Discover the new crime books our booksellers are excited about this month!
Unbury the Dead
Fiona Hardy
Readers are in for a treat with Unbury the Dead, award-winning writer Fiona Hardy’s hugely anticipated debut crime novel. Long-term Readings Monthly readers will be familiar with Hardy’s warmth and wit over her 12-year tenure as our crime columnist, and it’s a thrill to see her back on those pages, this time as a crime writer.
Unbury the Dead is a cracking mystery, but where it really shines is in the tender depiction of the ride-or-die friendship between our two protagonists.
Unbury the Dead revolves around two ‘cleaners’ (in the mafia sense of the word, not the housekeeping kind), Teddy and Alice, who are called in from their well-deserved holidays for two straightforward jobs that prove to be anything but. Alice has been hired to drive the body of the richest man in Australia to his final resting place, while Teddy is on the hunt for a disaffected young man who’s gone missing. Before too long it becomes clear the two jobs have more in common than expected, and that’s where things start to get dangerous.
An investigative-thriller-cum-road-trip-adventure that meanders delightfully through the familiar surrounds of Melbourne and regional Victoria, Unbury the Dead is a cracking mystery, but where it really shines is in the tender depiction of the ride-or-die friendship between our two protagonists.
Hardy’s exquisite grasp of human emotion is shown to full effect as she deftly walks the tightrope between grief and humour. Like Alice and Teddy themselves, Unbury the Dead is sharp-edged but full of heart, distinctly funny, and seriously clever. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Reviewed by Lian Hingee.
The Wolf Tree
Laura McCluskey
A number of tropes exist in the crime fiction world, such as cosy crime, the police procedural and the locked room mystery, the latter being a great legacy of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and other ‘golden age’ writers. An established variation on this is the remote location: think Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, or Christie’s And Then There Were None, where the remote setting – be it the environmental conditions or the inhabitants – can obfuscate the solution. Laura McCluskey’s terrific debut is a novel that exploits this to great effect and combines additional elements: folkloric tradition and two (famously named) detectives with a dash of interpersonal conflict.
The setting for The Wolf Tree is Eilean Eadarm, an isolated Scottish island which is little more than a rock. Broody, windswept, and thoroughly uninviting to the two detectives – George Lennox and Richie Stewart – tasked with investigating a mysterious death. The inhabitants are insular, unfriendly, and wary of the outside interference in their day-to-day lives while they grapple with the death of one of their own. Eighteen-year-old Alan Ferguson was found dead at the base of the lighthouse, over a century after three lighthouse keepers disappeared without a trace. The two detectives find that nothing is as it seems, and with the weather preventing them from leaving the island until the case is resolved, neither the weather nor their slow progress is helping their relationship.
I loved the slow burn of this book, its gothic undertones, and characters I’d expect to find in Lanny. It’s one for lovers of Scottish folklore, viewers of the recent series The Red King, and more generally anyone who loves an atmospheric and suspenseful thriller!
Reviewed by Julia Jackson.
Also recommended are:
The Bluff
Joanna Jenkins
Ruth Dawson has taken a break from big city law to fill in for a few months at a mate's small-town legal practice in Myddle. It's not what she's used to. So when she hears the front door of her office open she's expecting a weird demand, or a question she doesn't know the answer to. But it's Bea Baulderstone's mum, worried that she hasn't seen her seventeen-year-old daughter for five days, and Constable Gazza Parker is refusing to report the girl missing.
Ruth tries to find Bea, but Myddle is a wall of indifference. Then Dash Rogers is found at his farm gate, dead from a gunshot wound, and suddenly the town is very interested in Bea's whereabouts …
The Body Next Door
Zane Lovitt
When Claire Corral goes missing from her home on Carnation Way, her neighbour Jamie isn't too concerned. He's busy-caring for his dad, recovering from a broken heart and eating himself into a bigger pair of pants.
Then the police turn up. Is Claire's disappearance connected with the body found next door thirteen years ago? Does Jamie's father, now grappling with dementia, know more about these events than he should? And then there's Tess, equal parts mysterious and charming, who just moved in at number thirty-five …
As Jamie asks around, an unsettling picture begins to form. Perhaps quiet, respectable Carnation Way is home to the same secrets and heartaches as any other neighbourhood – with a few more murders thrown in.
The Grapevine
Kate Kemp
It's the height of summer in Australia, 1979, and on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Canberra a housewife is scrubbing the yellow and white chequered tiles of the bathroom floor. But all is not as it seems. For one thing, it's 3 am. For another, she is trying desperately to remove all traces of blood before they stain. Her husband seems remarkably calm, considering he has just murdered their neighbour.
As the sun rises on Warrah Place, news of Antonio Marietti's death spreads like wildfire. Gossip is exchanged in whispers and suspicion mounts. Twelve-year-old Tammy launches her own investigation, determined to find out what happened, but she is not the only one whose well-meaning efforts uncover more mysteries than they solve. There are secrets behind every closed door in the neighbourhood, and the identity of the murderer is only one of them …
The Marble Hall Murders
Anthony Horowitz
Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder. She’s edited two novels about the famous detective, Atticus Pünd, and both times she’s come close to being killed. Now she’s back in England and she’s been persuaded to work on a third.
The new ‘continuation’ novel is by Eliot Crace, grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death exactly twenty years ago. Eliot believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. And when he tells Susan that he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his book, Susan knows she’s in trouble once again.
As Susan works on Pünd’s Last Case, a story set in a villa in the South of France, she finds more and more parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world – until suddenly she finds that she has become a target. Someone in Eliot’s family doesn’t want the book to be written. And they will do anything to prevent it.
Available from 11 March
Gunnawah
Ronni Salt
It's 1974 in the Riverina. The weather is hot. But the body in the Murray River is stone cold …
When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper's owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work.
What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's like she's poked a bull ant's nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.
Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. And too many are already dead quiet.
When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole
Geoff Parkes
It’s January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand’s rugged King Country. It’s a bittersweet trip: he’s working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother’s house, and he’s increasingly feeling like an outcast in his childhood town.
But mostly he’s haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the summer before – then vanished without trace. Now Sanna’s sister Emilia has arrived from Finland, determined to get answers – and as he’s the workmate who reported Sanna missing, she wants Ryan’s help. Because Emilia knows her sister was not the first female traveller in the area to disappear …
