CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH:

Before it Breaks by Dave Warner

DI Daniel Clement lives in a patchy so-called apartment on top of a supply store by the wharf, trying to piece his life back together after abandoning his excellent career in crime-prone Perth to become a DI on Western Australia’s far-northern coastline. Forsaking that life to follow his estranged wife and young daughter back to his hometown seems like the right thing to do, but Clement feels ostracised from the place of his youth and everyone who lives in it – especially when a brutal murder is discovered in a crocodile-infested creek, and old friends are as suspicious as the new, unfamiliar faces. Now, the detection skills dampened by his low-rent life in low-homicide Broome have an opportunity to return as the case grows in both mystery and body count.

’70s punk-rocker Warner nails laconic Australian characters but has infused Before it Breaks with a sharp writing style. So immersive in its description of the outback that you could almost swat at the words on the page like the ever-present flies and use the pages to fan yourself from the heat, it bleeds casual realism, honest but never dreary, regarding the non-blockbuster limitations of technology on blurry pictures, office procedure and officers learning the ropes on their first murder, or the determination needed to traverse through hundreds of kilometres of searing West Australian space just to interview one person. A cyclone rampages its way towards them as the case gathers speed: just put on your raincoat and hang onto your book – it’s a wild ride.

Black Run by Antonio Manzini

Don’t let the book’s snowy cover fool you – this is not Sweden, but the Italian Alps, where cranky Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone is now located after getting the boot from Rome. Desperate to get back to his beloved city, and not appreciating his cold and unexciting new hometown (apart from the ladies who live there), he is virtually thrilled when a murder occurs. A body torn to pieces by a snowcat is almost unidentifiable, apart from the tattoo that leads Schiavone to a local trattoria and a hopeful business deal. The irascible Schiavone is also a man with a shady business to take care of, and it’s worth shaking your head and following him on his darkly funny first outing.

Black Widow by Carol Baxter

When Michael Collins, Louisa Collins’ second husband, died of a strange illness in 1888, the doctor was suspicious that Louisa was behind it, and tests proved there was arsenic in his system and in his glass of milk – and, worse, in the promptly exhumed body of her first husband, too. The trial and accompanying tale of the six months leading up to her gruesome execution in January 1889 is a bizarre story of hung juries, a motiveless death, evidence unfairly entered, heated politics, and more. Carol Baxter’s meticulous research and intelligent storytelling serve the long-dead, and, let’s face it, probably guilty, Collins well.

The Drowned Boy by Karin Fossum

Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer is called to the harrowing scene of a drowning by Inspector Skarre: a 16-month-old boy has wandered off and drowned in the family’s backyard pond, his parents unable to resuscitate him. Yet Sejer was summoned for a reason: Skarre felt something was off-kilter with the mother’s story, and the autopsy proves him right. Carmen then confesses that the boy drowned in the bathtub while she had an epileptic seizure, but even after her admission, Sejer can’t shake the case off. Fossum knows her strengths in Sejer, returning for the first time in nearly five years, and her own ability to plumb humanity’s cavernous depths.

Palace of Tears by Julian Leatherdale

In the Blue Mountains, there is a hotel known by outsiders for its luxury and by locals as the Palace of Tears. On a searing January day in 1914, a sparkling party is held by the owner for his son – but by the end of the day, disaster will eclipse the glamour and leave the Fox family scarred. One hundred years later, Lisa, the owner’s descendant, sets out to find out what happened in the hotel that keeps its grim nickname to this day. Fiction set in the early twentieth century in Australia is having quite the glory moment with Leatherdale joining, among others, Greenwood and Gentill – I really couldn’t be happier about it.

Wake by Elizabeth Knox

This is horror both in the glorious literary sense, and in the sense that the world around us is full of horror: full of people whose failings seem everyday in the normal world, but expand when the world falls apart – as things do for a town full of people in Kahukura, New Zealand, when a gruesome madness sees almost everyone dead. For those few survivors, trapped with something unseen, something that wants to pull their emotions into little pieces, the bravery of looking after each other and the town itself may be the only solution.

Fiona Hardy