Situated in a beautiful setting abutting the Balarang waterways and located on an acre of natural bushland, this three-bedroom country home is full of promise, character and potential. Featuring private access to the many splendours of Balarang Creek, this idyllic property is perfect for...Read more
Started reading this novella (133 pages or thereabouts) and really did, for the shortest time, wonder what on earth I'd started. THE STONE WĒTĀ isn't your normal enviro-thriller, oh boy is it not your normal enviro-thriller.
"With governments denying climate science, scientists...Read more
"Sure thirty years is a long time. Sure the case was closed. Well, never really a case as such. Fifteen-year-old brown girl tops herself, who cares? Turn the page. That bloody notebook, thought Club. God knows what was in it. Who knew that little bitch could even write?"
Ruby...Read more
The second in the Maigret series (although there's some suggestion it could be the fourth although I've done zero fact checking one way or the other), this one really re-affirmed my decision to go right back to the start, and work my way through the audio versions of this series (the anti-...Read more
I used to keep count of "girl in a hat" (and man standing on a foggy street corner) book covers. But in this case, you know the sort of thing, book covers for rural / romance styled novels with girls looking off into the distance, over fields of golden (dry) grass, akubra style hat firmly...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 4 in the Maigret series, which I'm wandering back through via the medium of audio books. Which as we all know is successful based hugely on the narrator. In this case Gareth Armstrong does a great job, with a voice that's laid back enough to make it pleasant listening, but not so much...Read more
This fierce, unflinching thriller asks timely questions about threatening behaviour. Why don’t we recognise it? Stop it? - Full Review at Newtown Review of Books.Read more
THE WRONG WOMAN is the first foray from J.P. Pomare overtly set in the US, and it was, for this reader, utterly seamless in its evocation of an American feeling small town. Helped a lot by the central character ex-cop, now Private Investigator Reid being from this particular community, and...Read more
Harrowing and insightful, DOUBLE LIVES by Kate McCaffrey is a very topical exploration of issues around gender, identity, acceptance and truth. There is, for some readers, some confrontational and topical subject matter being addressed here, revolving as it does around the murder of...Read more
I'm not going to pretend that I didn't wonder if the dreaded "second book syndrome" would appear with Benjamin Stevenson's EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT.
This second novel in the series (not his body of work overall), features Ernest Cunningham, of EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY...Read more
Been very intrigued by this series for the longest time, and I'm so glad I finally remembered to add it to the audio queue. Probably been mentioned lots before, but this felt very much like a worthy successor to the espionage thriller crown that sat atop John Le Carre's head for many many...Read more
As is the way of the world, there have been quite a few crime fiction books recently that delve into the world of cults, the people that get caught in them, and those trying to get them out. DEEP IN THE FOREST is a slightly different twist on that. It's the story of a small town outcast,...Read more
In 1911, Augustus (Gus) Hawkins is a mounted trooper in rural New South Wales. A veteran of the Boer war he's a complex man with a severe case of PTSD and a bad dose of long-standing longing for Flora Kirkbride, eldest of four children of a local "landed gentry" family. Until the night he...Read more
Borrowed this one by sheer happenstance from the library in audio format. Turned out to be an excellent choice, as it was different, and cleverly done.
MURDER BY NATURAL CAUSES is told in two timelines. In the current day, Cilla is a 22-year-old contract killer, specialising in...Read more
You know the type - small time crims / druggies / fringe dwelling bikers who cause havoc. Only this time the violent robbery they've just committed gets a lot worse when they kill the very young daughter of a family who were just out on a bit of a day trip. Turns out the law catching up...Read more
The 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...Read more
If everyone has a book hidden somewhere in them, it seems, these days, it's probably going to be a crime fiction book. It seems inevitable now that "celebrities" will show up at, touting their wares - some with considerably more success than others.
Susie Dent, famous for her...Read more
My review of RESERVATION FOR MURDER, FACULTY OF MURDER and MAKE-UP FOR MURDER has been posted:
June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange outstripped sales of Agatha Christie in...Read more
In a sign of just how ridiculously behind and disorganised I've been of late, A CASE OF MATRICIDE has been lurking around here for months now, and it's the third novel in a series that I'd failed to even start. Now I'm reading it back to front because this was such a fascinating read....Read more
Not for a moment would this reviewer wish to suggest that this is a time in history when the murder of an obnoxious rich person, on a luxury island, busily engaged in being obnoxious and threatening to all and sundry is an enjoyable idea, but it did come across, in this novel, as...Read more
COLD GRANITE is one of those debut books that come along and slowly cause a stir of comment and discussion in crime fiction forums. So much commentary just makes you want to get that book that everyone is talking about, but at the same time you often wonder if there's a chance that it's all...Read more
The bodies of two young girls are found, shot and discarded in an old abandoned warehouse in the Cockpit Lane district in Brixton, London. Nearby the activity of the police investigation sparks the interest of a young schoolboy who is obsessed with a school myth about "Brown Bread" and an...Read more
Okay - a little housekeeping first. I can't get accented characters to work properly here ... yet. I'm working on it because it annoys me as much as it undoubtedly annoys readers of these posts.
Secondly, a little background to the Harry Hole (pronounced - we think - Hurler...Read more
THE MURDER FARM was one of the books that I purposely read as I was seeing the author at a Melbourne Writers Festival session. I actually picked it up to take on the train in with me - a journey of just on an hour in total. I can't remember the last time I was tempted to stay on the train...Read more
A well written police procedural is one of the reasons I'm so addicted to crime fiction. A good police procedural will introduce you to the police,take you by the land and lead you through their investigation as they unearth clues by interviewing people, sifting the evidence and following...Read more
It's been quite a wait for the latest WYATT novel - The Fallout was published in 1997. I for one was rather excited to hear the news that there was a book on the way last year and I've been somewhat impatiently waiting for it to appear since then. As with all these greatly anticipated...Read more
Think Hercule Poirot in a Sikh turban and the tropical heat of Kuala Lumpur, but add a hefty dose of rumpled Columbo and I think that's the best description of Inspector Singh of the Singapore police that I can come up with. A MOST PECULIAR MALAYSIAN MURDER is the first in this series from...Read more
A little book I've had salted away for quite some time, it took the sad death of Bill Green to get me to stop dipping into and out of it, and sit down and read it. Having finished it, the quote from Mungo McCallum on the back sums up the political component:
...Read more
Set mostly in Phnom Penh, ZERO HOUR IN PHNOM PENH is based in the early 1990's, at the end of the civil war that tore Cambodia apart, in the wake of the appalling Khmer Rouge regime. UN peacekeeping forces are on the streets, gunfire is regularly heard, and PI Vincent Calvino is looking for...Read more