Robert Goodman For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed Robert GoodmanRobert Goodman is a book reviewer, former Ned Kelly Awards judge and institutionalised public servant based in Sydney. This and over 450 more book reviews can be found on his website Pile By the Bed. pilebythebed.com/
After the success of his comic golden age of crime thriller Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and the continuing resurgence of golden age crime narratives (including Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies and the Knives Out series) it is no surprise that Benjamin Stevenson has returned to the well for Everyone on this Train…
After a three-year break, David Fincher is back with a very un-Fincher-like film with The Killer. This finely crafted film sees the director subverting just about every convention of the hitman sub-genre in a way I found both inventive and a little perplexing at the same time. Fincher is of course known for the directorial…
Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon is a Western crime drama set in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Based on fact, it looks at the serial murder of native Americans living on oil-rich land. After arriving home from WWI, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), moves in with his wealthy cattle rancher uncle, William King…
Detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan return for a third time as the leads in Chris Hammer’s sixth book The Seven. Once again he delivers a multi-generational tale of crimes and misdemeanours in a very particular part of the Australian rural landscape. While Treasure and Dirt was set in the opal fields of Northern New…
Sex, crime and bad behaviour characterise the ’60s dark period drama romance Roaring, the debut work for writer and director Staz Barres. Vera (Jackie von Lierop) desperately wants to make it in show business. She seeks fame. As it is, she works in a dead-end job as a waitress, alongside her friend Jane (Daisy Paxton-White). The pair…
Shelley Burr burst onto the Australian crime scene in 2022 with her rural crime debut Wake which has gone on to win both the British Crime Association Dagger and Ned Kelly Award for best debut, among others. While Wake contained many of the elements of more traditional Australian rural crime stories, Burr managed to put…
The Camorra is in the sights of mysterious former government operative Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) in the violent, action-filled The Equalizer 3. The third and final film in the Equalizer trilogy, you can watch this one in isolation and make sense of it even if you haven’t seen the others. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua,…
Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian detective Arkady Renko has been kicking around since 1981’s Gorky Park. Even in that book he was already a senior investigator. If Renko aged at the same rate as his reality that would make him pretty old by now. Luckily for readers, Renko follows the rules of most fictional detectives in…
In Crook Manifesto, multi award winning author Colson Whitehead returns to the Harlem of Ray Carney for some continuing adventures in crime in his follow up to 2021’s Harlem Shuffle. Similar in structure to the first book, Crook Manifesto comprises three long short stories, each some time on from the last. Through these stories Whitehead…
