Rural noir is a thing at the moment, which means some stellar entries in the category, and some not so good ones. Makes opening each new novel and settling in for the experience a bit of rollercoaster ride. So did 55 live up to the hype? Well yes, yes it did. It’s an intriguing premise…
Horror isn’t a sub-genre I spend a lot of time reading, so Painted, being a mystery with a horror overlay, wasn’t a book that came with much in the way of preconceptions or expectations. The premise is that when an extremely reclusive artist instructs a law firm on the manner in which is vast art…
Thought-provoking and confronting, Imperfect by Lee Kofman is the book I’ve been recommending to anyone who asks lately. Imperfect (clever cover design makes the title read I’m Perfect, sans apostrophe) skillfully weaves memoir with interviews in a compelling and heart-tugging way. The blurb reads: By the time she was eleven and living in the Soviet…
A psychological suspense novel with touches of paranormal, Tess is a beautifully balanced, chilling, claustrophobic and clever novel. Set in small town New Zealand, at the turn of the millennium, Tess is, as the blurb puts it “a gothic love story about the ties that bind and tear a family apart.” It’s also a story…
“She doesn’t answer. Death is never banal. If someone can live for more than fifty years without realising that, then it is beneath her dignity to teach them any better. ‘The water’s boiling. I’m making tea,’ she says. ‘Let’s talk later.’” Outside of Norway, Kjell Ola Dahl is perhaps best known for the Oslo Detective…
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now. This firecracker of a novel details the sparkling but short life of a very successful 70’s band who once flew so very close to the heat of the…
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone by Felicity McLean hooked me in with its all-too-familiar north-west of Sydney 1990s setting and the missing girls premise reminiscent of Joan Lindsay’s classic Picnic at Hanging Rock. Here’s the blurb: Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992 – the summer…
As a teenager I scoffed at elders who insisted that the generation gap was alive and well. They claimed we spoke a different sort of English to them, that the things we were obsessed with were unfathomable, the complications of our lives irrelevant, and the music sucked. Then I recently found myself saying the problem…
The Lost Girls by Jennifer Spence is a new release reminiscent in some ways of 1998 movie Sliding Doors, but with a darker, more urgent tone. The central question asks, “What would you do if you had the chance to change a pivotal moment from your past?” Here’s the blurb: At the core of the…
Chloe Hooper has, yet again, taken on difficult terrain and a complex subject matter in The Arsonist. As in The Tall Man, there are victims, family members, affected communities and people still trying to get on with their lives, Black Saturday being ten years ago this month / year in the one of the most…
