Another winnner from my favourite Icelandic crime writer. This one is a little more disturbing than her previous efforts, involving the rape and murder of an 8 year old girl and the reckoning that comes afterwards. What I admire about Sigurdardottor is that she does not depict horrific crimes; she leads us to the very […]
Thriller
The Nowhere Child by Christian White
Good elements in this, though the creepiness of a religious sect with a way of worship that involves handling live snakes is what ultimately stays with you. The poor bloody snakes. Two year old Sammy Went is taken from her home in Kentucky USA. Twenty eight years later her brother tracks her down in Melbourne, though […]
Munich by Robert Harris
I do hope Robert Harris will again reach the gripping literary heights of the Cicero Trilogy and Fatherland, but alas he doesn’t with this one. Munich takes place in September 1938; it’s well written, dense with the comings and goings of gentlemanly diplomats, but never really engages or intrigues.
The Good Father by Noah Hawley
”He was twenty years old. As a boy he had never been attracted to the mindless aggression of men. He did not collect toy guns or turn everything he touched into a weapon, he saved birds that had fallen from their nests. He shared. And yet there he was in two-lane Texas, test-firing automatics on […]
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish
Another winner from Louise Candlish, whose finely observed portraits of relationships between friends, spouses and neighbours reminds me very much of Liane Moriarty. This book has Christy and her husband moving into their enormous dream house on Lime Park Road. Soon enough they notice there’s Something Weird Going on, to do with the the disappearance […]
Into the Night by Sarah Bailey
This one comes hot on the heels of Bailey’s first novel, The Dark Lake. Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock has ditched her complicated life in the country for an equally complicated life in Melbourne. She has left her young son with his father and feels the guilt and sadness of it every day: yet another part […]
Dear Amy by Helen Callaghan
A solid, intelligently written little thriller with fairly satisfying twists and turns. Margot Lewis, a teacher and newspaper agony aunt, gets a letter (how quaint that people still write actual letters) purporting to be from a girl who went missing twenty years ago. How can this be? There’s a few too many dream sequences in […]
The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham
You’ve got to appreciate a protagonist who has a plan and sticks to it, much like Agatha. She sees the life of Meghan O’Shaughnessy, so bright and shiny from the outside, and plans to take something from her. Meanwhile, inside Meghan’s life, it’s far from glamorous. Both women are struggling in their own way; both […]