Category Archives: Aussie Authors Challenge 2010

Review: Document Z by Andrew Croome

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If you ignore the fact that we (literally) lost one of our serving Prime Ministers in the 1960′s, relative to most countries in the world Australia’s political history is uneventful. We’ve had no civil wars, no major coups, our lone armed rebellion lasted a single day and for most of the 223 years of our political history you’d have had to look awfully hard to find more than six people holding anything approaching radical political beliefs. It is little wonder then that when a genuine political upheaval does occur it receives an enormous amount of attention. What is known colloquially as ‘the Petrov Affair’ is one of these events. Taking place in 1954 it involved the defection of a senior official from the Russian Embassy in Canberra and his wife who had both also been operating as spies. This sparked the Royal Commission on Espionage which in turn led to the severing of diplomatic relations between Australia and Russia until the end of the decade.

In Document Z Andrew Croome has provided a fictional account of these events from the point of view of the primary ‘players’: Vladimir Petrov, his wife Evdokia and the Polish/Australian spy who orchestrated Petrov’s defection. Croome says that using fiction allowed him to put his characters in every-day scenarios in a way that factual historians cannot For me, someone who has never been able to take the subject of spying seriously due to an early and prolonged exposure to Get Smart, I found this particularly effective as it showed that the art of spying is subject to the routines, mistakes, ordinariness and petty rivalries familiar to any workplace.

The story that Croome tells is personal rather than political. Vladimir is depicted as a womaniser, a petty thief and fairly unsuccessful spy. His decision to defect has a lot less to do with any deeply held beliefs than it does vested personal interest. His betrayal of his wife is in keeping with that character. Defecting alone, without telling her what he was up to, put Evdokia in an impossible situation because she had family in Russia whose safety she was worried for. Her story is just sad. Having lost her first husband to a Russian gulag she marries Vladimir more out of necessity than anything else. She appears to spend her entire life dealing with the real or imagined death of loved ones and, though she is stoic, it is quite heart breaking to read.

I have never been much engaged by the study of history as a series of dates and events to be remembered. In this confidently written novel Croome has provided the kind of history that is intriguing even if it is not entirely true (though the factual basis for his imaginings is evident). He shows us a reality that might very well have been. One in which there were innate problems in maintaining strong Marxist principles while living in a place that demonstrates daily that capitalism has its advantages and one in which people’s fears and worries don’t always (often?) lead them to do the laudable thing. As someone who has plowed through a considerable amount of the non-fiction available on this subject I found this fictional account offered the much-needed human element that is missing from so much historical writing.

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You can hear a 15-minute discussion with Andrew about the book on our national radio network’s Book Show here. He talks, among other things, about making use of the extensive documentary archive as well as ignoring it when it did not suit his narrative needs.

Document Z has been reviewed at The Resident Judge of Port Phillip and Guy Salvidge

Document Z has won many awards including the 2008 Vogel Award (for best debut fiction by an Australian awarded by The Australian newspaper) and was shortlisted in the best first fiction category at the 2010 Ned Kelly Awards.

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My rating 4/5
Author website http://www.andrewcroome.com/
 Publisher Allen & Unwin [2009]
ISBN 9781741757439
Length 346 pages
Format paperback
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it

Aussie Authors Aced

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I know the title doesn’t mean much but I had a yen for alliteration. What it means is that I have finished the highest possible level of the Aussie Author Challenge (8 books by Aussie Authors during 2010). And it’s only July.

These are the titles I read counted for the challenge

I have a swag more books by Aussies sitting very close to the top of the TBR pile so this is by no means the end of my aussie reading for the year. Stay tuned.

Review: Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland

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I try quite hard to have no expectations of the books I read. Even if I have enjoyed an author’s work before there is no guarantee I will do so the next time and sometimes I disagree with even my favourite reviewers. But I admit to tingling with anticipation when notified by the bookseller that my pre-order of Gunshot Road had left the warehouse and was on its way to me. I read it as the last book in my Aussie Author Challenge for this year.

Emily Tempest has become the world’s most unlikely cop, an Aboriginal Community Police Officer no less. On her first day on the job in Bluebush in the Northern Territory she is one of the officers called to the scene of a stabbing out at Green Swamp Well. On the surface it looks like an open and shut case: two old drunks got into a fight and one stabbed the other in the neck. But to Emily, who knows both the victim (Doc) and the suspect (Wireless), something doesn’t feel right and she can’t let the investigation slide.

Gunshot Road has it all. Literally. Everything I could possibly want from a work of fiction all in one gorgeous package.

First there are fantastic characters. Emily Tempest is brave and stubborn and smart and funny and, as was the case with the first book in which she features, I’m still not entirely sure how a bloke can create such a credible female character but I’m delighted he has. In this book she is more mature than in her first outing though she still struggles when she knows what she should do is not what she wants to do and usually her heart wins out over her head. For better or worse.

There are plenty of other beautifully depicted characters to look out for too. Like the teenage Aboriginal boy called Danny who is deeply troubled by something and unable to communicate his fears to Emily. And the town’s new top cop, taciturn and uncomprehending of all the things he doesn’t know, but trying to do the right thing in his way. And of course the setting, the harsh land in the country’s centre, is just as much a character as any person in the book.

The desert isolation, the unrelenting heat, the laconic humour, the often awkward relationships between blacks and whites all combine to form an unmistakably Australian story. It’s not always a pretty one though and no one could accuse Hyland of trying to make it so because he tackles touch subjects such as the rampant domestic abuse of women in Aboriginal communities, endemic poverty and racism. However he somehow manages to do it without once lecturing from a self-proclaimed moral high ground. That’s a much rarer trait than it ought to be in modern literature.

Next there is writing that made me simultaneously jealous at someone else’s ability to string words together in a way that I will never be able to and grateful that he didn’t keep his gift to himself.  This is from the opening chapter about an initiation

The town mob: fractured and deracinated they might have been, torn apart by idleness and violence, by Hollywood and booze. But moments like these, when people come together, when they try to recover the core, they gave you hope.

It was the songs that did it: the women didn’t so much sing them as pick them up like radio receivers. You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered: scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.

The resonance of that music is everywhere, even here, on the outskirts of the whitefeller town, out among the rubbish dumps and truck yards. It sings along the wires, it rings off bitumen and steel.

I could go on but I’d end up quoting the whole book. In short, Hyland’s writing is a thing of beauty and the entire book is, in part, one long ode to its country.

Finally there is a great story and Gunshot Road is a more solid piece of crime fiction than its predecessor. For the first half of the novel there’s a fairly slow, humorous approach to the investigation as we’re introduced to all the players and people tease Emily about her new obsession. Then at a certain point the novel switches gears and speeds up as it becomes more serious and foreboding. Together these halves make up a perfectly paced story with a genuine nail-biting finish.

Heck the book even incorporates, glorifies actually, geology, my favourite science. What more could I possibly ask for? Gunshot Road is a funny, beautiful, sad and thoughtful book that everyone should read. Immediately.

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My rating 5/5

Publisher Quercus [2010]; ISBN 9781849162158; Length 369 pages

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I read, and loved, Adrian Hyland’s first novel featuring Emily Tempest, Diamond Dove (a.k.a Moonlight Downs in the US) last year.

Gunshot Road has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction, International Noir Fiction, Kittling Books and Petrona

Review: Watch the World Burn by Leah Giarratano

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Thanks to the author for my copy of Watch the World Burn, the 7th book for my Aussie Author challenge which is the 4th book in Leah Giarratano’s series of novels featuring Sydney cop Jill Jackson.

At a prophetically named upscale Sydney restaurant an elderly woman is dining with her son when she bursts into flames for no discernible reason. The restaurant’s manager, former cop Troy Berrigan, does his best to help but the woman later dies of her injuries. Other incidents which may, or may not, be connected start happening across the city. Jill Jackson is studying for her Master’s degree and is on vacation from her job as a Detective with the Police Force but is drawn into the investigation at first because her boyfriend is leading it and then because the case becomes personal.

Watch the World Burn is the perfect example of a suspenseful police procedural mixed with a psychological thriller. There were enough disparate threads to keep me interested in who has done what and what will be done next but not too many that I lost track. Some threads allowed me to build up a picture of intriguing characters while others offered momentary snapshots but all of them kept me turning pages. In fact the shorter passages, such as the one where a woman hands out leaflets on a train station before coming to a sticky end, are really superb short stories within the larger tale and I really enjoyed these vignettes. It’s hard to talk much more about the plot without giving away huge spoilers but there were not many moments in which the story took me where I thought it would and that is always a satisfying experience as a reader.

As I’ve found with all of the books in this series the characters also standout and demonstrate Giarratano’s eye for observation of human behaviour (she is a practicing clinical psychologist). Jill Jackson has had some pretty astonishing personal problems in her life (these are briefly recapped here for those who haven’t read the previous books) but as Watch the World Burn opens she is more confident and happier than she has been before and it’s nice to see this kind of character growth. Quite realistically though she is not ‘all better in an instant’ and the personal trauma that she experiences in this book does force her to deal with her psychological issues in a more structured way than she has in the past and this entire thread has a very credible feel to it. There are other deft creations too including a terrific middle-aged woman who uses humour to help her through her marriage break-up and Troy Berrigan who is also under pressure because he has guardianship of his younger siblings and struggles to maintain some control over their lives.

The one thing missing from this book that I’ve loved about the others was a detailed picture of the ‘bad guy’. Here we only get brief snapshots of the evil-doer which would usually be fine but I must admit to a somewhat guilty pleasure in reading Giarratano’s excellent dark characters in the past. Even so, it’s a thoroughly entertaining read with a nice mixture of action and reflection which will appeal to fans of the series and is also, I think, a great place to start for those new to the world of Jill Jackson.

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My rating 4/5

Publisher Random House [2010]; ISBN 9781741668148; Length 389 pages

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I’ve reviewed all three of the earlier books in this series

Review: Bleed for Me by Michael Robotham

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For the sixth book in the Aussie Authors challenge for this year I chose the audio book of Michael Robotham’s latest Joe O’Loughlin novel

Former policeman Ray Hegarty is dead and his 14-year old daughter Sienna is accused of his murder. Joe O’Loughlin is a psychologist who has previously worked with police and because Sienna is his daughter’s best friend he is drawn into this case too. While Joe believes Sienna is innocent and tenaciously investigates other people in and around the Hegarty family to see who else might have had a motive for murder, the Police generally accept that their former colleague was killed by his daughter. At the same three men are being tried for a hideous race hate crime and it seems as if the two cases might ultimately converge.

In the several earlier books in this series I have adored Joe O’Loughlin, imperfections and all. In my review of Shatter I wrote of Joe

Each time I meet him I find something else to love. Unlike many of the protagonists in crime fiction Joe is not a troubled loner nor does he have any super human abilities. Even his skills in reading people, which he is mostly very good at, let him down some times. He’s smart, funny and heart-wrenchingly self aware. I particularly like the way Joe deals with the personal issues in his life in a very realistic way. He’s not always sensible (who is?) but nor does he go to the extremes that you see in some fiction that make you wonder how the person could possibly have survived adolescence.

It seemed to me that almost none of that applied to Joe in this book. He has now been separated from his wife for two years and is enduring the increasingly difficult manifestations of his Parkinson’s disease which has, kind of, turned him into something of the troubled loner after all. At times I found him bordering on creepy, such as when he sat outside his family’s home watching their shadows behind the curtains. Ick! There is a not so fine line between love and stalking. At one point he resorts to extreme violence against another man and although he was provoked it was all very banal and meant that Joe didn’t bear much resemblance to the intriguing, thought-provoking character that he had been in the past and reading about his exploits this time around was a bit like being disappointed when a family member goes off the rails.

The rest of the characters were fairly standard fare, though Joe’s nearly ex-wife Julianne was more sensitively depicted than had been the case in past novels and we did get to see from her perspective how difficult Joe must be to live with. Of the new characters to this book I didn’t find any of them terribly compelling I’m afraid. There just didn’t seem to be anything new said here about a bloke who was teased as a kid becoming a paedophile and I think I have reached my quota of unstable divorcées becoming clingy when a new chap looks at them sideways. The bright spot for me was a very brief appearance by an older couple whose daughter had been missing, presumed dead, for several years. For me this was a glimpse into the kind of thoughtful characterisations that I’ve enjoyed from Robotham in the past.

As was the case for me with Shatter and The Night Ferry I struggled to stay interested in the story too. It dragged a bit, especially in the first half (and I am generally far more forgiving of stories in audio format). We spent too much time inside Joe’s head as he reviewed and picked over almost every conversation he’d had and there was a lot of recounting of events which were quite predictable the first time round and did not improve on repetition. There also seemed to be a few too many plot elements that were not explored in any depth and therefore added nothing to the whole. The inclusion of a really brutal description of an animal’s death for example served no purpose other than to add gore and cruelty.

Although there was just enough to keep me listening, thanks in part to Sean Barrett’s sensitive narration, ultimately neither the story nor its characters ever succeeded in really hooking me in.  It felt to me a little too much like the author was checking off a list of elements that the modern psychological thriller ought to have without giving much meaning to any of them.  Overall I found it too formulaic and shallow to truly engage me.

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My rating 2/5

Narrator Sean Barrett; Publisher Hachette Audio [2010]; ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible); Length 11 hours 45 minutes

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As always the review is one person’s opinion, others have loved this book so check out their thoughts too. Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise tells us the book kept her reading in a single sitting and Craig Sisterson’s review in the Nelson Mail says the book was compelling.

On the other hand Karen at Aust Crime Fiction also had problems with the gratiutious animal violence and I found one reviewer who thought that some of the problems I identified might not have been noticeable to someone who had read all of the previous books in this series but, alas, this was not true for me.

Review: Bloody Ham by Brian Kavanagh

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For my fifth book in the 2010 Aussie authors challenge I went for a cosy mystery set in England but with an Australian protagonist.

In her third adventure ex pat Australian Belinda Lawrence and her antique dealer friend Hazel Whitby are working on a period drama being filmed at historic Ham House in Surrey. Hazel is keeping an eye on some antique silverware that she has hired out as props for the film and Belinda goes along for the ride. As the egos get bigger and personality squabbles get nastier on set one of the film’s stars dies and Belinda finds herself both a stand-in for the replacement star and a suspect.

I’m not sure why it is so but film sets, at least in fiction, do seem to have a murder rate higher than the average workplace. This one is beset by egotistical behaviour, dummy spits from all the stars and multiple potential murder motives. What fun. Kavanagh does a nice job of intertwining the very modern setting of movie making with the historical setting of the house and both aspects felt realistic to me which is not entirely surprising as Kavanagh is a well-credentialed film producer, director and editor as well as being an accomplished mystery writer.

Although these are known as Belinda Lawrence mysteries my personal favourite character in the series is Hazel who has the kind of sarcastic wit I enjoy so I was pleased to see her driving much of the action in this tale. Belinda, who I also like for being independent and more than a bit daring, has a few personal problems to contend with here as well as being suspected of murder. She has to choose between her English boyfriend of some years (who is frankly a bit soppy for my liking) and an old friend from Australia who she has recently reconnected with. This brings a nice bit of tension to the book without making it too schmaltzy.

Bloody Ham offers an entertaining combination of an old-fashioned whodunit with characters who are fun to meet. It seems everyone on the film set has something to hide and the side threads are as entertaining as the main, twist-filled plot. In short, the book is delightful and recommended to fans of cosies and traditional mysteries.

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My rating 3.5/5

Publisher BeWrite Books [2007]; ISBN 9781905202539 Length 174 pages

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I have also reviewed The Embroidered Corpse, the second book in this series

Review: Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn

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Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, was one of my favourite books of last year so I was keen to get my hands on this second, follow-up novel. I’m also counting it towards my Aussie Authors challenge because even though Nunn was born in Swaziland and the book is set in South Africa she lives in Australia and, as is our practice, we’ve happily adopted her as our own.

In the 1950′s it’s eight months since the events of A Beautiful Place to Die and, under South Africa’s increasingly draconian apartheid laws, Emmanuel Cooper has been re-classified as non-white and stripped of his job in the police. He’s had to move to Durban and is working a manual labour job by day and doing undercover surveillance work documenting police corruption at the dockyards for his former boss at night. It’s during his night time work that he stumbles across the body of a young boy, Jolly Marks. Of course investigating deaths is no longer Cooper’s job but he is compelled to work the case anyway. When he is accused of being the one to have committed the crime, and two subsequent murders, he has only a brief window of time to clear his name.

Once again Malla Nunn has delivered a brilliant depiction of a time and place. In the urban setting the harshness of the political situation is even more starkly displayed than was the case with the first book which took place in the remote Jacob’s Rest. With so many routine day-to-day activities now controlled by the myriad of new laws virtually everyone is in danger of doing something illegal at some point and the distrust, paranoia and necessary self-interest this engenders is portrayed here to perfection. There is also a hefty dose of desperation displayed by many characters caught in horrendous circumstances such as having married before the laws came into effect and now learning the marriage is outlawed because the couple are newly classified as different races. What struck me too here was that on top of all the kinds of hell the regime settled upon the civilian population it made the ever-present ‘us and them’ mentality between police and the wider community that much worse because, essentially, everyone a policeman comes across is a criminal of one sort or another. Even an honourable cop struggles to deal with that.

Characterisations are Nunn’s other great skill. I liked Emmanuel Cooper even more than in the first book though he is not always a likable human being. But as a character, flaws and all, he is the sort of person who leaps off the page. Experiencing first hand the plight of being classified out of the self-appointed ruling race and losing his job, the main thing by which he defines himself as a human being, make Cooper lose some of his confidence and sense of self-worth. He seems even more haunted by the phantom of his former Sergeant Major and is generally not functioning at his best but he strives, not always successfully, to do no harm to others, especially when the two friends he made in Jacob’s Rest come to town to help him. There isn’t a single standout villain here but there’s a criminal under

As far as story goes I found the middle section a bit woolly with a couple of complications too many. Apart from Cooper, who simply can’t let the dead lie, no one seemed to care much about the murder victims because they were too busy worrying about themselves (not without good reason I admit) or, in the case of the cops, were focussed on ‘getting’ Cooper. For a while the story lost its way a little though it ended strongly with a nail-biting but believable climax.

Emmanuel Copper is certainly not the first flawed protagonist in crime fiction but I find him unique in terms of the experiences he’s endured and I’m left wanting to read more about him. And while this is too confronting a setting to be considered a comfort read it is superbly drawn and, alas, all too believable. I heartily recommend this book though would suggest reading A Beautiful Place to Die first to get a full sense of all that Cooper has had and lost before becoming who he is in this novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher Simon & Schuster [2010,]; ISBN 97814116586227; Length 382 pages

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Let the Dead Lie has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction and you might also want to read my review of A Beautiful Place to Die

Review: Blood Born by Kathryn Fox

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Teenager Giverny Hart was brutally raped and the trial of her attackers, several brothers from the Harbourn family, was recently declared a mistrial so she must go through the whole, excruciating exercise again. On the morning Giverny is to give evidence in the second trial, forensic physician Anya Crichton and counsellor Mary Singer arrive at her house for moral support and to escort her to Court only to find her near death from hanging. Frantic attempts fail to save Giverny’s life and to compound matters these attempts appear to have obliterated crucial evidence of whether she was murdered or committed suicide. Having been the one who tried to save Giverny, Anya feels even more guilty about this when two sisters are raped on the night the Harbourn brothers are released from remand and evidence soon points to at least some of them being responsible for this horrific new crime.

Blood Born is a very solidly plotted forensic thriller which more than holds its own against its well-known competition from the likes of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. Fox is a  doctor with a special interest in forensic medicine and it shows both in the scope in the detail provided here. The forensic details of injuries perpetrated upon the various victims is fairly gruesome at several points, though it never felt gratuitous or particularly sensationalist. Nor did the ‘ick factor’ detract from the intertwining stories which I found very compelling and far more believable than many in this genre. There are no rampaging serial killers here, just ‘ordinary’ suburban evil that, unhappily, is far easier to imagine than Hannibal Lecter types.

Despite enjoying the story I was left a little disappointed by the book. Fox tackles some weighty issues here such as the systematic failure of the legal system to achieve anything approaching justice for several victims, including Giverny, the two subsequent rape victims and all of their families.  I wished we’d spent time delving into it more thoroughly. Another topic tantalisingly glimpsed was the age-old issue of whether it is upbringing or genetic code that determines one’s behaviour and, again, I would happily have spent more time exploring this issue.

Heaven knows there are plenty of similar thrillers that never bother to do anything more than pile up the body count so I should be (and am) grateful that the book bothered to explore other issues at all but I can’t help feeling let down that this was done a little too superficially for my tastes. It’s probably not that helpful but I am reminded of Susan Hill’s The Pure in Heart which I thought managed to achieve a more satisfying balance between straight-forward storytelling and the exploration of broader social issues.

My other quibble with the book is that I’m not particularly enamoured of Anya Chrichton as a protagonist. Mostly this is because I think she’s a bit too good to be true in her unwavering selflessness and devotion to womankind (my 15-year old niece would soon be making gagging motions if she encountered Anya). But in Blood Born she also displays a rather astonishing willingness to believe the worst of people who she claims as friends, particularly lawyer Dan Brody who on two occasions she assumes to be behaving immorally without really discussing either situation with him.

Though set in Sydney I did not discern a single element that identified it as a particularly Australian story which is, I suspect, a deliberate decision of the author’s because I’m told such things make a difference when trying to sell international publishing rights, particularly for the US market.

Blood Born tells a story that is grim but also credible and engaging and does so in such a way that it’s quite difficult to put down (my copy has pasta sauce stains on it because I tried, semi-successfully, to read and stir concurrently). I do applaud Fox for attempting to do more than merely tell a tale though I would have preferred the book to tackle one ‘big’ issue in more depth. However, the writing is first-rate and, having read all of Fox’s published fiction to date, I’ll be lining up for the next one.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5 (though I genuinely did oscillate between 3.5 and 4; on a less disgruntled day I might have leaned the other way)

Publisher: Pan Macmillan [2009]; ISBN: 9781405039314; Length 327 pages; Setting: Australia, present-day

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Blood Born has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise and The Book Bag

Here at Reactions to Reading I read and reviewed Fox’s Skin and Bone in February last year. It features one of the minor characters in Blood Born but the two can be read independently. I read Fox’s earlier two books in my pre-blogging days.

Too Many Murders on Australia Day

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Chances are that the review below is not as objective as it ought to be. I’ve a rather large soft spot for Colleen McCullough and her work. I don’t know why she was the only female to have been included among the six literary legends immortalised on a set of stamps* commemorating Australia day this year (she’s tucked at the back, behind Bryce Courtenay in the picture) but she is one of my favourite Australians.

I admire her attitude, her intellect and the fact she has never conformed to expectations, either in her life or in her writing. Before she worked as an author she was a teacher, librarian and journalist before studying to be a neuroscientist. As far as her writing goes she has not allowed herself to be confined to any genre, instead having a go at every kind of fiction from epic romantic sagas like The Thorn Birds to science fiction (A Creed for the Third Millenium) to literary novellas (my personal favourite, The Ladies of Missalonghi) to a superbly detailed historical fiction series, Masters of Rome.

McCullough has, of late, turned her mind to crime fiction with Too Many Murders being the second of her novels to feature Captain Carmine Delmonico and the police force of Holloman Connecticut. It opens on the 3rd of April 1967. A young student at the small city’s prestigious university is killed in a particularly gruesome way. One nasty murder would be enough to cope with in the relatively crime free city but there are 11 other murders on the same day and the small police force is stretched beyond its limits. Despite the fact that there are a variety of methods used and none of the victims appear to have anything in common Carmine Delmonico begins to suspect that there is a single person responsible for all of the deaths.

To say the book’s plot is complicated is something of an understatement. Between the alarming body count (it keeps growing after that first day) and the seemingly endless twists and turns you do feel the need to have a notebook by your side, especially in the first third of the book. Complicated is what McCullough does well though and it all does resolve itself in a satisfying way. However I’d have to admit that by incorporating so many murders and associated investigations the book has skimped a little on its tackling of the big-picture social and political issues which are intertwined with the story. Things like the women’s liberation movement and the cold war between the US and Russia are present more superficially than I’d expect from McCullough and there are tangential threads that could easily have been omitted in order to address such issues more deeply.

There are some fabulous characters though. Again, perhaps a few less would have enabled us to get to know some of them more deeply, but Carmine Delmonico and his wife, Desdemona, are thoroughly engaging, As the book opens they have yet to agree on a name for their 5 month old baby boy but their gentle arguing about the issue shows they have a quite lovely relationship which is an equal partnership possibly a little ahead of its time. Delmonico is a dedicated cop and caring about his subordinates as well as being a doting husband and father. If anything he’s a bit too perfect, also being extremely intelligent, but I can see him as a bit of an homage to the golden age private investigators like Hercule Poirot (I’ve been to see McCullough speak twice and on both occasions she has talked of her love for a good whodunnit). There’s a fabulous female ‘civilian’ working with the police called Delia Carstairs (who is eventually deputised and is instrumental in solving the case) and a cast of other intriguing heroes, villains and bit players.

I managed to keep track of this tale in the well-narrated audio version but due to the complexity of the tale I wouldn’t recommend it for audio book novices. Any way you read it though I would highly recommend this romp of a yarn with its larger than life characters and absurdly complicated story full of criminal masterminds, cold war espionage and heroic investigators. It’s not McCullough’s best writing but even her average is pretty darned good.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Narrator: Bill Ten Eyck Publisher: Bolinda Publishing [2009]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible); Length: 13hrs 4mins; Setting: Connecticut, USA, 1967

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72 year old McCullough has, this month, undergone brain surgery to relieve trigeminal neuralgia which causes excruciating pain to all parts of the face including the lips and eyes. She was reported to have been afraid of having the surgery as it might result in permanent brain damage and leave her unable to write. I for one hope she pulls through, in tact.

Here are two snippets from Colleen McCullough’s appearance on an Australian talk show a couple of years ago.

*It’s wonderful to see writers being commemorated in this way (even though the legends list includes the author whose name cannot be spoken in my house) but it says a lot about our country that in the 13 years the Australian Legends stamps have been issued we’ve commemorated all manner of sporting identities (Sir Donald Bradman in 1997, Olympians the following year, tennis champs in 2003 and horse racing folk in 2007), a swag of other entertainers (country singer Slim Dusty in 2001, opera star Dame Joan Sutherland in 2004 and satirist Barry Humphries [a.k.a Dame Edna Everage] as well as our very own Hollywood actors in 2009) and even fashion designers (2005) before we got around to writers.

Unusually I’ve allowed this book to count for two of my current challenges

Review: The Killing Hands by P D Martin

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It wasn’t until I toddled home from the bookstore with the newest Sophie Anderson book in my hot little hands this week that I realised I had hadn’t read last year’s release yet. Such are the woes of having a ludicrously large pile of unread books lying about the house.

So I embarked hurriedly on The Killing Hands, the fourth book to feature FBI profiler Sophie Anderson. She’s called in to work up a profile of the killer of an unidentified body who appears to have had his throat ripped out. Even before he’s identified the body is linked to Asian organised crime in Los Angeles which requires Sophie to work with a myriad of gang-related government agencies who form a task force. Eventually Sophie identifies that the man, and possibly other victims as well, might have been killed using a specialist form of martial arts training and the task force focus their attention on the Yakuza both in LA, Japan and China.

One of the things that I like most about this series is that there’s always a change in Sophie’s work environment so it doesn’t ever feel stale. Here her work with gangs is a completely new arena for Sophie and, aside from Sophie’s parents and her potential love interest, all the characters are new and interesting to meet. Sophie herself continues to grow and is harnessing her unique psychic ability with greater skill in this book. If you’re like me and a little skeptical of ‘woo woo’ in your books don’t let that last sentence turn you off because it’s a relatively minor element of the plot and it really is handled very intelligently.

The plot of this one builds well towards the end though I have to admit I found some of the earlier parts a little hard going. Martin does meticulous research and incorporated this well into the book in terms of providing enough information on relatively obscure topics like martial arts moves and organised crime but it did lead to a little slower pace than usual at the beginning. It probably doesn’t help that I have a personal bias against books where organised crime features heavily (I simply can’t get terribly interested when criminals start killing each other but given the ratings of TV shows like Underbelly and The Sopranos I realise I’m in the minority). However there were enough other threads including protecting an undercover agent, the exposing of a dangerous leak from the task force and more emphasis than usual on Sophie’s private life to maintain my interest.

I enjoy this series as it does seem to occupy a fairly unique slot in the genre. It is a procedural of course but having Sophie move around so much allows new characters and completely different types of cases to be featured which keeps the books fresher than many series of this type. And Sophie herself is not your run-of-the-mill investigator either, being able to harness a special gift over and above her more traditional skills. The Killing Hands is another credible and engaging outing in the series and I’m looking forward to catching up with Sophie again soon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2009]; ISBN: 978-1-4050-3902-4 Length: 392 pages; Setting Los Angeles, United States, present day

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have reviewed book two (The Murderer’s Club) and book 3 (Fan Mail) in this series already (I read book 1, Body Count in my pre-blog days).

The Killing Hands has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction and Books and Musings from Down Under

P D Martin is busy writing her sixth Sophie Anderson book, Coming Home, as an ebook in which new chapters are being released as they’re written (following voting by fans on the plot lines which should be taken). I’m not entirely convinced this is how I want my fiction developed but it’s an interesting experiment to watch (if the above link doesn’t work it’s not my fault or yours, the technology does seem to be a bit ‘flaky’)

I’ll never understand publishing. This is the American cover of the book, I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting or relevant as our version.

This is my first book by an Australian author this year and so my first book in the 2010 Aussie Author challenge.