Broken Shore by Peter Temple

"Every word in The Broken Shore contains meaning..." - Courier-Mail.

Gist of this book:  A wounded cop recovering from life-threatening injuries in Australia's coastal countryside gets drawn in to the investigation of a murder.

About the author:  South-African born Peter Temple's bestselling novels are published in more than twenty countries.  He has won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction five time, and in 2010, Truth (2008) won the Miles Franklin  Literary Award.

Truth is the companion to The Broken Shore (2006), winner of the world's most prestigious prize for crime writing, the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger.  Peter Temple lives in Victoria.

His other novels are

Bad Debts (1996)
An Iron Rose (1998)
Shooting Star (1999)
Black Tide (1999)
Dead Point (2000)
In the Evil Day (2002) aka Identity Theory
White Dog (2003)
Truth (2008)
Ithaca In My Mind (2012) - novella (Kindle)

Rating:  5/5

Bad Debts by Peter Temple

Bad Debts (1996) is the celebrated novel introducing Peter Temple's Jack Irish, a book-carrying ex-criminal lawyer who now works as a serious debt collector in Melbourne, Australia.

Paperback:  Melbourne in winter.  Rain.  Wind.  Pubs.  Beer.  Sex.  Corruption.  Murder.

A phone message from ex-client Danny McKillop doesn't ring any bells for Jack Irish.  Life is hard enough without having to dredge up old problems:  his beloved football team continues to lose, the odds on his latest plunge at the track seem far too long and he's still cooking for one.

But then Danny turns up dead and Jack has to take a walk back into the dark and dangerous past.

About the author:  Peter Temple is a South-African born Australian crime and thriller writer, and has worked as a journalist, magazine editor and lecturer.  He is the winner of the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for crime fiction for The Broken Shore (2006) as well as the winner of the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction, Colin Roderick Award for best Australian book and lastly, the Australian Book Publishers' Award for best general fiction.  He is the first Australian to win a Gold Dagger.

His other novels are (the Jack Irish novels are marked with an asterisk)

An Iron Rose (1998)
Shooting Star (1999)
Black Tide (1999) *
Dead Point (2000) *
In the Evil Day (2002) aka Identity Theory
White Dog (2003) *
The Broken Shore (2006)
Truth (2008)
Ithaca In My Mind (2012) - novella (Kindle)

Rating:  5/5

Feeling The Demons by Gabrielle Lord

This is a novel by Australia's "First Lady of Crime".  Feeling The Demons (1999) introduces us to PI Gemma Lincoln and "explores the nastier side of human nature."  Lord writes with authority and refinement and the narrative is superb.  I highly recommend this unputdownable book (and the others in the series) because they deserve to be read and devoured.

Paperback:  Gemma and Kit's childhoods were overshadowed by their father's conviction for murdering their mother.  Thirty years later he is released from prison, sparking conflict between the sisters, who have never agreed about his guilt.

At the same time a series of gruesome incidents involving slashed women's clothing escalates into serial murder.

Both Gemma and Kit become caught up in a terror linked to dark secrets.  In a gripping climax that threatens their lives, demons from the past come back to haunt the present.

About the author:  Gabrielle Lord is widely acknowledged as one of Australia's foremost writers.  Her psychological thrillers are informed by a detailed knowledge of forensic procedures, combined with an unrivalled gift for story-telling.

Her first novel, Fortress, was published in 1980 and has been translated into six languages, as well as being made into a successful film starring Rachel Ward.  Since Fortress, Gabrielle has published many other best-selling novels, including The Sharp End (1998), Tooth and Claw (1983), Jumbo (1986), Salt (1990) and Whipping Boy (1992).  Her stories and articles have appeared widely in the national press and been published in anthologies.  She has written for film and TV.

Other books in the PI Gemma Lincoln series are Baby Did A Bad Thing (2002), Spiking The Girl (2004), Shattered (2007) and Death By Beauty (2012).

Rating:  5/5

The Exception by Christian Jungersen

The Exception is another fiction gem I discovered in 2012.  It is truly a powerful and terrific story.  I hope everyone will read it.  I hope to see more works from the author in future.

"The Exception is an interesting novel with quite unexpected pace and a great deal to tell us about the psychological games we play with other people and with ourselves" - Times Literary Supplement

Paperback:  Office politics can be deadly.

Four women work at the Danish Centre of Genocide Information.  When two of them start receiving death threats, they suspect they are being stalked by a Serbian torturer and war criminal.  But perhaps he is not the person behind the threats - it could be someone in their very midst.

As the tension amongst the women builds, they begin to turn on each other and discover that none of them is exactly the person they seem to be.

An obsession with tracking down the killer turns into a witchhunt as the women resort to bullying and victimisation.  And the brutality which the women have described from a safe distance is now revealed in their own world.

About the author:  Christian Jungersen's first novel, Krat (The Thicket) (1999) - not published in English yet -, won the Danish Best First Novel of the Year Award.  The Exception (2006), his second novel, won the Danish Golden Laurels prize, and has been a huge bestseller across Europe as well as an international bestseller.  He lives in Dublin, Ireland and New York and is currently at work on his third novel.

Check out Christian Jungersen's website here.

The Exception is translated from the Danish into the English by Anna Paterson.

Rating:  5/5

The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard

The Library of Shadows is an engrossing literary thriller of intrigue, conspiracy and the extraordinary power of reading.

Paperback:  Imagine that some people have the power to affect your thoughts and feelings through reading.

They can seduce you with amazing stories, conjure up vividly imagined worlds, but also manipulate you into thinking exactly what they want you to.

When Luca Campelli dies a sudden and violent death, his son Jon inherits his second-hand bookshop, Libri di Luca, in Copenhagen.  Joh has not seen his father for twenty years, since the mysterious death of his mother.

After Luca's death is followed by an arson attempt on the shop, Jon is forced to explore his family's plast.  Unbeknown to Jon, the bookshop has for years been hiding a remarkable secret.  It is the meeting place of a society of booklovers and readers, who have maintained a tradition of immense power passed down from the days of the great library of ancient Alexandria.  Now someone is trying to destory them, and Jon finds he must fight to save himself and his new friends.

About the author:  Mikkel Birkegaard is an author of fantasy fiction and lives in Copenhagen.  The Library of Shadows (2007) is his first novel.  It was first published in his native Denmark where it was a national bestseller, and has now gone on to be published in seventeen languages.  This book is translated from the Danish into the English by Tiina Nunnally.  Over mit lig (My Dead Body) (2009) is his second novel.

Rating:  4/5

Blood Redemption by Alex Palmer

Alex Palmer is an excellent writer and her stories are unputdownable.  They are powerful stories told with vigour, purpose and insight.  I highly recommend the Harrigan and Grace series of which Blood Redemption is the first in the series followed by The Tattooed Man (2008) and, lastly, The Labyrinth of Drowning (2009).  Could there be anymore in the works?  I sincerely hope so.

Blood Redemption (2002) is the winner of the 2002 Canberra Critics Circle Award for Literature as well as the winner of the 2003 Davitt Award for Crime.  

Paperback:  Matthew Liu sees his parents gunned down on a lonely Sydney backstreet.  A young woman, the killer, stares him in the face before fleeing the scene.  When the police arrive, all they find is the discarded gun.

Detective Inspector Paul Harrigan's unit is pitched into a high-profile investigation with little to go on.  Who is the young woman?  How can she have vanished into thin air?

When DC Grace Riordan follows up a connection between one of the victims and a termination clinic, the pieces start to fall into place, but Grace is forced to confront some personal demons.

Harrigan has demons of his own to contend with.  Burned badly in the past for refusing to turn a blind eye to police corruption, he suspects that his current team and investigation are being subtly sabotaged.  Then he discovers that his own son is in email contact with the killer and that the young woman's bloody rampage is far from over.  And with a single phone call the killer draws Harrigan and Grace into her trap.

About the author:  Alex Palmer was born in London in 1952.  Her father abandoned her family when she was very young and they left England when she was five to live variously in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, arriving in Sydney in the late 1960s.  Here, she studied English literature and language at Macquarie University and later sat for a postgraduate diploma in information management at the University of New South Wales.

Alex has travelled extensively in Australia and in Asia, Europe, Britain and North America.  After a working life which has included occupations as diverse as geriatric nursing to automated systems design, she now writes full time.  She is married and lives in Canberra.

Rating:  5/5

The Eye Of Jade by Diane Wei Liang

'A classic detective fiction with lots of underworld contacts and hushed conversations in noodle bars, but underneath, it's an examination of China old and new, and feels absolutely contemporary' - Mark Coles, BBC's The Ticket.

Paperback:  Mei is an independent Chinese woman who runs her own business in Beijing, working as a private investigator.  

One day, 'Uncle' Chen, no relation but a close friend of her mother, comes to Mei with a case:  he asks her to find a Han-dynasty jade that was taken from a museum during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards swarmed the streets, destroying many remnants of the past.

But Mei's investigations reveal a story that has far more to do with her own family than she could ever have expected.  

On the author:  Diane Wei Liang was born in Beijing.  She spent part of her childhood with her parents in a labour camp in a remote region of China.  While attending Peking University in the 1980s, she took part in the Student Democracy Movement and was in Tiananmen Square.  Diane has a PhD in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University and was a professor of management in the US and the UK for over ten years.  She lives in London with her husband and their two children.

The Eye of Jade (2008) is her first novel in the PI Mei Wang series.

Rating:  3/5

The Tattooed Man by Alex Palmer

This is an exceptionally well-written story and an excellent read to boot.

Paperback:  Paul Harrigan is a top cop who has survived the corruption and political manoeuvrings of the NSW Police.  So far.

His partner Garce Riordan has left the Service and now works in the shadowy world of undercover intelligence - so she and Harrigan can't talk about work much.

Harrigan is called to a grisly murder scene in Sydney's wealthy north:  four guests are seated around the dinner table - all dead.  One of them a Senator's ex-wife;  one of them a missing corrupt NSW detective.  And the mummified condition of the detective's body - identified by a distinctive tattoo - suggests he has been dead for quite some time.

While Harrigan is facing the demons of his past, Grace is drawn into the investigation through some very unofficial enquiries of her own.  Enquiries which will lead to a flashpoint neither can predict.

Politics, corruption, big business, espionage and illicit technology, Alex Palmer weaves them all into a heart-stopping race for the truth.

About the author:  Alex Palmer is a Canberra-based novelist who took up writing full time when she was made redundant from the Australian Public Service.  With her debut Blood Redemption (2002), she won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel and shared the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for best crime novel by a woman with Gabrielle Lord.  Her second novel in the Harrigan and Grace series, The Tattooed Man (2008), was the winner of the 2008 Canberra Critics Circle Award.  The third book, The Labyrinth of Drowning, was published in 2009.

I purchased this book from Abbey's Bookshop in Sydney.  It was priced at AUS$19.99.

Rating:  4/5

Trackers by Deon Meyer

The Times wrote that Deon Meyer is "one of the sharpest and most perceptive thriller writers around" and they are not wrong there.  However, as a reader, one needs to be as sharply perceptive as the author to weave this complicated and one-thousand-and-one plot into a cohesive intelligent tale of smuggling, politics, terrorism and edge-of-the-seat brilliance.  The conclusion is so unexpected.  Very cleverly written.  Recommended read especially if you like to tax your mind.

Paperback:  On the vibrant streets of metropolitan Cape Town, three people are all running from something or someone - where will their paths cross?

Milla - escaping an abusive marriage.  Finds herself at the heart of an anti-terrorist operation in Cape Town in the days before the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Lemmer - a bodyguard of the rich and famous.  On a new experience looking after a pair of smuggled white rhinos on a thousand kilometre journey from Zimbabwe.

Mat Joubert - former policeman making a living in the private sector.  Current assignment is to search for a young woman's missing husband.

From the city to the wild border country, from luxurious gated communities to the ganglands of the Cape Flats, Trackers (2011) is the finest novel yet from the award-winning Deon Meyer.

Deon Meyer shares with us the gist of the book:



Go to deonmeyer.com for more reviews, photos, videos and other information.

The Independent's review (24 October 2011).

Rating:  5/5

Death, Taxes, and a French Manicure by Diane Kelly

What is this book about?  Watch this clever trailer by Diane Kelly:



Getting to know Diane Kelly and her Tara Holloway debut novel:





About the author:  Diane Kelly is a tax attorney by day, writer by night.  A recipient of the 2009 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award for Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements, she has received more than two dozen RWA chapter awards.  Diane's fiction, tax and humor pieces have appeared in True Love magazine, Writer's Digest Yearbook, Romance Writers Report, Byline magazine, and other publications.

Death, Taxes, and a French Manicure (2011) is her first mystery novel, followed by Death, Taxes, and a Skinny No-Whip Latte (February 2012) and Death, Taxes, and Extra-Hold Hairspray (June 2012).  Death, Taxes, and a Sequined Clutch will be available in October 2012 and last but not least, the fifth book in the Tara Holloway novel series, Death, Taxes, and Peach Sangria will become available in 2013.

Do visit Diane Kelly's feisty website for more information and updates.  What a funny make-me-laugh-out-loud debut.  It comes with the highest recommendation - love it to bits!

Rating:  5/5

The Bodies In The Barrels Murders by Jeremy Pudney

This is a true serial killings story involving barbaric and sadistic torture methods and macabre rituals which occurred in what the author termed "a sleepy backwater" in South Australia between 1992 and 1999.

Where is this sleepy backwater?  It is Snowtown, a settlement noted for its quality stock breeding, fat lambs, wool and wheat crops, 150 kilometres from Adelaide.  According to the author, "its wide main street is virtually deserted during the day and the town is dissected by a rail line on which trains that used to stop now barely slow as they pass."  If you have been to Australia, it is easy to picture it.

It is now famously known as the Snowtown murders.  It was Australia's most horrific and sustained serial killings and the single biggest criminal investigation and trial in Australia's legal history.  Unfortunately, South Australia already had a reputation for producing the country's highest number of serial killers.  Even so, it appalled the nation and the world.

The Bodies in the Barrels Murders (2005) is divided into three sections:  The Beginning, The Murders and The Trial.  Part police reporting, criminology text, biography and social history including unreported details from the 171-day trial, it is the authoritative account of the twelve horrifying and gruesome deaths which reads like the worst horror movie you could possibly imagine in your lifetime.

About the author:  Born in Adelaide in 1974, Jeremy Pudney was also raised in the South Australian capital.  He completed a Journalism degree at the University of South Australia and began his journalism career in 1993.  Jeremy was a police reporter at South Australia's only daily newspapers, The Advertiser, when the Snowtown murders story broke.  He is now a television reporter with Network Ten in Melbourne.  Primarily a police reporter, he is also assigned to major national and international stories.  The Bodies in the Barrels Murders (2005) is Jeremy's first book.

For video buffs, this documentary (watch at your own peril;  contains disturbing images) is as informative as the book.

I do not rate books of this nature.

The Wrath Of Angels by John Connolly

I have never read a better introduction on the blurb of a new book.  The Wrath of Angels (2012) is the eleventh novel in The Charlie Parker Stories.  I highly recommend this excellent thriller/horror series to all.  Just remember to keep the lights on when you are at it!

From the hardback:  In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of a plane is discovered.  There are no bodies.  No such plane has ever been reported missing.  But men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time.

What the wreckage conceals is more important than money:  it is a list of names, a record of powerful men and women who have struck a deal with the Devil.

Now a race is on between those who want the list to remain secret and those for whom it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.

The battle to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list.

It lures others too:  a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing;  a silent child who remembers his own death;  and the serial killer known as the Collector, who seeks new lambs for his slaughter.

But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets.

Someone has survived the crash.

Some thing has survived the crash.

And it is waiting...

About the author:  John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968.  His debut - Every Dead Thing (1998) - swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers.  He is the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award.

To find out more about his novels, visit johnconnollybooks.com

John Connolly introduces his latest book:



Rating:  5/5

Disgrace by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Disgrace aka The Absent One (2012) is the terrifying new episode in the four-part Department Q series.  The first, Mercy aka The Keeper of Lost Causes (2011), was a No 1 international bestseller.  The third, Redemption, will be out in 2013.

From the paperback:  Kimmie's home is on the streets of Copenhagen.  To live, she must steal.  She has learned to avoid the police and never to stay in one place for long.  But now others are trying to find her.  And they won't rest until she has stopped moving - for good.

Detective Carl Morck of Department Q, the cold cases division, has received a file concerning the brutal murder of a brother and sister twenty years earlier.  A group of boarding-school students were the suspects at the time - until one of their number confessed and was convicted.  So why is the file of a closed case on Carl's desk?

Who put it there?  Who believes the case is not solved?

Carl wants to talk to Kimmie, but someone else is also asking questions about her.  They know she carries secrets certain powerful people want to stay buried deep.  But Kimmie has one of her own.  it's the biggest secret of them all.  And she can't wait to share it.

About the author:  Jussi Adler-Olsen was born in Copenhagen and worked as a magazine editor and publisher before starting to write fiction.  He holds the prestigious Glass Key Award, given annually for a crime novel by a Scandinavian author, and is also winner of the Golden Laurels, Denmark's highest literary accolade.

Disgrace is translated from the Danish into the English by writer and translator K E Semmel.

Another Danish thriller film in the making?:

Rating:  5/5

Then And Now