Tag: book review

Book Review: The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer

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Anna can’t bring herself to end it. Instead she spirals toward insanity while she sits on the pavement outside her house and polishes five tiny footprints embedded in the cement, protecting them from passers-by. Her son Daniel disappeared and the footprints are all she has left.

DCI Marvel is a curmudgeonly detective who hates most people but has a uncharacteristic empathy for the missing and murdered. His mood takes a turn for the worse when he’s assigned to look for his bosses wife’s lost dog.

Anna and Marvel meet when Anna is trying to throw herself off a bridge. When Anna goes to a psychic for help to find Daniel, she meets the owner of the missing dog and decides to help the cynical Marvel find it. Then things take a strange turn.

English crime writer Belinda Bauer brings her characters to life by exposing quirky details about the absurdities of life and then weaving them with human tragedy. She has a knack of making the almost unbelievable plausible and times you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry. Her prose flows in a way that is easy to digest and draws the reader into the characters.

The first Bauer novel I read was Snap, short listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Snap was a page turner that surprised and delighted with its offbeat, idiosyncratic characters and made me an immediate fan. I must admit I wondered if I would enjoy her earlier novels as much given I seemed to have started with the best. I’m pleased to say The Shut Eye did not disappoint and I’ll be delving into more of her work in the future.

Book review: Eden by Candice Fox

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Reading Candice Fox’s novel Hades (reviewed in last weeks blog) set me off on a binge and I followed it straight up with the sequel Eden which won the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. Like it’s predecessor, Eden has several narratives running through it.

We are thrown back to discover how Hades, who bought up Eden and her brother came to be the man he became, the go-to body disposal guy who runs the tip, makes elaborate sculptures from discarded metal and causes many a grown man to tremble in their boots with fear, yet has a heart capable of great love.

Frank the cop who has fallen into a pit of drunken despair after the death of his lover, the death of a colleague and almost dying himself, is forced out of his misery by his work partner, the mysterious and dangerous Eden who loves hunting criminals but doesn’t always wait for the justice system to determine their sentence. She wants Frank back on his feet as they are to be assigned to a murder investigation that will require her to go undercover. She wants him to watch her back on surveillance and Frank can’t say no to her because she knows his dark secret.

As Frank gets drawn into Hades world, helping him solve a long ago mystery an unexpected twist nearly gets Eden killed. Dark, gritty, noirish and poetic, another great read.

Book Review: Good Samaritans by Will Carver

On By rlsmithwritingIn Reviews5 Comments

It takes six bottles of bleach to clean a dead body.

Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

A lonely insomniac in a dysfunctional marriage with a wine guzzling wife who compulsively watches crap TV seeks late night comfort in the sympathetic ear of strangers plucked from the phone book at random.

A promiscuous misunderstood woman with several failed relationships and suicide attempts finally meets someone who accepts her for who she is, listens and understands her.

A man traumatised by the suicide of his childhood friend who he found hanging on the back of a door whilst they were traveling overseas together tries to assuage his guilt by dedicating his life to saving others and developing a few obsessive compulsive behaviours.

The character’s flaws are exposed like festering wounds via the short chapters which build suspense and unveil plot twists at every turn switching from one characters bizarre view of the world to another.

The Bridge, Adelaide

The unlikeable characters trudge through life in dysfunctional relationships rife with unhealthy sexual practices and violence while they grapple with dark thoughts and obsessions bought to light via crossed wires. Dark, sick, twisted, quirky contemporary domestic noir set in a dull suburban backdrop.

Thrillers are meant to suck you in, elevate your heart rate and totally freak you out. Will Carver does all these things with Good Samaritans. I could not put it down despite being disturbed and disgusted by the tortured souls and their cat and mouse antics. Even the contrary title made me cringe.