The March crime review
These are the crime books which have been read and reviewed by our excellent booksellers this month – all in one place!
What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan
Reviewed by Lian Hingee, digital marketing manager
Australia is blessed with some of the very best crime writers in the world right now, and Dervla McTiernan is without a doubt one of the finest. Her debut, The Rúin, was a global bestseller that won a host of awards when it was released in 2018, and she’s gone on to make a name for herself as one of the most consistent and compelling writers in the contemporary crime genre. McTiernan’s most recent book is a standalone novel, and it’s one of her best. Not so much a whodunnit, or even a howdunnit, What Happened to Nina? is a nail-biting suspense thriller about whether money and privilege is enough to buy a guilty person an ‘innocent’ verdict.
Nina Fraser is a devoted sister, a conscientious daughter, a loyal friend, and a loving girlfriend; Nina Fraser is a bitch, an unreliable worker, a risk-taking addict, and an unfaithful lover. Whichever version you believe, one thing is certain: Nina Fraser is gone. When Nina’s boyfriend Simon is implicated in her disappearance, his influential parents go into overdrive, using expensive lawyers and an unscrupulous PR firm to initiate a vicious media campaign to discredit Nina’s family and cast doubt on Simon’s guilt. As the police attempt to wade through the quagmire of disinformation, Nina’s family realise that to find the answers they need, they might have to start breaking some rules of their own.
I tore through What Happened to Nina? at a rate of knots: alternately on the edge of my seat with anxiety, burning with injustice, and desperate to know how the story of Nina’s disappearance could possibly be resolved. For a crime novel with no red herrings, no twists, and no huge reveals, it’s an electrifying read about what happens when a case is tried in the court of public opinion.
Anna O by Matthew Blake
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr from Readings Kids
On the 30th of August, 2019, Anna Ogilvy committed a double homicide, brutally killing her two best friends. The catch is that she was sleepwalking when she committed the murder, and she has not woken up since. Four years later, Dr Benedict Prince, a forensic psychologist specialising in sleep disorders and sleep-related crimes, is called as a last hope to wake up Anna O, find out the truth, and bring her to trial.
But as Dr Prince spends more time by Anna’s side, he finds himself obsessing over her, her motivations, who she was, and how her story is related to the case of Sally Turner. Sally is a woman who, 20 years earlier and on the exact day and month of Anna’s crime, killed her two stepsons while she was sleepwalking. He begins to truly question something he’s never had to before: if someone commits a crime while asleep, are they guilty or innocent? Should he wake her up and be the prince to her ‘Sleeping Beauty’, as the media has dubbed her? Or should she remain asleep, and avoid prosecution?
This spine-tingling novel had me in the clutches of curiosity and suspense until the very last page, especially after I learned that the story was inspired by the cases of Resignation syndrome in Sweden, and the real ‘Anna O’, a pseudonym given to Bertha Pappenheim. She was a patient of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud who suffered from partial paralysis, hallucinations, language aphasia, and amnesia. I was compelled by the mythology of Anna O and the actual truth, as well by the contemplation of whether humans are more monstrous in fiction or in reality.
Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Alex Michaelides, Matthew Blake’s debut is an ingenious and Hitchcockian thriller. Brimming with deftly hidden clues and mind-bending reveals, Anna O is an endlessly compelling novel that will keep you awake long into the night.
The Hunter by Tana French
Reviewed by Lian Hingee, digital marketing manager
In Tana French’s 2015 novel The Searcher, retired cop Cal Hooper moves from Chicago to a remote Irish village where he becomes entangled in the case of a missing teenage boy. In her long-awaited new book The Hunter, French returns to Ardnakelty with a new mystery. The friendship between Cal and 15-year-old Trey Reddy has blossomed into a surrogate father-daughter relationship, so when Trey’s feckless father unexpectedly returns from London, Cal is on high alert. Johnny Reddy is a small-time con artist, and he’s pegged the locals of Ardnakelty as easy marks for a scheme he’s cooked up to find gold in the mountains. But Johnny hasn’t come alone, and it’s not long before Cal’s peaceful existence is turned upside-down by hidden threats, half-truths, and dangerous strangers.
You don’t need to have read The Searcher to enjoy The Hunter, but it will help you better understand a little of what’s going on under the surface: the rage simmering in Trey’s heart, Cal’s uneasy relationship with his neighbours, the difference between the locals, the outsiders, and the outcasts.
French called The Searcher her take on a Western, and indeed both The Searcher and The Hunter have the same laconic humour, slow-burning menace, colourful side-characters, and impeccably rendered landscapes of films like True Grit or The Dressmaker. French’s ability to capture a scene in broad, sparse strokes makes reading any of her books an immersive and enjoyable experience, but it’s in her extraordinary talent with the inner lives of her characters that her writing sings. Cal and Trey are well-rounded and genuine people, with follies and foibles and strict personal codes of their own. Ardnakelty’s tight-knit community – with their closely-guarded secrets, generational grudges, and roots dug deep in the rural land – are likewise vividly portrayed.
The Hunter is a pitch-perfect revenge thriller whose ambling plot and dry wit lulls you into a false sense of security before the tension begins to draw tight, ensnaring you in an all-consuming read that you’ll struggle to put down.
Joy Moody is Out of Time by Kerryn Mayne
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr from Readings Kids
For their whole lives, Joy Moody has told her adopted twin daughters Andromeda and Cassiopeia that they are both from the future, and on their 21st birthday they will be transported back to the year 2050 to save the world. Starting as a wondrous tale to explain how they came into her life, Joy has fallen deep into her deception, and now there’s no return. She isolates her daughters from the world, barring them from technology and socialising with people. So when Joy is found dead on the twins’ 21st birthday, all the secrets that have lain buried come to the surface. Where did Andie and Cassie come from? And what happened to their real mother?
Andie and Cassie are very different people. As she’s grown older, Andie has questioned her mother’s story, both the truth of it and also her forecast role in it: what if she doesn’t want to go back to the future and take on the responsibility of saving the world? She wants to explore the world, and find out who she was meant to be without having been told first by her mother. Cassie, however, cannot imagine life outside the laundromat her mother runs. Yes, she is also curious about the world, and she may have just had her first kiss and fallen in love. But Joy has relied on her daughters her whole life. Can Cassie really take a step towards forging a future of her own choice?
I remember reviewing Kerryn Mayne’s debut Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder last year, and absolutely loving it, knowing I had to get my hands on her next book as soon as it came out. Mayne’s characters are quirky, unique, and simply unforgettable. She balances the light and the dark, explores the complexities of human emotion and memory, and fills her character’s lives with both suspense and promise.
The Fury by Alex Michaelides
Reviewed by Mary-Louisa Horrigan from Readings Doncaster
Amid the ferocious winds on a small and idyllic Greek island owned by the reclusive movie star Lana Farrar, a murder occurs. With only seven people on the island, the six possible suspects are left scrambling in the wake of the tragedy, trying desperately to understand what exactly happened.
What occurs next is nothing short of a destructive mania; a fever dream where we seem to live the murder again and again as our narrator, Elliot Chase – Lana’s friend and a possible suspect himself, to whom we are akin to a confidante – tries to make sense of what he has witnessed. Yet all the while, he makes us as readers question repeatedly whether the story that we are being fed is in fact the truth.
A master craftsman, Alex Michaelides is in complete control as the story unfolds. He unravels it with such precision, peeling back the layers of each character, each interaction, and all that leads up to that fateful night. The night when one dies and then the rest completely and utterly implode.
While not necessarily a fast-paced or action-packed novel, The Fury is a deeply compelling read. Michaelides wanders, letting you stand in the centre as he weaves between philosophical musings and seemingly innocuous comments – only to snap, bringing together all the threads in a perfect harmony, leaving you gasping.
During the novel, Elliot Chase states that this is less of a whodunnit and more of a, as he coins it, ‘whydunnit’. He is well justified in this description. The Fury is a profound examination of how character forms and then twists, of how we fall prey to our own grandiosities and, moreover, how ego feeds it all.
Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr from Readings Kids
Everyone thinks Lucy was the one who killed her best friend, Savvy. It makes sense – Lucy was found stumbling through the streets, covered in Savvy’s blood, and claiming she couldn’t remember anything that happened. But the police never found enough evidence to confirm Lucy as the culprit, and she was let go.
Five years later, after living a comfortable life in Los Angeles, a true crime podcast called ‘Listen for the Lie’, hosted by the annoyingly handsome Ben Owens, releases a new episode focusing on Savvy’s murder and Lucy’s involvement in it. She loses her job, her boyfriend, and, upon being kicked out of said boyfriend’s apartment, Lucy returns home to the small Texas town she never thought she would see again. When she finds out that Ben has also arrived there, the two pair up to solve the mystery of what happened the night Savvy died, even if that means exposing Lucy as the murderer.
Funny, clever, and gripping, Listen for the Lie is a chilling whodunnit full of juicy secrets, gasp-worthy plot twists, and a vivid cast of characters each more mysterious and untrustworthy than the last. Notable among them are Lucy’s grandmother, who is the only one who ever believed in Lucy’s innocence; Lucy’s parents, who refuse to talk about the night Savvy died; Lucy’s abusive ex-husband – who wants her back; and Savvy herself. Was Savvy the innocent victim everyone believed she was, or did she have her own agenda? Or perhaps it was Lucy? Sure, she can’t remember anything that happened, but she is plagued by bloodthirsty thoughts, and a murderous desire that needs satiating.
Alternating between Lucy’s perspective and Ben’s podcast, this fast-paced thriller peels back the veneer of the quaint, picture-perfect town to expose the sex, scandals, and secrets some people will do whatever it takes to cover up.
The Rumor Game by Thomas Mullen
Reviewed by Kate McIntosh, manager of Readings Emporium
Pearl Harbor has been attacked and America looks set to join her allies in the war in Europe. On the streets of Boston, far from the killing fields, there are battles of a different sort taking place, all somehow linked to the devastating events taking place overseas.
Anne Lemire is a young female journalist trying to make her voice heard in a world of men. Although raised Catholic, Anne’s mother is Jewish and Anne has struggled for years to find her place in society. While she may not know her own feelings around religion and belief, she does know that the attacks on Jewish people in her neighbourhood and the rise of fascism in the United Sates are fundamentally wrong. If only she could find a way to do something about it, something that will make a real difference, something more than just disproving the local rumours and gossip in her newspaper column.
Devon Mulvey is an Irish Catholic FBI agent who also has difficulty fitting in, even if he is back working in his hometown. As he tries to track down the killer of a Jewish factory worker, he also has to deal with the realisation that his own family might be behind some of the propaganda and attacks that have been happening close to home. His job is to investigate sabotage by Nazis, fascists, or their sympathisers, within industries working to help the war effort. To do so, he too must uncover rumours which may, or may not, turn out to be true.
As Anne and Devon’s paths cross, tensions heat up and fiction becomes fact. Based on true events, this thriller explores fear, antisemitism, corruption, and loyalty in a time of great change. It is also disturbing and remarkably relevant right now.
The Strip by Iain Ryan
Reviewed by Joe Murray from Readings Kids
The Gold Coast. 1980. A city coated in a thick layer of grime, sweat, and sleaze with a grisly series of unsolved murders looming over its police department. It’s a case that has thoroughly defeated the corrupt and aimless Diablo taskforce, and sent its best detective, Brisbane’s very own Sherlock Holmes, into a grim tailspin. Enter Detectives Lana Cohen and Henry Loch: one a bold outsider from down south, and the other a grizzled underdog perfectly used to getting a little dirty. Together, with single-minded determination and no shortage of underhanded policing, they’ll steadily prise open the case until Queensland’s secrets spill out onto the tarnished floor – secrets that might be dangerously close to home.
Drawing on a real history of vice and corruption in ’70s and ’80s Queensland, in The Strip Iain Ryan has created a vivid world of danger and debauchery, populated by brothel-owning kingpins and hitmen police, professional voyeurs and elusive serial killers. It’s the sort of world that draws you in with a gravitational pull, and with Ryan’s mastery of pacy tension, it’s only natural to look up and realise that an hour has passed, the smell of cigarettes has filled your nose, and the taste of rot has settled on your tongue.
Beyond its worldbuilding, The Strip also excels in one of the benchmarks of any great thriller: the ability to slowly draw together the threads of a mystery page by page, with each little revelation leaving you hungry for more. With the strange and twisted Diablo murders, Ryan combines an electrically compelling drip-feed of information (that knows when to drop a burst of earth-shaking understanding) with a brilliantly woven final picture that surprises you yet makes perfect sense. With a final flourish of solid character work, The Strip is a lean, powerful display of craft that delivers an unmatched sense of Australian atmosphere, where cops drink tea before taking hard drugs.
