CANBERRA WEEKLY COLUMN: 10 JUNE 2021 – RECENT CRIME THRILLERS
This week in the Canberra Weekly I reviewed three new enjoyable crime thrillers ideal for reading over the long weekend in Canberra.
First up, is T. J. Newman’s terrifically entertaining, race-against-the-clock thriller Falling (Simon & Schuster, June2021).
Former flight attendant Newman apparently wrote parts of the novel while working red-eye flights in America and she enhances her exciting tale with a good dose of insider knowledge. The basic premise involves a pilot on the Los Angeles to New York flight who is put into an impossible situation when a terrorist seizes his family and threatens to kill them unless he crashes his plane. The pilot, Bill Hoffman, has less than six hours to thwart the terrorists on the ground, and in the air, and save his family and passengers. A very enjoyable read.
I did a longer review of Falling a couple of weeks ago: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/may-mayhem-recent-crime-and-thriller-reading/
Second up is the very impressive outback noir novel by actor and writer Matt Nable, Still.
Set in Darwin in 1963 this is the most evocative and moving Australian crime novel I have read so far this year. Nable does an outstanding job of capturing Darwin and its inhabitants, warts and all, and his story about a determined young cop facing up to corruption is masterful.
See my earlier review here: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/recent-australian-crime-novels/
Finally, M. W. Craven’s Dead Ground (Hachette, June 2021) is the keenly waiting fourth novel in his popular series about Detective Washington Poe and civilian data analyst Tilly Bradshaw.
Dead Ground opens with Poe being summoned to a backstreet brothel in Carlisle, where a man has been beaten to death. It seems to be a simple assault and well outside Poe’s normal area of expertise, but there are security concerns at play and Poe soon becomes caught up in a complex case involving old crimes. A confident and enjoyable crime thriller that can easily be consumed in a couple of sessions.
Here is my earlier longer review: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/may-mayhem-recent-crime-and-thriller-reading/
In all, three very different, but very entertaining crime novels.
Thanks to the publishers and the Canberra Weekly for copies of the books.