CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH:

Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic

While I love a solely plot-driven book as much as I love a blustery action movie (i.e. a LOT), a book that has characters of real depth and diversity, like Resurrection Bay, is quite simply a pleasure to read. And having diversity in a book’s characters is, quite honestly, a relief: it shows awareness of the world around us, one that is not full of much-loved cookie-cutter crime staples but actual humans.

Here, we follow a profoundly deaf main character, his 57-year-old female ex-cop detective partner, his Koori ex-wife and her extended family, a selection of good-to-partly-good and bad-to-monstrously-bad cops, and friends and passers-by, all of them involved in a case that beats down your door and knocks you out cold from page one, when Caleb Zelic responds to a friend’s alarming message only to find him torn to shreds. Caleb and Gary have been friends since they were children, tearing up Resurrection Bay as rowdy kids, before Gary became a cop and Caleb a detective of a different kind. So when the police seem determined not to follow any leads, Caleb knows he must hunt his friend’s killer himself, no matter where that search may lead.

And it leads, inevitably, to him bunkering down in his ex-wife’s house, a relationship ruined by personal tragedy and stubbornness, but one he still treasures. Kat and he have unfinished business, but whether they can tie their loose ends together before Gary’s killers slice them apart is another thing. There are breathless scenes of tension – when your main character cannot hear, what happens when you’re fighting for your life in the sand and you can’t hear what the other person is yelling at you? – and times when I was guiltily desperate to skip ahead just to make sure the people I loved were going to make it through okay. And in the capable signing hands of Viskic – a Ned Kelly short story award winner – you never know what’s around the corner, in the very best kind of way.

NEW CRIME FICTION

Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin

At sixteen, Tessa is found in a field full of flowers, along with the dead bodies of three other women. She is the only survivor, and two of them are nothing but bones. Their killer is found, prosecuted, imprisoned. But nearly twenty years later, just as his execution looms, Tessa finds something planted outside the house she shares with her daughter: Black-Eyed Susans, out of season, and put there on her birthday. This is a tale just as chilling as its premise, and Tessa, trying to claw her memories out of the darkness of the past, is memorable – personable but tough, a survivor but in danger – and this story a thrill that blooms (sorry) from the first page.

Detective Work by John Dale

It’s a good title, of course: it tells you exactly what’s going on inside. Detective work at its best, spearheaded by a cop who’s just been promoted to a new unsolved crime unit and is determined to finally do something to change the world instead of busting small-scale crimes. Dimitri Telegonus draws a short straw with his new partner, who has the knowledge yet none of the drive – but has already worked on the case they are assigned, the 1994 disappearance of a 24-year-old Sydney escort. So what happened to Renee Summers? A meaty, excellent thriller by a seasoned and lauded Australian author.

The Girl In The Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (translated by George Goulding)

A book so secretive that it was written on a computer with no internet connection lest it get hacked, here is the controversial fourth book in the Millennium series, begun by Stieg Larsson and now continued by fellow Swedish writer David Lagercrantz, who had free rein on where to take the story. It sees the return of everyone’s favourite eponymous capital-g Girl, the excellent Lisbeth Salander, who is again onside with Millennium journalist Mikael Blomkvist and on the trail of a secret so powerful that will again put them in danger, after so narrowly escaping it in the past.

The Killing Kind by Chris Holm

Say you’re a bit of a terrible person. Perhaps you’ve laundered some money using your business. Perhaps worse. (Not you personally, of course – Readings customers are excellent people.) Anyway, someone’s found you out, and now they want you dead. That’s bad for you. But Michael Hendricks has found out. And that’s bad news – for them. Hendricks is someone who is very good at killing very bad people, and he’s on the side of good – though, when it comes to murder, good is a fairly loose term, and no one is ever far from the business end of a gun. This detailed thriller is gloriously atmospheric, full of character and as fast as a sniper’s bullet.

Fiona Hardy