The blurb on HEAD SHOT says Jarad Henry has worked in the legal criminal justice system for the past ten years. It shows. There is a credibility to HEAD SHOT that implies that Henry knows how things work. He has met the people and walked the streets. Anyone who has been following the saga...Read more
Sophie Anderson is an Australian profiler working in the USA for the Behavioural Science unit with the FBI. She is also psychic, she sees through the eyes of the killer, and sometimes the victim, in her dreams. She is currently based in Washington DC and soon makes friends with fellow...Read more
FORBIDDEN FRUIT is the 5th book in the Corinna Chapman series by Australian author Kerry Greenwood (probably best known for her Phryne Fisher series). These books are set in modern day, inner Melbourne, are also on the cosier end of the scale. There are enough elements that coincide in...Read more
This book was on my Quest List for such a long time until I finally managed to track down a copy (and was subsequently somewhat startled to find it listed on Fishpond NZ!). The reason it hit the Quest List was the premise sounded so fascinating - take a bunch of real life cases, give them...Read more
Before everything comes across just a bit gushy, there was a point somewhere in the middle of the Cliff Hardy series where I seriously lost interest. Whilst there are some elements of the books that are always going to be the same, somehow the sameness became very obvious, there was...Read more
BLACKWATER MOON is the second book from Australian author B. Michael Radburn, although this has more of a crime fiction / thriller focus. Atmospheric, emotional, poignant and tightly controlled, both books from Radburn mark him out as an author to be watched.
The story is built...Read more
The legal thriller is a fairly common sub-genre overseas, but Alex Hammond’s Blood Witness is the first of this sort of book from a local writer for quite a while. Full review at ...Read more
ILL-GOTTEN GAINS is the second Nell Forest Mystery by Ilsa Evans set in the imagined country town of Majic (somewhere out near Bendigo if I remember from the first book :) )
When reviewing the earlier book, NEFARIOUS DOINGS ...Read more
Set in the heat, dust and community of the South Australian Mallee there is much that is visceral in ONE BOY MISSING. From the opening in which a young, vulnerable boy desperately tries to avoid a pursuer, to the character of DS Bart Moy who is back in Guilderton, possibly because his...Read more
June Wright is one of the early writers who forged a way for the current vibrant Australian crime fiction scene. Reviewed at Newtown Review of BooksRead more
This is the latest in a series of intelligent, well-researched and engagingly written crime-fiction novels set amid the suffragette battles of early 1900s England. ...Read more
In 2013 Aoife Clifford was awarded an Australian Society of Author's mentorship to help bring this debut novel - ALL THESE PERFECT STRANGERS - to fruition. To be fair to those who have read it and are finding the idea that this is a debut novel hard to believe, she has form. Shortlisted for...Read more
Leah Giarratano, forensic psychologist, crime fiction writer and consummate storyteller has just released her third novel - BLACK ICE. As with both of the earlier books, Giarratano takes the reader deep into a specific world of crime and criminal behaviour, the theme in BLACK ICE is illegal...Read more
GUNSHINE STATE has been compared to Garry Disher's Wyatt series for a very good reason. The anti-hero characterisation here is as crisp and clear as you'd want, with Gary Chance the sort of loner survivor that has stepped straight from the pages of classic noir into the bright lights and...Read more
After a few attempts, managed to finish BIG LITTLE LIES over the weekend. There's a reason this has been a bit of a chore explained below.
Funny and quite cleverly constructed, BIG LITTLE LIES is about every day lives. If you're a mother, an ex-wife, a daughter, a second wife or...Read more
AN ISOLATED INCIDENT is one of those books I've been trying to read for a ridiculously long time now, so being able to finally get to it in the context of our f2f bookclub gathering was an added bonus.
This is such a fascinating book, one that worked particularly well for our...Read more
JUST PLAY ALONG is Megan Daymond's debut novel, and she's taken on quite confrontational subject matter. A double date that turns into a snuff film, with one of the girls fighting back and killing one of the attackers in the struggle to survive. From there things go from bad to worse as...Read more
The Morley family--a husband, his wife and her three children from a former marriage, one young ward, and a governess. Add in Giles Ware, a young man who was engaged by a family agreement to the young ward, and the fact that he's in love with the governess, and you have the start of a...Read more
It has been a long time between drinks. Author Barry Maitland has always had a dab hand with the police procedural, and it is a relief to once again encounter the sensibilities and stoicism of his stellar creations David Brock and Kathy Kolla. Paired even in retirement, the two continue in...Read more
I know that summer is supposed to be finished, but no one told the sun and its mate, the wind that blisters off the plain, making me feel like a dry frog stranded between water points. But I see the plains grass is still green, the dust is holding low, and the kurrajong tree leaves are...Read more
Bush crime, or rural noir if you prefer, is having quite the moment as we all know. The challenges of such extreme geographic isolation in the hostile environment of outback Australia lends itself well to works of crime and dramatic fiction. It’s possible there is going to be no one...Read more
Sheerwater is an emotionally charged work of both hope and despair, beginnings and endings. Calling this book a thriller won’t be doing it a disservice, but it may give the expectation to the reader that they are about to dive into a work of suspense with no lingering take-homes to mull...Read more
A collection of eight different short stories, many of them past prize winners, all of them featuring crime and women from differing viewpoints.
Journalists, police officers and private investigators are some of the occupations of the different central characters. Perpetrators...Read more
First off, let me break all the "rules" of reviewing and say from the outset that I really enjoyed CUTTERS END.
Set in the South Australian outback town of Cutters End, this is a two timeline mystery, with the story harking back to the death of Michael Denby in the scrub off...Read more
Given the juxtaposition of this review, and my recent one for THE STONING, I probably should mention that Aoife Clifford was the author I was discussing rural noir versus rural crime with. To my eye, Clifford is one of the great writers of rural crime in Australia at the moment, and she's...Read more
One of my recent audio book listens, THE CONSEQUENCE by Gabriel Bergmoser features hardman, rogue ex-cop Jack Carlin who's the sort of bloke that finds running thugs out of town, and handing over all of the money they'd stolen to a struggling kid de rigueur. The drug cartel, whose money it...Read more
Book six in the Peter Clancy series, set in the world of investigative journalism, BEACHDAZE sees Peter back in Australia, out of the day-to-day newspaper game and up to his elbows in neighbourhood dispute from the moment he sets foot in his new home.
Readers of the earlier...Read more
My review of Bryan Brown's first full length crime novel - The Drowning has been posted at Newtown Review of Books:
https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/bryan-brown-the-drowning-...Read more
The first book in a planned series of post-war literary crime novels, DEATH OF A FOREIGN GENTLEMAN by Steven Carroll was released in April 2024. Not sure when the next one is due for release but I'll be standing by for it when it arrives.
Set in 1947, in Cambridge England,...Read more
In Melbourne, in 1868, theatre star Marie St Denis dies in the arms of her best friend, up and coming actress, Lola Sanchez. The accepted cause of death is suicide by laudanum overdose, something that Sanchez refuses to believe. Why would her brilliant, much admired, accomplished dear friend do such a thing? But then why would anyone kill St Denis?Read more