Book Reviews

I am about to head off on a seven week trip, so I thought I would reflect on some of the books that have caught my attention so far this year. Just over half the way through the year and we have already seen some terrific releases from new and […]

This week in the Canberra Weekly I reviewed three books about the dark side of the art world. Lisa Barr’s Woman On Fire (Welbeck, 5 July 2022) is a highly entertaining read that mixes suspense, family drama, thriller elements, history and romance into an enjoyable concoction. It moves along at […]

This recent batch of Australian crime fiction covers a wide range of themes and locations, from poaching in Zimbabwe to corruption in Mumbai to stolen art in Sydney and murder in Melbourne in 1923. Sydney author Tony Park is one of my favourite thriller writers and his African based novels […]

Early August sees the release of two clever, concept crime novels by Megan Goldin and Catherine Ryan Howard. Megan Goldin’s Stay Awake (Penguin, 16 August 2022) has that sort of clever opening hook that is guaranteed to draw you in and keep you reading. “Liv Reese wakes up in the […]

As I have previously highlighted, the Australian Larry Kent digests (Cleveland) went through several revamps over their nearly thirty year run from 1954 to 1983. These changed from the nicely stylised artistic covers by Walter Stackpole in the 1950s and early 1960s, through to the stereotyped, more routine covers of […]

In the increasingly crowded field of outback noir, few do it as well as Dave Warner. After The Flood (Fremantle, 2 August 2022) is the third in his series about Broome detective Dan Clement and follows on from Before It Breaks, which won a Ned Kelly Award, and the exquisitely plotted […]

In a recent post I highlighted a bunch of early Australian digest westerns from Cleveland publishing that I had acquired: TRASHY TUESDAY: CLEVELAND WESTERNS | Murder Mayhem and Long Dogs I now have another batch, including a very early novel by Marshall Grover (pseudonym for Leonard F Meares). As I […]

Mark Mills won the 2004 British Crime Writers Award for Best Debut novel for Amagansett and received well deserved praise for his 2009 crime novel, The Information Officer, which was set on Malta during World War II. His output since then has been mixed and infrequent, although I quite liked his […]

It has been a while since we were in the contemporary world of Charlie Parker. In 2020 John Connolly gave us a look at an earlier Charlie Parker, sans any supernatural elements, in The Dirty South and in last year’s thrilling The Nameless Ones the focus was mainly on Charlie’s […]

So far this year there have been some exceeding good crime novels and thrillers from a diverse range of authors, including Deon Meyer, Benjamin Stevenson, Emma Viskic and Michael Robotham, to name a few. The good news that there are still a stack of very promising releases scheduled for the […]