Tag: Crime fiction

Book review: The Murder Rule by Dervla McTiernan

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The Murder Rule is a legal thriller by seasoned Irish-Australian author Dervla McTiernan.

Hannah Rockeby was bought up by her a sole parent mother, Laura, after a youthful summer love affair with the son of a wealthy family. The boy drowned in a suspicious accident while the two were seeing one another. Laura had been the families house cleaner. She becomes an alcoholic and the mother-daughter relationship between her and Hannah is highly enmeshed.

Hannah moves from Maine to join a group of idealistic volunteers working on the Innocence Project in Virginia. The Innocence Project is an initiative to free wrongly convicted death row prisoners. Her plan is to prevent the man who she believes ruined her mother’s life from being released from jail. Hannah is prepared to do anything including deceiving and undermining colleagues and her boss to succeed in her quest.

Hannah pulled the door slowly closed. There was no creak from the hinges because she had oiled them the day before. She went downstairs, took a folded note from her backpack, and placed it so that it was held in place by the coffee machine.

The novel unfolds with the dual points of view of Hannah’s current life and her mother’s diary from her youth. The Murder Rule is a quick read, and a skilfully plotted story with plenty of twists. The female leads who are complex and engaging (if not always likeable).

The Murder Rule is McTiernan’s first stand alone novel – she is best known for her acclaimed debut, The Ruin.

Book review: The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

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If you like well crafted detective fiction with a bit of gruesome content, The Cutting Room, debut novel by Luise Welsh, could be for you.

Rilke works in a Glasgow auction house that sells the contents of deceased estates. Business is tight so he jumps at the chance to clear out Miss McKindless’s deceased brothers house, unperturbed by her need for haste and instruction that he alone must deal with the items in the attic and destroy them. The house has some good stuff that will sell well, he thinks.

John had said McKindless would be revealed through his library, but John was a bookseller; he formed his opinion of everyone through their books.

When Rilke ascends the stairs to the attic he finds a stash of rare pornographic books and old black and white photos in an envelope. The photos portray the sexual torture and murder of a young woman many years earlier in a room with French looking furniture. Rilke isn’t sure if the photos are real or staged, but is disturbed by the images and decides to turn detective.

We, the readers, are drawn into Rilke’s life as he cruises for men and hangs out with a caste of interesting and dubious characters – drug dealers, transvestites, shady book dealers, pornographers, bent cops, and his Merlot swilling boss Rose who colludes with him on a plan to skim off the profits of the sale.

People have died for love, they have lied and cheated and parted from those who loved them in turn. Love has slammed doors on fortunes, made bad man from heroes and heroes from libertines. Love has corrupted, cured, depraved and perverted. It is the remedy, the melody, the poison and the pain. The appetite, the antidote, the fever and the flavour. Love Kills. Love Cures. Love is a bloody menace. Oh, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Originally published in 2002, there are exquisite details and plenty of fascinating characters with dubious morals in The Cutting Room. It’s a grisly, creepy crime novel written with a literary flair.

Book review: Fire with Fire by Candice Fox

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Fire with Fire, the inestimable Candice Fox’s latest thriller is another cracker. Being a big fan, I have read all her books so I’m a bit gushy about the Australian author. And she seems like a good egg as well.

Constable Lynette Lamb gets fired on the first day of her new job as a cop and goes looking for the one guy who can help her. Detective Charlie Hoskins is in hospital after a near miss with death at the hands of the Death Machines biker gang after being outed when working undercover. The two become unexpected partners when Lamb confronts Charlie to help her get her job back and they are shot at by a gun toting thug, forcing them to make a hasty get away together.

In the hall outside the locker room, she was the new kid in the schoolyard; frozen, vulnerable. When she reached the bullpen, the officer who’d led her to the locker room was standing at the coffee station, one hand on the counter, the other pinching the bridge of her nose. The fuck my life pose. The colleague she was listening to touched her elbow in a consolatory manner and walked away.

Ryan and Elsie Delaney have been pushed over the edge. Desperate parents whose daughter, Tilly, went missing on a beach two years earlier. The girl was never found and the only piece of evidence was lost. They take matters into their own hands and hold up hostages in the police forensic labs – demanding something be done immediately to find out what happened to their kid.

‘My husband Ryan and I have taken over Laboratory 21 of the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. And we intend to…to do a lot of damage here…if our demands are not met.’

Candice’s characters are bold oddballs, her plots are tight and each book is a pacy page turner. Fire with Fire is no exception – a Hollywood action thriller on paper, it was over too soon. If only she could write faster…

For other review of Candice Fox book reviews see Hades, Eden, Gathering Dark, The Chase, and 2 Sisters Detective Agency (a collaboration with James Patterson).

Book review: None Shall Sleep by Ellie Marney

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Australian author Ellie Marney’s YA thriller, None Shall Sleep, set in the US in the 80s is about serial killers and will keep you uncomfortably riveted to the end.

There are no monsters. Only people.

Teenagers Emma and Travis are engaged by the FBI Behavioural Science section to help them get a better understanding of what makes a young serial killer. They have been chosen because the young serial killers refuse to speak to adults and because they each have their own unique experiences with serial killers.

Emma was the sole survivor who escaped one serial killer and Travis’s father was murdered by another in the line of duty. Their job is to interview convicted juvenile killers, but when they are drawn into an active case targeting teenagers, everything starts to unravel.

Emma feels the fear in her chest like a raven tapping at a window. It’s too late for misgivings, though. The door is open. A large male orderly stands sentry, securing her passage to the place beyond sanity, and Emma steps inside…

The writing style in None Shall Sleep has a police procedural feel to it which makes the story easy to follow and particularly appealing if you’re a true crime buff.Marney’s writing gives the reader just enough information to set your imagination going and send a shiver up your spine, then leaves you to fill out the worst of the gory details using your vivid imagination. Emma and Travis grab the readers sympathies from the get go which adds to the tension as you worry they will fall foul of the mind games and manipulations of the serial killers and something terrible will happen to one of them. But you will have to read it to find out.

Book Review: Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder by Kerryn Mayne

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Kerryn Mayne’s debut novel Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder is a rollicking good read.

Thirty-seven year old Lenny Marks spends her days teaching at the local primary school and her evenings playing Scrabble with her imaginary housemate, watching reruns of Friends, or organising her thirty-six copies of The Hobbit.

Lenny tries not to think about the day her mum left. She likes order, routine, certainty and predictability, and uses anagrams to calm her anxieties and shut down uncomfortable thoughts. Her beloved foster-mum thinks she needs to expand and ‘get a life’.

She found tremendous peace in this level of organisation, which was as close to happiness as Lenny Marks ever planned to be. Happiness, she knew, was unstable and quite unreliable. And Lenny was neither of those things. Instead she lived for the contentment of a routine, which had served her quite well up to and into her thirty-seventh year.

A mysterious envelope addressed to Lenny from the Adult Parole Board is delivered to the school and despite her best efforts to ignore the problem, it won’t go away. Soon her world begins to unravel as Lenny starts to remember the long buried truth about her childhood.

It all revolves around her stepfather’s parting words, ‘You did this.’

No one would notice Lenny Mark’s absence in their life. She likened herself to the word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite recall. It’s there, only it won’t come to mind and it is of no consequence if it doesn’t. She was the reason you walked back into a room, thinking you’d forgotten something, only you didn’t remember what it was because it had never been that important. Lenny was a shadow.

The character of Lenny reminded me of Eleanor Oliphant or a young female more reticent Don Tillman (The Rosie Project) – forthright, earnest, intelligent but extremely awkward when it comes to personal relationships. Her story is one of darkness and light told with humour, suspense, and a few great twists.

Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder is heartwarming and heartbreaking, a page-turning story about loss, grief, abandonment, coming to terms with our past, learning to trust and finding the friendships and life we deserve.

Book Review: The Bluffs By Kyle Perry

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Remote Tasmania is such a great location for creepy crime novels. Debut novel The Bluffs by Kyle Perry is Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Some Girls Are.

Four teenage girls go missing from a school camp in Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers. The residents of Limestone Creek start searching for the missing and are soon joined by a hoard of well-meaning volunteers rustled up by social media influencer and mean girl Maddison.

Up in the hills, he hides and kills.
Down in the caves, he hides and waits.
The Hungry Man, who likes little girls,
with their pretty faces and pretty curls.
Don’t believe what the grown-ups say,
the Hungry Man will find a way.
So I won’t walk alone by the mountain trees,
or the Hungry Man will come for me.

The mystery deepens when one of the missing girls is found mauled at the base of a cliff, her shoes neatly tied and placed at the spot from which she fell. As the story unfolds, the suspects pile up – the local drug dealer and father of one of the missing girls, the mythical bear like creature – the Hungry Man, and one of the school teachers are all suspects.

Detective Badenhorst, still stuggling with PTSD from another case has to negotiate a labyrinth of community suspicions, police corruption, folklore, and teenage politics to try and find the missing girls.

The story is told predominately from three points of view which aids to maintain the uncertainty, misdirection and foreshadowing that holds through the novel. There’s a lot of action and tension in The Bluffs, a twisty, atmospheric page turner with flawed three dimensional characters, all with something to hide.

Book Review: The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie

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Back to my favourite genre – Australian crime fiction…

Detective Kate Miles is a cop of Sri Lankan descent in the Northern NSW country town of Esserton. Miles is heavily pregnant and trying to wrap up an armed holdup case a week off maternity leave when her boss asks her to review a closed case. The drowning of a man in the river during a flood seems straight forward until Miles starts digging.

They walked on, Kate doing her best to keep pace, her hand moving to support the bulk of her belly and stepping with care along the muddy creek bed. She noticed several thick tree branches, rocks of all sizes, and even the odd shopping trolley. Flood debris, lying where the waters had dropped them, inert and innocent.

Dinuka McKenzie’s debt novel The Torrent won the Harper Collins Australia 2020 Banjo Prize. The police procedural is an easy read that explores country life, a woman making her way in a man’s world, and diversity – without making an issue if it.

There was a slight insolence in his manner. Nothing obvious that she could put her finger on. Maybe it was because she was a woman. Possibly it was her colour, though she didn’t think so. He didn’t strike her as that kind of insecure.

Protagonist Kate Miles makes a refreshing change from the usual jaded middle aged male cop in Australian crime novels. She’s complex, smart and dogged. The plot is tight, the characters unusual but believable, and the prose well crafted.

Review: The Complete Ripley Radio Mysteries by Patricia Highsmith

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A couple of weeks ago I went to see the documentary Loving Highsmith about American author Patricia Highsmith. The content for the doco was drawn from her unpublished diaries and notebooks, and the personal accounts of her lovers, friends and family.

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

Strangers on a Train

Highsmith was best known for her psychological thrillers (Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and for being part of the Modernist movement. Most of her novels were adapted to the big screen, notably with little need to be changed for the screen.

The partly autobiographical The Price of Salt written in the 1950s and published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan was also adapted for film in 2015 as Carol. Due to the social morals of the time, Highsmith led a double life, hiding her love affairs with women from the public and her family, but reflecting on them in her personal writings. Carol was the first lesbian story with a happy ending published in the USA.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.

Carol

The documentary was fascinating and led me to seek out the audio series, Ripley Radio Mysteries that dramatises her five Ripley novels. The character of Ripley was inspired by a man Highsmith saw from a hotel room in Italy after she moved to Europe. Ripley is not a nice man, though he only kills when absolutely necessary (I mean who doesn’t?). Highsmith wrote him empathetically so as a reader I both liked and loathed him – it’s creepy.

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Protagonist Tom Ripley is materialistic, though not in the usual way. He has an unstable sense of identity and possessions give him a feeling of safety and stability. It is this that leads him to his first kill. He befriended Dickie but felt uncertain about their relationship and killing reduced his friend to a collection of possession of clothes, rings and cash – much more predictable.

The series is tense, atmospheric and twisted. Perfect for a thriller!

Book review: Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

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Young adult suspense writer, Bram Stoker Award finalist and Edgar Award nominee, Elle Cosimano, has turned her hand to adult fiction and she’s a hoot. Finlay Donovan is Killing It is the first in a series of three books, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading the other two after book one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d liked South Riding, before the divorce. Back before I’d known my husband was sleeping with our real estate agent, who also sat on the board of the homeowners association. Somehow, I’m guessing that’s not what the saleslady had in mind when she’d described our suburban mecca as having a ‘small-town’ feel.

Crime fiction writer Finlay Donovan’s husband ran off with another woman. Finlay is broke, the bills are piling up, she’s late submitting a manuscript to her agent and her husband is threatening to take the kids.

The brochure had featured photos of happy families hugging each other on quaint front porches. It had used words like idyllic and peaceful to describe the neighbourhood, because in the glossy pages of a real estate magazine, no one can see through the windows to the exhausted stabby mommy, or the naked sticky toddler, or the hair and blood and coffee on the floor.

Finlay meets her agent in a cafe to try and get more time to finish her book, after she leaves without success she finds a note in her bag from a woman at the adjacent table who misinterpreted her conversation with her agent thinking Finlay’s a contract killer. The note asks her to kill the woman’s husband for $50,000 and where Finlay can find him on a certain date. Finlay is aghast, but starts to think about what she could do with the money and wondering what’s wrong with the guy that his wife wants him dead.

Fantasies where I let myself calculate how many economy-size packs of Huggies, Lean Cuisines, and baby wipes fifty thousand dollars could buy.

Curiosity gets the better of her and she goes to check the guy out, inadvertently interrupting him attempting to drug a woman in a bar. Finlay diverts the victim, switches the drinks and drugs the husband, rolling him unconsious into her van and driving home. She goes inside to call her policewoman sister who is looking after her kids and when she goes back out to the garage, the guy is dead from the exhaust fumes of her combi. Finlay is in trouble, but this is only the start.

My Google search history alone was probably enough to put me on a government watch list. I wrote suspense novels about murders like this. I’d searched every possible way to kill someone. With every conceivable kind of weapon.

Finlay Donovan is Killing It is full of big bold characters including police, the mob, women who want their husbands dead, Finlay’s nanny and two recalcitrant children. The narrative is fast paced with a twisty plot that will keep you turning the pages as Finlay gets into deeper and deeper trouble. Highly recommended.

Book review: Moon Sugar by Angela Meyer

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I was taken with Angela Meyer’s writing when I read Joan Smokes, it has a slow, hauntingly beautiful vibe about it. Her most recent novel Moon Sugar applies her literary style to a story that blends crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy.

The lichen at least helped him understand the way Sally, he, his daughter, even Rick were all connected and continuing atoms and gases, infinite universes opening out from each moment.  And yet, he still has to cope with being here, now, without her corporeal form.

The novel starts with a prologue set twenty four years ago about an ageing astronaut surrounded by a mysterious lichen as he contemplates his mortality and the secrets he will reveal to his daughter when she is old enough. The scene appears untethered to the story that follows, but we circle back to its connection later in the novel and it becomes a critical piece of information linking the crime elements to the science fiction and fantasy narratives.

He remembers something he heard about taking drugs, that sometimes it’s like a zipper opening and that if you keep trying to pull up the zipper you’ll have a terrible trip but if you just let the zipper open and accept whatever spills out you will have a good time. And thinking about it this way, he is able to let go of holding together the division of where the edges of himself meet the world.

Josh, a young sex worker disappears in Berlin. An email with a suicide note is sent to his family and his clothing is found on the banks of a Berlin river. Personal trainer Mila who is one of his clients, and his best friend Kyle both think something is amiss. They each travel independently to Berlin, where a chance meeting has the unlikely pair team up to try and find out what happened to Josh – and that is when the magic seeps in.

This is how the world is increasingly run: cashed-up idealists who are in too much of a rush to properly consider any long-term projects, wanting to be heroes of the people in the moment, be the first and best.

Moon Sugar touches on themes of drug taking, queerness, connection, disconnection, capitalism, magic, sex and death. The characters are well drawn and Meyer pens great insight into the inner worlds of Mila and Kyle, take a trip with them.