Red Dust by Fleur McDonald

First paragraph:  Tears rolled down her cheeks as Gemma stood looking into the grave, a lonely figure in the hot January sun.  All the other mourners had since left for the coolness of the church hall, seeking welcome cups of tea or cold drinks.

Backcover blurb:  After the death of her husband, Adam, in a horrific plane crash, Gemma Sinclair defies community expectations - and Adam's dying words - by taking on the daunting task of managing the 100,000-hectare station he bequeathed her.

As if Gemma's grief and the job of looking after Billbinya Station aren't enough, a wave of innuendo sweeps the community that Adam's death was no accident.

Struggling to uncover the truth of these rumours while battling to keep Billbinya afloat, Gemma wonders if she'll ever find peace - or love - again.

This heart-wrenching outback saga is the inspirational story of a woman doing her best to triumph over adversity and forge a new life.

About the author:  Check out her official website where she gives updates on what she does on her farm and many more.

My thoughts:  Red Dust is the author's debut novel released in 2009.  It is an intriguing and original story set in Western Australia.  It has been a great learning experience for me, more so because I have just returned from Australia and love everything about the country and also thrilled to be reading a novel by an author who has firsthand knowledge of an Australian farmer's life in the harsh outback.  What a beautiful story.  Well-written in all aspects.  It goes to prove that you do not always have to write about dead bodies, blood, high tech gadgets, etc to create "a ripper of a yarn"!

Australian readers have shortlisted it for

1)  the Romance Writers of Australia's Romantic Book of the Year in the Romantic Elements category and
2)  the Australian Book Industry Awards in the Newcomer of the Year (debut novel) section.

Here is what the author said about the truth behind the novel (written as a postscript in the book):

Stock 'rustling' or 'duffing' is entrenched in the fabric of Australia's history.  From the convicts to the bushrangers to the modern-day criminals, stealing other farmers' stock has been an easy way to make money.  It's also very hard to prove who is responsible for the theft.

With the rising costs of diesel and fertiliser, it isn't only stock that is now targeted.  It's anything from machinery to fuel to wool.  Rural crime costs Australia $70 million per year and the frightening thing about this statistic is that only 60 percent is reported.

If you want to keep in touch with the author, you can like her on her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter.

I highly recommend this book - understatement of the year - and will get her next book Blue Skies (April 2010) right now!

Rating:  4/5

Three Weeks To Say Goodbye by C J Box

First paragraph in the book:  It was Saturday morning, November 3, and the first thing I noticed when I entered my office was that my telephone message light was blinking.  Since I'd left the building late the night before, it meant someone had called my extension during the night.  Odd.

Backcover blurb:  They're SO sorry...  They've made a TERRIBLE mistake...  There's NOTHING they can do...  They HAVE to take your daughter away...  You have three weeks to say goodbye.

After years of trying for a child, Jack and Melissa McGuane adopted baby Angelina.  Nine months later, they are plunged into every parents' worst nightmare:  the biological father wants his daughter back - and the law's on his side.

With three weeks until the McGuanes must legally hand over their daughter, the nightmare only gets worse.  The father, a sullen eighteen-year-old with gangland connection, is the son of a powerful judge - and both are prepared to use the full weight of their influence to intimidate the McGuanes.

But it's clear that the judge and his son have no love for baby Angelina.  So why do they want her so badly?  Jack and Melissa will have to break the law to find out...

What I think of the book:  This story is a case of an innocent family finding themselves in a lousy situation not of their own doing.  One day, their life is going smoothly, the next they are thrown into a deep bottomless pit and they can see no way out.

What do they do?  How do they deal with a harrowing situation involving a young innocent child?  Why are good people always punished and the bad ones allowed to get away?  How much can they endure before they snap?  More importantly, as parents, to what lengths would they go to to protect/keep their child?  Because at the end of the day, family is what matters.  No one can take that away from you, least of all time.  It is as simple as that.

A compelling read by an author new to me.  A story riddled with tensions and frustrations.  Original characters and a plot so believable it could have been a true story.  Box has sent me on an emotional ride with his evocative writing and his ability to dig deep into the recesess of my heart to connect with two parents who love their child very much and who found themselves in a heart-wrenching situation is pretty laudable.  These are the real strengths of the book.  I would recommend anyone to pick up this book and read it now.

Here is an interesting interview conducted at the end of 2009 between the author and 'Critical Mick'.

To learn more about C J Box, click here or on his Facebook page.

The author is coming to UK for his book tour in 2011 and will appear at The Harrogate International Festivals in the run up to the publication of his new stand-alone book, Back of Beyond (publication date: August 2011).

Rating:  4/5

Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell

First line in the book:  September is glorious in Manhattan, and this year was no exception.

Backcover blurb:  To everyone who's anyone in New York, Victory Ford, Wendy Healy and Nico O'Neilly are riding high, the beautiful faces of success in the city.  Victory is the hottest new designer on the block; Wendy is president of Parador Pictures with a sure-fire hit in production and three gorgeous children; and Nice is the editor of Bonfire magazine, the city's style bible.  To the outside world they've their prime.

The trouble is, from where Victory, Wendy and Nico are standing, things don't look quite that way.  Nico is fitting in guilty extra-marital sex with an underwear model, Victory's last collection bombed and Wendy's twelve-year marriage to her metrosexual househusband is in freefall.

Fierce, funny and flawed, Candace Bushnell's new heroines are also irresistible, and as she follows them through the minefield of work, love and life at the top she gives us a hugely entertaining lesson on how to stay ahead and keep laughing in the toughest town on the planet.  Welcome to Lipstick Jungle.

My take:  This book has been left on my bookshelf for a number of years so I decided to take it with me on holiday before it got buried in another layer of dust.

I enjoyed reading One Fifth Avenue a couple of years ago and liked Bushnell's stylish and smooth writing so much so that I bought this book as soon as I had finished reading One Fifth Avenue.  Makes for a good buffer between those heavy crime reads.

Bushnell has an innate knack for telling stories about women, especially ambitious women who try to make the best out of their lives in good times and in bad times.  

They can be strong and successful on one end which is their public persona and on the other, vulnerable and full of doubts about themselves in private.  Sounds familiar?

Usually, their conflicts resolve themselves at the end of the book but ironically, this leaves me hungry for more.

I rate this as a pick-me-up/downtime book meet glamour, fashion, ambition, style, power, money, sex and success but above all, it is a book reminding us (women) to remain true to ourselves especially when life throws us unexpected curveballs.  An absorbing and highly entertaining read while on holiday down under.

Liptstick Jungle became a hit TV series from 2008 to 2009 starring Brooke Shields (Wendy Healer), Kim Raver (Nico O'Neilly) and Lindsay Price (Victory Ford).

Rating:  2/5

Authors I Discovered In 2010

I have had the utmost pleasure of both discovering new authors as well as reading new (and old) books by some of my favourite authors this year.

It has been an exhilarating year in terms of discovery and reading.

I thought that to close off a wonderful year of reading, I would compile a list of authors, predominantly crime fiction authors including light/cosy mysteries, new to me which I have discovered by chance (bookshelves), from brilliant bookbloggers around the world, from websites, libraries, recommendations, and from my favourite place to go - bookshops.

Here they are in no particular order:

Brian Cohen

Shamini Flint

Steve Berry

Tara Moss

Sara Paretsky

Jake Needham

Daniel Silva

Peter H Fogtdal

Stephen Jay Schwartz

Michael Stanley

S J Rozan

Lisa Scottoline

J R Reardon

P J Tracy

Judith J Jance

Joseph Teller

David Baldacci

Bronwyn Parry

Deon Meyer

Matt Hilton

Elizabeth Becka

Michael Robotham

Geoffrey Cousins

Cara Black

Stephen J Cannell

Lorna Barrett

Robin Cook

J D Robb

Dave Zeltserman

John Burdett

Robert Wilson

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Melinda Wells

Mikkel Birkegaard

Peter Corris

Leigh Redhead

Fleur McDonald

Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant

Fiona McGregor

Helene Young

Gerald Seymour

Peter James

John Connolly

Robert G Barrett

C J Box

Dennis Lehane

Laura Childs

Russell Andrews

Nelson DeMille

Joanne Fluke

Claude Bouchard

L J Sellers

Alafair Burke

Allison Brennan

Some of you may already have read books by the authors listed above and some may be totally new to you.  It is certainly an impressively exhaustive list for me.  Phew!

Whichever it is, what matters is that it is never too late to read and once you do, join the club.  Reading is not a competition by any means.

I look forward to another year of reading and to new (and old) discoveries.

Happy read to all!

Laundry Man (A Jack Shepherd International Thriller) by Jake Needham

Epigraph:  "You're an expatriate.  You've lost touch with the soil.  You get precious.  You drink yourself to death.  You become obsessed by sex.  You spend all your time talking.  You are an expatriate, see?  You hang around cafes."

"It sounds like a swell life, " I said.  "When do I work?"

"You don't work.  One group claims women support you.  Another group claims you're impotent."

(by Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises)

First line in the book:  I've always thought that driving a convertible is an awfully fine way to enjoy the soft-toned stillness of Sunday twilight in Bangkok.

Backcover blurb:  Extortion, corruption, money laundering, and murder.  Just think of it as business as usual.

Once a high-flying international lawyer, a renowned expert on global money laundering, Jack Shepherd has happily swapped the fierce intrigue of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok where now he's just an unremarkable professor at an unknown university in an unimportant city.  Or is he?

A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd is a man perpetually tantalized by the moral labyrinth that bedevils all western expatriates in Asia.

An international bank collapses under dubious circumstances; a law partner killed two years ago abruptly reappears; prominent members of the Asian financial community die spectacular deaths; and a twisting trail of deceit and corruption leads Jack Shepherd from Manila to Bangkok to Hong Kong to the fabled island of Phuket, and ultimately all the way back to the life he thought he'd left behind in Washington, perhaps even straight into the White House itself.

About the author:  Jake Needham is the most stylish and atmospheric writer of popular fiction in Asia today.  A lawyer and investment banker in Asia for nearly three decades, he has written numerous screenplays for motion pictures and television and he is the author of four best-selling novels.  Laundry Man is his second novel.  He lives in Bangkok with his wife, a Thai-born concert pianist, and their two sons.

To keep up to date with the author, follow him on Twitter.

A substantially different version of this novel was published in Thailand for limited distribution in Thailand, Myanmar and Indochina, under the title Tea Money.


My thoughts:  I found this book on my Sydney apartment's bookshelf, most probably left there by another tourist-tenant like myself.

Three posts back, I mentioned that I was looking to read a more hard-boiled novel and I have found it.

This is it!

What intrigues me about this book is that it says you can only purchase it in Asia.  Go on to the author's website (click on his name above) to find out why he is not selling it worldwide.  However, when I went on to the Amazon sites both in the USA and the UK, Needham's books showed up in the results and they could be purchased without any problems so I guess that the situation has changed since(?).  Unfortunately, a search in Sydney's bookshops yielded no results.

Being in the Asia region at the moment, I can certainly relate to the culture, ambience, dialogue, colourful and exotic places in the novel.  Still, the most interesting aspect is reading about the experiences and outlook of an expatriate living in a foreign country, fiction or otherwise.

Set at a brisk pace and riveting, I find this modern financial thriller well-written, well-researched and is one of the best books I have read this year.

I highly recommend this novel and the others in the Jack Shepherd series.

You may find this interview conducted in the year 2001 enlightening or watch this video of the author talking about encouraging reading and writing among young people (a writer after my own heart):



Rating:  4/5

Siren by Tara Moss

Epigraph:  Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature - Helen Keller

First paragraph from the book:  A brief glow peeked through the curtains, washing the crowd in crimson lights, before the little theatre plunged into shadow.  There were murmurs, and then renewed silence, ears straining for sounds beyond the curtain.  Shhhh...


Backcover blurb:  Enter a world of beauty and danger, of burlesque and terrible revenge.

Mak Vanderwall - beautiful, street-wise daughter of a cop, graduate in forensic psychology, and now PI - is hired by a widowed mother to track down her missing nineteen-year-old son.  Has he come to harm?  Or has he run off with a bizarre troupe of shady French cabaret artistes sweeping through Australia?

And what of the rumours of violence and tragedy that have plagued the troupe for the past decade?  Is their horrifying past fact or fiction?

Meanwhile, Mak is increasingly obsessed with the powerful and ruthless Cavanagh family.  And it seems their security advisor Mr White, and his hitman, Luther Hand, may not have forgotten about Mak either...

About the author:  Tara Moss, is the author of five bestselling crime novels published in fifteen countries in ten languages.  Writing has been a lifelong passion for her; she began penning gruesome 'Stephen King-inspired' stories for her classmates when she was only ten.  Tara enjoyed a successful international career as a fashion model before pursuing professional writing, first earning a Diploma from the Australian College of Journalism.  She began writing her debut novel, Fetish, when she was just twenty-three.  Her crime novels have been nominated for the Davitt and the Ned Kelly awards.  She has a star on the Australian Walk of Fame:  the first person so inducted for services to literature.

Not a writer to rely solely on imagination, she has toured the FBI Academy at Quantico, spent time in squad cars, morgues, prisons, labs, the Supreme Court and criminology conferences worldwide, taken polygraph tests, shot weapons, conducted surveillance, flown with the RAAF, and acquired her CAMS race driver licence.  Tara recently earned her PI licence, and was set on fire by Hollywood stunt company West EFX and choked unconscious by Ultimate Fighters 'Big' John McCarthy for her research.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Tara is a proud dual Australia/Canadian citizen, and divides her time between Sydney, Los Angeles and her hometown in Canada.  She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, as well as an ambassador for the YWCA and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children.

She hosts the true crime series Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals on the Crime & Investigation Network and Tara Moss in Conversation on the 13th STREET Universal channel.  Previously, she hosted the crime documentary series 'Tara Moss Investigates' on the National Geographic Channel across Europe and Australia/New Zealand.

Rating:  3/5

Bookshops I visited in Sydney

On the third day I arrived in Sydney, I thought I would pay a visit to any bookstores that happened to come across my path while I was checking out the city.

My mission was to buy books by Australian authors and Australian authors only.

I took a ferry from Cremorne Point where I am staying across to Circular Quay, the hub of Sydney Harbour, and then caught one of the myriad buses heading out to the city.

The first bookshop I came across was located on 424 George Street.  It is Dymocks, a family owned business and the oldest Australian-owned bookstore.  There are more than twenty branches of Dymocks in New South Wales alone.

There, I bought

1)  Red Dust by Fleur McDonald

2)  Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor

3)  Siren by Tara Moss

4)  Border Watch by Helene Young

5)  The Butcherbird by Geoffrey Cousins

There is no particular section on crime and the Australian fiction section covers romance, historical and crime so you need to know who and what you want to buy otherwise the choices can be overwhelming.

The staff were extremely helpful and friendly and I came away with a good experience and a good impression of the store.

I was also given a free attractive and exclusive book bag (see above) featuring selected titles from the 'Dymocks Booklovers' Best Top 101 list' to carry my purchase in as I had bought over AUS$100 worth of books.

I was a very happy customer.

                                                      *   *   *   *   *

Out of the four bookshops I visited in Sydney, I think Abbey's Bookshop is the most well-stocked in terms of crime fiction find.

The crime section is divided into three sections:

1)  Modern Crime

2)  Australian Crime/Crime Anthologies and

3)  Historical Crime.

Unfortunately, I did not explore the rest of the store as I spent too long a time in Modern Crime and had to go when one part of my anatomy called much too loudly in the hush of the aisle.

I bought

1)  Feeding The Demons by Gabrielle Lord (Australia's First Lady of Crime)


2)  Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Leah Giarratano

3)  The Tattoo Man by Alex Palmer

4)  The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell

If you come to Sydney looking for Australian crime writers and their books, I recommend visiting Abbey's first.

                                                     *   *   *   *   *

On the fifth day of my holiday down under, I came across two bookstores.

The first one is the Japanese bookstore, Kinokuniya which is situated at Level 2, The Galeries, 500 George Street, Sydney 2000.

As is expected, there is a good selection of books in the store as well as a cafe at the side of the entrance to quench one's thirst or rest those tired feet.

Sadly, I did not find the customer service at Kinokuniya as good as Dymocks'.  I had a list of about ten Australian authors and a pen in my hand and even so, none of the staff approached me to ask whether I needed any help and I did not bother asking for help either.

Nevertheless, I did make some purchases and they were

1)  Torn Apart by Peter Corris

2)  Thrill City by Leigh Redhead

3)  The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

I have not gotten round to buying a Kindle yet and I do not think I ever will unless Santa decided to drop me a present down the chimney this year but I have found an alternative here in Australia and that is the ECO Reader, a 6-inch digital book, priced at AUS$199 available at most bookshops here.

Apart from those two gadgets, I am very much in the dark about paperless books so to speak and will carry on buying printed books in bookshops and borrowing books from libraries for the foreseable future.

                                                             *   *   *   *   *

The second bookshop I chanced upon is a discounted bookstore named T Kelly Discount Books situated at 583, George Street, Sydney 2000.  It is quite small and narrow and packed full of books from ceiling to floor and on two extended shelves in the middle of the floor space.  As the banner outside the entrance depicts, T Kelly also sells CDs and DVDs.

The owner is a friendly and helpful chap who helped me find the books that I asked for but unfortunately, even though there is a good selection of bestselling books by bestselling and well-known authors from around the globe, he could only find Peter Temple for me!  Where are all the Aussie writers?

How discounted is it?  Well, a book from a chain bookstore usually costs AUS$24 or more but at T Kelly's, a book sells for AUS$19 give or take.

I love bookshops.

Thus my mission continues.

A Deadly Trade (A Detective Kubu Crime Novel) by Michael Stanley

About the authors:  No, you did not read wrong and yes, there are two authors with regards to this book/series.  Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip.  The pair have had many adventures together, including tracking lions at night, fighting bush fires on the Savuti plains in northern Botswana, surviving a charging elephant and losing their navigation maps while flying over the Kalahari.  Sears lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Trollip divides his time between South Africa and Minneapolis, Minnesota.  To find out more, click on their website here.

Below is a picture of the crime-writing duo - Sears (L) and Trollip (cradling the cat):

First line in the book:  The farewells had been said many years ago, so Goodluck hugged his old comrade and left without a word.

Synopsis:  How can a man die twice?  That's the question facing Detective 'Kubu' Bengu when a mutilated body is found at a tourist camp in northern Botswana.  The corpse of Goodluck Tinubu displays the classic signs of a revenge killing.  But when his fingerprints are analysed, Kubu makes a shocking discovery:  Tinubu is already dead.  He was slain in the Rhodesian war thirty years ago.

Kubu quickly realises that nothing at the camp is as it seems.  As the guests are picked off one by one, time to stop the murderer is running out.  With rumours of horrifying war crimes, the scent of a drug-smuggling trail and mounting pressure from his superiors to contend with, Kubu doesn't notice there is one door left unguarded - his own.  And as he sets a trap to find the criminals, the hunters are closing in on him...

My take:  As far as I know, the only other story set in Botswana is Alexander McCall Smith's and here I am reading the other pea in the pod to the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, albeit "with a dark edge and even darker underbelly" (Peter James).

Assistant superintendent, Kubu, (Setswana for 'hippopotamus' because of his big waistline and hearty appetite) works in the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department and is fond of food, wine and his wife, Joy.  He reminds me very much of Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh - both men boast a commanding girth and like food.  They work in a laid back environment with their subordinates and have someone higher-up to answer to even when they are working quite independently.  Their books are pleasantly paced and not as edgy and dark as say Deon Meyer's.

As with McCall Smith and Deon Meyer's, I do not think you can read a novel from South Africa and not come across the local cultures and customs, its people and its beautiful landscape and not forgetting its diverse wildlife.  These types of books are very much culturally inclined while enjoying a good light crime mystery.  I have enjoyed reading this book in flight to Kuala Lumpur for my Christmas break but having said this, it would not make me read their debut (A Carrion Death) soon/next for the simple reason that I would like to explore other literary styles, a more hard-boiled style perhaps.  It has been an enjoyable read though.


A Deadly Trade is published in the USA under the title The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu.

If you are searching for more South African crime novels to read, you can click on the Top 10 compiled by www.guardian.co.uk.  Enjoy reading!

Rating:  2/5

Concourse (A Lydia Chin & Bill Smith Mystery) by S J Rozan

First line in the book:  At Mike Downey's wake the coffin was closed.

My thoughts:  This time, piano-playing P I Bill Smith comes to the forefront while Lydia takes a back seat in the second book of the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery series.  At the behest of his old mentor, Bobby Moran, who runs a security business, Bill goes undercover to investigate the killing of a security guard at the Bronx Home for the Aged in a gang-infested territory in the Bronx.  What he then uncovers is a startling web of corruption in the world of non-profit organizations and the evil wrought by money and the giddying power of knowing you can get away with it!

Likeable characters, rich and rewardingly plotted, exciting at every turn and a first-rate read.  I am impressed with her poetic diction which is so vivid it awakens my imagination.  Her detailed descriptions of nature, buildings, people, scenes can only come from one who knows what they are writing about.  This book is a true blue dee-tec-tive story in the way a P I is supposed to detect and find answers for his client with a lot of legwork and asking questions and if you started with Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys in the past and want to know how much detection has evolved and changed since those heydays, then this is the series to get you back into it.  I love a good P I story and I am not saying it lightly.

I can see why this book won the Shamus Award (awarded by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) for the best detective fiction genre novels of the year) for the "Best P I Hardcover Novel" category in 1996.  This book could be used as a textbook/reference book for students in writing programs.

Rating:  5/5

China Trade (A Lydia Chin & Bill Smith mystery) by S J Rozan

First line in the book:  I jumped a pothole in Canal Street as I dashed between honking cars and double-parked ones.

My thoughts:  As I said I would after reading S J Rozan's The Shanghai Moon, I am back with her superb debut called China Trade introducing the original tea-drinking American-born Chinese private investigator Lydia Chin and her sidekick, Bill Smith.

Set in the heart of New York's Chinatown, Lydia is hired by the local Chinese community organizers to find a set of rare Blair porcelains stolen from the basement of its headquarters.  Lydia works with her low fann sometimes partner, Bill, to find a link between groups of rival Chinese tongs and the black market in stolen art.  An investigation that Lydia eventually finds not as straightforward as it first appears when violence intervenes in the courtyard behind the kitchen of a seafood restaurant...

Face.  Reputation.  People desperate to protect their good names.  When it comes to the Chinese people, you can be pretty sure this is what it is all about on all counts!

Rozan certainly has Chinatown and Chinese cultural nuances down pat and is a talented writer in the contemporary sleuth genre.  What I like most is that it is funny and witty and the relationship between Lydia and Bill is so comfortable and easy that it seems Rozan must have been writing about a rea life friendship.  A very interesting reader's comment about this book went like this, "...this book was written in the early 90s and it was amusing to remember that not so long ago people used answering machines, answering services and pay phones!"  I wonder if anyone noticed while reading the book at the present time.

An excellent start to a long series of books alternating between Lydia and Bill.  Highly recommended.

S J Rozan is a former architect and lives in lower Manhattan, New York City.

Rating:  5/5

Cream Puff Murder (A Hannah Swensen Mystery with Recipes) by Joanne Fluke

First line in the book:  There was a loud crash as someone dropped a platter.

Back cover blurb:  Bakery owner Hannah Swensen has a dress to fit into and a date with her sister, Andrea, at Lake Eden's new health club, Heavenly Bodies.  Dragging herself out of bed on a frigid Minnesota morning for exercise, of all things, is bad enough.  Discovering the body of man-eating bombshell Ronni Ward floating in the gym's jacuzzi?  Okay, that's worse.  Nor does it help that there's a plate of The Cookie Jar's very own cream puffs garnishing the murder scene.

Trying to narrow the list of Ronni's enemies down to fewer than half the town's female population, Hannah has her plate full.  Trouble is, when it comes to cookies - and to murder - there's always room for one more...

My thoughts:  This eleventh book wraps up my sweet indulgence with the Hannah Swensen mystery series as the bookshop does not stock the new ones at the moment.  However, I will be back for more when they are available.  In the meantime, I will start another series ie A White House Chef Mystery series by Julie Hyzy which have been marked down on my next-to-read cosy reading list.

If you want to find out about Joanne Fluke, her books, photos, what's next, reviews, interviews and especially her recipe index, click here which will link you to her homepage.

Rating:  3/5

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

Connelly introduces his latest book:



The best-selling author answers questions about The Reversal for USA Today:



First line in the book:  Tuesday, February 9, 1:43 P.M.  The last time I'd eaten at the Water Grill I sat across the table from a client who had coldly and calculatedly murdered his wife and her lover, shooting both of them in the face.

Dust jacket blurb:  When Mickey Haller is invited by the Los Angeles County District Attorney to prosecute a case, he suspects he's being set up.  Why should one of the hottest defense lawyers in the business agree to switch sides for one trial?  Especially since the DA's determination to re-try Jason Jessup, a convicted child-killer who spent almost twenty-five years on death row before DNA evidence freed him, seems doomed to failure.

Despite the risks, Mickey finds it's an offer he can't refuse.  Not only will the trial generate a media blitz, but as Mickey and his lead investigator Detective Harry Bosch learn more about the death of twelve-year-old Melissa Landy all those years ago, they become convinced that Jessup is guilty - and once freed he will kill again.

With the odds stacked against him - including a defense attorney adept at portraying Jessup as the innocent victim of a corrupt justice system and a key witness who risks having her life torn apart on the stand - Mickey knows that if this is the only case he ever prosecutes, it's one he cannot afford to lose.

My thoughts:  What an exceptionally well-written book!  This is the fourth novel of Connelly's twenty two novels starring Mickey Haller as the protagonist and Harry Bosch taking a not-so-secondary role.  It is very hard to fault Connelly's books because he never disappoints his fans and always delivers top quality work.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book because it is a book about right and wrong, love and evil.  As Bosch says, "There are certain kinds of evil in the world that had to be contained, no matter the hardship."  Does justice always prevail?  We know that there are no certainties in a courtroom and that a wrong does not necessarily mean a chance of conviction and that a right does not mean that the public will agree with the verdict.  Potential political fallout plays a huge role in enforcing judgment, more often than not on opposing ends of the scale.

In this respect, it demonstrates that nothing seems to move in a straight line and how a mistake in judgement can affect the search for truth and thereby pervert the course of justice.  In the author's acknowledgement, he writes that he greatly benefited from reading Defending the Damned:  Inside a Dark Corner of the Criminal Justice System by Kevin Davis, an award-winning journalist, author, magazine writer and a former crime reporter based in Chicago.  His book gives you a true behind-the-scenes look on the way the court system works in America.

A gripping and convincing storyline with well-drawn characters and their relationships with one another, realistic dialogue, smooth prose, excellent attention to details, all in all, an intelligently written thriller which you just gotta read!  Super!

In my opinion, Michael Connelly is one of the best and inspiring contemporary writers of crime fiction.

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Rating:  5/5