reading of THE BAT, some time after that, and was startled to find a Scandinavian writer setting a book in Australia. At the time I also remember it ... Read Review |
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In the Blink of An Eye, Jo Callaghan08/10/2024 - 2:42pmNo use pretending that the basic premise of this novel, the use of an AIDE entity to assist in a stock standard cold case investigation, headed up by a (not unsurprisingly) sceptical DCS Kat Frank, was what grabbed my attention. So much noise about AI, so little accuracy, so why not an AIDE? By extension, would the idea fly, would the concept come across as vaguely believable, useful, worthwhile, interesting or just a bit of a gimmick. Anyway, onto the surrounding stuff. DCS Frank is a widowed, single mother of a teenage boy, struggling since the death of her husband to ... Read Review |
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Fallen Angel, Chris Brookmyre04/10/2024 - 2:44pmFALLEN ANGEL was released in 2019. I hate how behind I'm getting with my all time favourite authors, Chris(topher) Brookmyre being very unfairly on that accidental list. His take on people being people, particularly when some of them are flat out horrible people, is always drily delivered, pitch perfectly scathing, funny and flinch-inducingly pointed. In the case of this novel you've got a couple of family groups, English well to do's with their own villas around a shared pool in Portugal. In 2002 Max Temple is a famous scientist, known for his take-down of a delusional ... Read Review |
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No One Will Know, Rose Carlyle01/10/2024 - 2:55pmEve Sylvester is a young, very naive girl with a lot of tragedy in her life. Raised partly in the foster care system, she's been restlessly moving around most of her life, when a chance meeting with a young Australian man overseas leads to a yacht journey home. It's a short lived period of bliss with the love of her life, Xander, who then dies in a car accident on the way to introduce Eve to his very wealthy parents. Who were convinced their son was going to marry a much more suitable previous girlfriend, and are very sceptical when, after being released from hospital recovering from ... Read Review |
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Death of A Countess, Jenny Harrison30/09/2024 - 4:12pmDEATH OF A COUNTESS is set in May, 1957, London. In the aftermath of WWII, a group of friends are gathering for a party. Displaced people, they survived the worst of Hitler's concentration camps, so this party is a chance for them to celebrate their liberty, as well as to reconnect with their pasts and their culture. The second in the Midnight Heroes series, featuring Detective Andrew Perry, this is an historical novel that can be read as a standalone. The tagline of the novel spells it out "Post-war London should have been safe. It wasn't", and one of the attendees at ... Read Review |
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The Beijing Conspiracy, Shamini Flint25/09/2024 - 3:02pm
Another one of those books that I should have loved, really enjoyed the plot of, but had to abandon because the narrator didn't work for me on the audio version. (Have I mentioned before - very fussy listener). Will need to find this in eBook format. |
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Did I Ever Tell You This?, Sam Neill25/09/2024 - 12:37pmWatched Sam Neill's appearance on the ABC's version of "The Assembly" at the same time that I read this most unexpected, delightful, memorable memoir from a man who does tongue in cheek really well, but can never quite hide the humanity, kindness and thoughtfulness of the true self. An unusual sort of timeline in that it does take you down some of the expected pathways of memoir - childhood, growing up in various countries, the move to New Zealand, his family life, his acting career, his love of wine and so on. Interwoven with that, is unsurprisingly, the cancer diagnosis he now deals ... Read Review |
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Poison at Penshaw Hall, G.B. Ralph20/09/2024 - 8:45pmThe 2nd in the Milverton Mysteries featuring Addison Harper, this is a series that's on the cosier, English Village styled end of the mystery scale. Although that setting is delivered with a dry, very wry tone, and a great sense of petty politics in a pretty village. It's definitely the tone of this that sets it a little outside the standard traditional cosy fare. In this, the second of what is now a series of 3 novels, Milverton is the village at the centre of the action. In the running for the Terrific Town Award, so a dramatic, opening ceremony death is, as the blurb ... Read Review |
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The Old Woman with the Knife, Gu Byeong-mo20/09/2024 - 8:39pmSometimes a little gem pops into your listening orbit, THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE by Gu Byeong-mo being just such a surprise. Borrowed from the libraries audiobook list on a whim, narrated by Nancy Wu, there some just something about this that worked for this deeply fussy listener. Set in Korea, this is the story of a sixty-five-year-old contract killer who has experienced loss, grief and many complications in her life, not just because of the job she's done for many years. Nearing the end of her career, her life is starting to lose meaning. It's really down to her and ... Read Review |
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Southern Aurora, Mark Brandi19/09/2024 - 8:54pmEvoking a particularly poignant sense of the time period in which it is set, SOUTHERN AURORA is yet another pitch perfect book from Mark Brandi exploring intergenerational damage, domestic violence, small town and rural life and young boy's experiences - good and bad. Raw, visceral and unrepentantly confrontational, SOUTHERN AURORA explores the life of young Jimmy, a charismatic, complicated little boy, committed to holding the threads of his little family together. A borderline alcoholic mother (Jimmy instantly knew what his mother was feeling based on the weight of the ... Read Review |
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Kill Yours, Kill Mine Katherine Kovacic17/09/2024 - 1:07pmKILL YOURS, KILL MINE (aka SEVEN SISTERS) is a standalone novel from Katherine Kovacic, a beautifully written, powerful, provocative take on the concept of justice and vengeance, coming from a place of grief, guilt and the failure of the justice system. It's based around the deaths of women at the hands of domestic partners, and their sisters, left behind to pick up the pieces and make sense of the past. Mia is a psychologist with a practice specialising in grief counselling. It's called "The Pleiades", named for the seven sisters of Greek mythology, companions of the ... Read Review |
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Leave the Girls Behind, Jacqueline Bublitz16/09/2024 - 3:13pmLEAVE THE GIRLS BEHIND is the latest offering from Jacqueline Bublitz, after the absolutely fascinating BEFORE YOU KNEW MY NAME. This is a different beast entirely, although it's again set in the USA, featuring a strong, unusual central female character. Ruth-Ann Baker is a college dropout, bartender and amateur detective who lives in an apartment owned by a much loved uncle, with only her beloved dog for company. She's a tormented, complicated character, not at all helped by her obsession with the murder of her best friend, nineteen years earlier, by a suspected serial ... Read Review |
Shadow City, Natalie Conyer16/09/2024 - 2:11pmThe second novel in the Schalk Lourens series, SHADOW CITY uses his home of South Africa as one location for the story, introducing a new character, Sergeant Jackie Rose to lead the action in Sydney. The story begins with the discovery of the body of a battered and tortured young woman in a food court in Sydney's Chinatown. To Jackie Rose, initially it looks suspiciously like yet another drug murder, but there is an odd tattoo on the young girl and some complications when it comes to identifying her. What Rose doesn't know is around the same time, in Cape Town in South ... Read Review |
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Butter, Asako Yuzuki16/09/2024 - 2:05pmI (tried) listening to this much acclaimed Japanese book, which is very much focused on cooking and food, with a sideline inspired by the true story of a convicted con woman and serial killer. An unusual sort of a story, it's all a long slow build up, which hints at, but doesn't necessarily provide any indepth commentary on, the position and treatment of women in Japanese society. Those later aspects, had they been concentrated on a lot more, might have provided some connection for this listener with the central journalist character, and the serial killer at the heart of ... Read Review |
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Every Time I Go on Vacation Someone Dies, Catherine Mack13/09/2024 - 2:03pmTo be honest - read the blurb on this and nearly made it a hard pass. But I do love Only Murders in the Building, so I am relieved I paid no attention to my initial reservations, started reading and a few chapters in, was highly amused and very engaged. On one hand it's all a bit silly - Eleanor Dash is a breathless, disorganised, needy writer who finds herself on a book tour surrounded by a busload of groupies (known as the BookFace ladies), a number of other authors somewhere on the unpleasant to unmemorable scale, an ex-flame, an ex-boyfriend (two different men), a ... Read Review |
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The Crag, Claire Sutherland10/09/2024 - 8:56pmIn Claire Sutherland’s debut crime novel, a body is found on an isolated track on the Wimmera Plains, where Mount Arapiles towers over all. Anybody who has ever spent any time in the Wimmera around Gariwerd (the Grampians) in Victoria will know how striking the contrast is between the vast flat plains and the sudden, towering mountain range. It’s an astounding sight, bringing to mind the ancient age of the landscape and, if you look at the climbing faces of Mount Arapiles, the danger that awaits the unwary. This enormous old sea cliff rises ... Read Review Newtown Review of Books |
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Unblessed, Roger Simpson10/09/2024 - 2:02pmUNBLESSED is the latest in the Jane Halifax series of books, featuring the TV series character of the same name. A forensic psychologist, Halifax has worked with all sorts of criminal types - from serial to opportunistic killers, and in the last book, herself, when she suffers from sudden onset amnesia as a result of a car accident. You don't need to have read the earlier books in the series necessarily, although Halifax has got a bit of baggage that she's carting around with her which is not always fully revisited in each outing. In UNBLESSED she's in the US visiting her ... Read Review |
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The Chasm, Bronwyn Hall10/09/2024 - 1:15pmThe second novel from author Bronwyn Hall, THE CHASM is set in and around a fictional small town in Victoria's rugged mountains. Andy King has returned to Stonefield 10 years after her boyfriend, Will Hoffman, disappeared without a trace, something all the locals blamed her for. Despite the animosity, King promised an old friend in a nearby town that she would help out at his veterinary practice so he could take a break, which means she's busy with the day to day activities of a country vet, so she's nearby "technically" but not quite back at the scene of the disappearance. ... Read Review |