CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH

Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil by Melina Marchetta

Like many readers, I’ve adored Melina Marchetta since my English teacher issued Looking for Alibrandi as a Year 11 text and we all gleefully discussed it in class since all of us actually happily read it instead of reading the study guide and bluffing our way through exams. Here, Marchetta has written her first novel for adults, and it’s a crime book – and nothing could have prevented me from enjoying it.

Beginning near Calais, where a bus full of international students has been bombed, it follows British ex-Chief Inspector Bish Ortley as he rushes headlong into Calais, in mortal fear for the daughter, Bee, who was on that bus, even as he is still burning from grief over the death of his son. Bee turns up – mostly fine, apart from what she has seen – but Bish realises another name on that bus is familiar.

Violette LeBrac, sullen teenager and bomb survivor, is seventeen years old, and thirteen years ago her extended family was arrested for its part in a supermarket bombing that killed twenty-three people. Thirteen years ago, Bish was the one who took Violette from her mother Noor’s desperate arms and placed her in care as Noor was jailed for life. The media immediately latches onto Violette and her family history, even though she’s been living peacefully in Australia for years, but before anyone can prove anything, Violette and another student vanish. Bish is struggling enough with his own daughter when suddenly he has another teenager to worry about – but the deeper he delves into Violette’s whereabouts, the more he realises that, even back then, his assumptions were clouded by judgement.

As the media and the public become more and more frenzied with sightings of Violette, even to the point of people engaging in violent acts towards anyone who looks remotely suspicious, Bish searches further for the truth – of what happened thirteen years ago; of what kind of father, husband and police officer he became after his son’s death; and of what happened to get a bomb onto a bus of schoolkids. Marchetta is a wonderful storyteller, with every interaction important, thrilling, enjoyable or all of the above, and every character gifted with such an honest, gloriously vivid life of their own that reading the whole thing in a searing rush of pages in one sitting is irresistible.

NEW CRIME FICTION

Closed Casket by Sophie Hannah

I must confess that I glared rather frostily at the new Hercule Poirot mysteries written by Sophie Hannah, thinking they could not be as wonderful as Agatha Christie’s divine books – the ones that got me into crime fiction all those years ago, little yellowed books I picked up from markets and school fairs. And yet, picking this up, I was utterly entranced  – here were all the trappings of a Christie book: oversized estate, weeping servants, a great old mix of extravagantly named characters thrown into rooms to out-scandalise each other with witty and caustic repartee as Poirot sits quietly in a corner letting his little grey cells do all the work for him. Here, Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool are called to the grand home of children’s author Lady Athelinda Playford, who declares to her family that she’s changing her will  – leaving her vast estate to her dying secretary instead of her two children. But why, if she will outlive him, would she do such a thing? It becomes increasingly apparent that someone will become a victim at this gathering… but who? Oh, it’s just too wonderfully delicious.

The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke

The fitting end to the loose trilogy that began with the Holland family in Wayfaring Stranger and House of the Rising Sun, this instalment follows seventeen-year-old Aaron Holland Broussard as he makes his way to adulthood in a 1952 that is less polka-dots-and-milkshakes and more mobsters-and-mayhem. Houston at that time is a brutal place: the murder capital of the world, a place steeped in violence and one that Burke (who would also have been seventeen in 1952) knows well. After he’s involved in an altercation at a drive-in while defending a girl in a fight with rich local thug, Grady Harrelson, Aaron finds that confrontation can lead to dire consequences for everyone he loves. That’s a brief summary that can’t give much away, but Pulitzer-nominated Burke has a glorious sense of prose and here the harsh realities of youth in a dark place are set in the foreground against the onset of the Korean War and the bitter results of WWII trauma, while Burke’s razor-sharp dialogue and flawlessly flawed characters all meet in a perfect storm of literature.

The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong

Jock Serong won last year’s Ned Kelly Award for best debut crime novel for his previous book Quota – and deservedly so, since it was an excellent book. His lyrical prowess – laconically Australian, laced with no small amount of shrewdness and wit  – shines again with The Rules of Backyard Cricket, which opens with Darren Keefe tied up and shot in the boot of a car, considering his fate as the Geelong Road spins out through the hole in the tail light he watches it through. And so he considers how he got from scrappy kid playing endless backyard cricket with his older brother Wally to shameless sporting celebrity and mischief-maker to a man clearly on his way to a fiery end in a burnt-out car. Seventies Australia is in its glorious, orange-tinted nostalgic best in Serong’s match-calloused hands, and Darren’s hapless suburban boy is recognisable as those you know personally or see in the media. And no, you don’t have to know cricket to know that this is a winner.

Darktown by Thomas Mullen

With the American fight for racial equality ongoing – especially in the current climate of police shootings – Darktown’s devastation remains relevant, despite being set some seventy years ago. In Atlanta in 1948, the city has its own black police force, but the members are restrained by white authorities, unable to arrest white people or even drive a squad car, and are unable to enter the Atlanta Police Station, instead reporting to the basement of a segregated YMCA. So when two of the cops in the black police force find a black woman dead and the suspect is not only white but also ex-police, they have to overcome the bone-deep hatred and bigotry of those around them to find justice for her by toeing the line and attempting to find allies in the white police force that sees nothing in the systematic abuse of African-American suspects. This is a galling, brilliant, unmissable slice of fictional history, and one that is all too factual.

Nothing Short Of Dying by Erik Storey

Like a hard whiskey on a soft summer night, this is the type of book sharp and edgy enough to give you a paper cut and tough enough that you won’t even whimper and look for a bandaid. Clyde Barr is fresh outta jail and sixteen years out of the Colorado town he grew up in, but when he gets a call from his sister, Jen, asking for help, there’s nothing he can do but say yes. Back home he goes, and it’s just one solid night’s sleep in a hotel before he’s being chased by criminals – well, criminals worse than he –along with a bartender named Allie, and he’s on his way to save the sister who once saved him. This is a fast and dirty thriller and you’ll enjoy every damn page of it.

Fiona Hardy