Small town living in 1990's Australia is big in GOODWOOD, which is interesting as this is a slow burning, confined, seemingly "small" story in the life of 17 year old Jean. She lives in Goodwood, a small town, near a bigger town, with her mother, near her grandparents, surrounded by people...Read more
A STOLEN WOMAN is the third novel in the Elizabeth McClaine series, and I can't help thinking it would have been much better to have read the earlier novels first as there's some back story here that took some sorting out. In short, Elizabeth McClaine is the custodian of a wealthy...Read more
A bit of housekeeping up front. A TROPICAL CURE is the second book from John Hollenkamp to feature cab driver Darren Mangan, following on from STEALTH. That to be honest, I really should have read first up because it took some serious concentrating to figure out what was going on here....Read more
POKER CHIPS AND POISON is the first novel in what's intended to be a series set around 97-year-old Alice Atkinson, resident of Silvermoon Retirement Village, and cunning sleuth. Anybody who has read this author's Hitchhiker series may remember a cameo from Alice, but in this story she's...Read more
When it comes to knowing anything at all about sport, if it's not cricket, then I'm the last person you want on your trivia team (and then only if you're really short of subject matter experts). The author of SPIKED, on the other hand, seems to know a lot about this environment,...Read more
In her first full length novel for adults, educational and children's writer Carmel Reilly has delivered a crime fiction book that tackles sibling relationships and family secrets full on.
Set in two main timelines, in 2016 Lori receives a visit from a policeman to tell her...Read more
Having been lucky enough to be offered a copy of PRIOR VIOLATIONS for review I was intrigued to see it come with it's own curated Spotify music list. Made for a particularly unusual reading experience although the music would probably mean more to fans of American TV and movies, nearly all...Read more
Before the death of author John Le Carre, I'd already promised myself a re-run through the George Smiley series, for two reasons. I'd listened to AGENT RUNNING IN THE FIELD last year and been absolutely taken with the style of narration from the author himself; then late one night we'd...Read more
THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MINISTERS is the first in an intended series JUST PIE MYSTERIES by Gina Poekeleen (a pseudonym I believe).
Straight out of the cosy manual, it's one of those arch, comically styled female investigator types of novel full of aside comments, and...Read more
Set in a fictitious location in Melbourne, timed to coincide with one of those blazing hot, drought and bushfire plagued summers, FOR REASONS OF THEIR OWN is a debut novel introducing DI Robbie Gray and her new to town offsider Mac, a young Aboriginal policeman who has been moved out of the...Read more
1973, from art school to shared housing in run-down Leeds, and Jude (aka Toto) is a chaotic, wild child, living a reckless, slightly crazy life, thoroughly enjoying her youth, blissfully unconnected with the news of random attacks on woman that keep showing up on the news.
What...Read more
In the middle of reading this novel an Antiques Roadshow episode popped up that included an old tally stick, bought in by an elderly gentleman who had kept it in a drawer for many years. Very useful and timely to be reminded that they were used as an aid to memory, often for financial or...Read more
In a conversation with a well known author of Australian Rural/Regional crime fiction on twitter recently, we talked about the differences between "rural noir" and "rural crime". She clarified the difference between rural crime fiction and rural noir fiction for me perfectly - a projection...Read more
Being a 14 year old girl is never an easy undertaking, but living in a dying town, in a family beset with problems makes Miracle's life that bit more complicated.
She's known as Miracle because she was born in the middle of Australia's biggest-ever earthquake. The same quake...Read more
Having been a fan of the Halifax TV Series, starring Rebecca Gibney as Dr Jane Halifax, this book was greeted with considerable excitement. The author, Roger Simpson, is an award-winning screen writer, creating both the telemovie series of Halifax f.p. (which ran from 1994 to 2001) and its...Read more
The world is a pretty awful place at the moment and there's no way I will stomach listening to a book that casually talks about animal cruelty. So this was a DNF with extreme nope.Read more
Puti Derrell likes running at midnight. During lockdown it was safe but now lockdown is over and Porohiwi doesn’t feel safe anymore – especially when she discovers her estranged grandfather has been murdered and left with a Judas mask on his face.
Puti’s already got a lot on her...Read more
Set in France in the aftermath of the First World War, THE GREAT SWINDLE is loosely a crime novel, owing to the fraud perpetrated as part of the ongoing action. What it really is, is an exploration of the treatment of returned servicemen, the damage - physical and mental - that war leaves...Read more
Set in 1951, Indochina, TOO FAR FROM ANTIBES is the story of Jean-Luc Guéry and his quest to find the truth behind his brother Oliver's murder. An avid reader of detective fiction, Guéry has a very firm picture of how investigations should proceed, although the likelihood of him being able...Read more
An outstanding debut novel back in 2022 (good grief has it really taken this long to post this ...), it's very very hard to look past an Australian rural noir novel called DIRT TOWN. Sitting as I am at the moment in the middle of an Australian rural summer that's mostly putting up dust...Read more
Devil’s Breath is the first novel in a new crime series built around a neurodivergent professor of botanical toxicology, Eustacia Rose. Full Review at Newtown Review of Books...Read more
Technology based thrillers like GOING ZERO can, sometimes, make this reader wary. Very wary, as the "tech" is often so far off course it endangers teeth and the book's ability to stay in one piece. Not so in GOING ZERO - the tech here might be a tad ropey in places, but the application was...Read more
Jack Beaumont is a pseudonym used by a former operative in the clandestine operations branch of the DGSE, the French Foreign secret service. He joined them after being an air force fighter pilot, flying special operations and intelligence missions. Needless to say there are a lot of...Read more
Right up front - I fell over this series via the library, loving the first I read so much so, that I reserved the second available immediately and read it as soon as it arrived. I'm annoyed with myself now because they were published in 2023 and 2024 respectively and I can't see how there's...Read more
KILL 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...Read more
This was one of those fortuitous pickups in the Audio section of the library's BorrowBox app. Probably based on the reference to Magpie Murders in the blurb, which was a TV series I thoroughly enjoyed. It might also be because of the description of the main protagonist:
...Read more
STRING THEORY is the 2nd in the Guitar Store Mysteries, and the first I've read. Which I think might have been a bit of a mistake. This worked, in that it was fun, a bit silly, and a bit of giggle in places, although it did take me a while to figure out who was who and how it all fitted...Read more
The opening line of HUMIDITY made me laugh:
Word gets 'round when you're a nude model in a small country town.
That would most definitely get around our nearby small country town, even though it could never be said that we have the...Read more
BROKEN BODIES is a follow-up to the author's first book TRUST NOBODY so many of the characters and their back story come from that first novel. Perhaps this is part of the reason why BROKEN BODIES was a bit of a slog to read, as many characters appear rapidly in quick succession in the...Read more