Winner of the Best Screenplay at the Cesar Awards (the French Oscars), The Innocent is a comedic crime caper mixed with romance. Sylvie Lefranc (Anouk Grinberg) is a 60-year-old prison drama teacher that can’t help herself. She has a habit of falling head over heels in love with and then marrying the inmates, which inevitably…
I don’t quite know what to make of Mafia Mamma. This is the new film from Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) and features both Australia’s own Toni Collette (who also serves as a producer on the project) and Monica Bellucci. It’s from an original short story by prolific French writer Amanda Sthers, and was adapted by J….
The first book of Spanish author Juan Gómez-Jurado’s crime thriller trilogy, Red Queen (translated by Nick Caistor) demonstrates (if it needed demonstrating again) that English-speaking authors do not have a lock on any genre. That said, while absolutely referencing American serial killer and terrorist thrillers, the book series it seems to draw on most also…
Even though this is a work of fiction (termed “an act of female imagination”), the starting point for Women Talking was a recent real-life event in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009, more than 100 girls and women in a remote Mennonite colony discovered they had been raped in their sleep. A group of men from…
Anne Buist continues to put the psychology, and particularly the psychology of women and mothers, in the centre with what may be the final entry in her Natalie King series Locked Ward. King debuted in Medea’s Curse and two further books followed – Dangerous to Know and This I Would Kill For. In each of…
Inga Vesper’s debut novel The Long, Long Afternoon was a crime novel set in a perfect Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s. Vesper used that scenario to get beneath the façade of the perfect housewife and community of the time to reveal the racism, infidelity and drug use that sat beneath the surface. Her second…
S. A. Cosby seemed to explode onto the noir crime scene with his 2020 release Blacktop Wasteland, soon followed up by the equally compelling Razorblade Tears. But Cosby had been honing his craft for many years before his “sudden” success. But this success means that readers who have discovered Cosby can now enjoy My Darkest…
Holly Throsby returns to her version of the NSW South Coast, explored previously in Goodwood and Cedar Valley in her third novel Clarke. Clarke is set in a bigger regional centre than the first two books but still has very much a small town feel. The plot is built around Throsby’s interest in the true…
John Grisham made his name with legal thrillers in which courtroom drama and legal shenanigans played an integral role in the story telling. In recent times, his books have tended to have a legal angle but are less about the cut and thrust and more about the legal ecosystem and the processes around it. His…
The true crime podcaster as investigator is continuing to trend in crime fiction. Recent examples include Benjamin Stevenson (Greenlight), Amy Suiter Clark (Girl 11) and Charlie Donlea (Don’t Believe It). In Double Lives Kate McCaffrey, if anything, doubles down on this trend, as many of the chapters are podcast episode transcripts. Amy Rhinehart is a…
