The June crime review
These are the crime books which have been read and reviewed by our excellent booksellers this month — all in one place!
Broken Bay by Margaret Hickey
Reviewed by Kate McIntosh, manager of Readings Emporium
South Australia’s Limestone Coast is covered in natural wonders, from dormant volcanoes to ancient caves, stunning lakes and, most remarkably, sinkholes. These are not your average sinkholes, either. (Google them, they really are something else.) Many of them open into enormous caverns and underground caves, and are the favourite haunts of cave divers. Margaret Hickey’s latest crime novel featuring Detective Mark Ariti begins below the surface, in one such hole.
An expert diver has gone down into a sinkhole to explore a newly discovered subterranean cave, but she hasn’t resurfaced. When a rescue team attempts to find her, they discover not one, but two women, one of whom has been missing for decades. Detective Ariti was only supposed to be in Broken Bay for a couple of days on holiday. An ocean expedition with a local family means he already has a connection of sorts to the brother of the missing woman, and a passing police commissioner suggests he might like to stay and keep an eye on things until the investigators from Adelaide take over in a few days. Somewhat reluctantly, Ariti agrees, and suddenly his peaceful weekend becomes anything but when a well-known local is murdered. This leads him to investigate two of the most prominent families in the area, and he discovers that nothing is as it seems in this small coastal town, not even the ground they walk on.
Although this is the third novel following the affable Ariti and his modern-day policing adventures, you don’t have to have read the first two. Hickey does an excellent job of including characters and backstory from the previous books without making it obvious that you could have prior knowledge of them. Her detective is flawed but likeable, the people he meets are recognisable, and their actions understandable, even when they lead to a sticky end. With a clever plot and a delightfully Aussie flavour, this rural crime noir is anything but dry.
A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao
Reviewed by Elke Power, editor of Readings Monthly
Nilima Rao’s debut novel arrives with a glowing endorsement from the prolific and adored Alexander McCall Smith of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame, who describes A Disappearance in Fiji as ‘an utterly charming novel’ and Rao as ‘an author well worth discovering’. It’s a recommendation to thrill any author, and, more to the point, it’s accurate.
From the outset, there are clear and enjoyable parallels with another enormously successful and long-running crime series – albeit a televised one – Death in Paradise. However, as the title suggests, this tale is set much closer to home, and against the dynamically explored, complex colonial world of First World War-era Fiji.
In a classic fish-out-of-water situation, 25-year-old Sergeant Akal Singh, a police officer with the British Raj, has recently arrived in Suva as punishment for a misstep in his previously stellar career in Hong Kong. His new posting with the Fijian Constabulary is less than glamorous, and he is somewhat isolated. Luckily, he has found an amusing and kind friend in Taviti, a Fijian corporal of a similar age with whom he works.
If only he could also find and catch the Night Prowler (a peeping tom preying on children), or solve his new case, that of missing Indian woman and indentured plantation worker Kunti. Her employer blithely maintains that she’s simply run off, but a local priest insists she has been kidnapped. He claims she would never have left her daughter, and had no reason to bolt when she was already three years into her five-year term on the plantation – freedom had been on the horizon; something does not add up.
A Fijian Indian Australian based in Melbourne, Rao has an interest in this period and has clearly done her research. A Disappearance in Fiji is immersive and beguiling cosy (yet tropical!) crime that readers will be pleased to find is the first in a series.
The Shot by Naima Brown
Reviewed by Elke Power, editor of Readings Monthly
If you are looking for a disturbing and absorbing story that is (hopefully only loosely) informed by real-life professional experience, and will make you fundamentally question the baseline ethical standards and direction of contemporary entertainment, look no further. The Shot takes the concept of reality TV and delivers a novel that could be the painfully modern and dystopian lovechild of Frankenstein and Pygmalion – and it’s frighteningly plausible.
Kristy Shaw is 21 and lives with her parents in Puerto Seguro, in a trailer park, in Florida. Her parents used to work, but both are now on disability and mostly housebound. Kristy works with her lifelong best friend, Denise, at Irvings Department Store, where Kristy sells designer handbags and pines for the Irvings’ son, Max – her unlikely and much-missed high-school boyfriend. Max broke up with Kristy the day they graduated and promptly disappeared to NYU to study architecture.
In the aftermath of an unexpectedly traumatic night out with Denise, a chance encounter with hot-shot reality TV producer Mara Bolt in the purse section of Irvings opens up wild new possibilities for Kristy. She is offered the chance to become the first subject on ‘The Shot’, Mara’s latest brainchild. It’s a ‘total body transformation’ TV program that would see Kristy leave her life and hide out in New York before undergoing drastic surgery to make her exterior ‘match’ her insides and assume a new (temporary) identity, so that Max will finally recognise her true worth and potential, and take her back – as the ‘improved’ version of her old self. If she fails to win him back, or wins him back but then fails to keep him when she reveals her true identity, she must have all her surgery reversed and return to her old life. What could possibly go wrong?! This is quite a debut – you won’t forget it in a hurry.
