I’ve enjoyed NZ-born, Australian-dwelling JP Pomare’s work to date and think it’s getting better and better. His last novel, The Last Guests, was my favourite to date and his new release – The Wrong Woman – though a smidge overly complex in parts, offers up some great characters and twists, impressing me even further.
The Island by Adrian McKinty has been getting a lot of attention from well-respected authors and publishing industry types, and it’s very much deserved. His last standalone, The Chain, was equally well-received, winning Ned Kelly and Barry Awards on its release.
The Island has probably given me a better understanding of the type of writer he is. It’s certainly action-packed. It’s exciting. It’s fast paced. There’s some depth to the characters, though more to our protagonists than our antagonists. It reminded me very much of action-packed reads by Gregg Hurwitz and the recent borderline horror reads by Gabriel Bergmoser.
This intriguing read came soon after another ‘he said / she said’ book, Anatomy of a Scandal, and similarly (slowly) shares the history of its key players as we learn how they arrived at the point at which we meet them; although of course it’s very different in the sense that The Confession starts out with a violent act and we go about understanding why it came about. In many ways it’s a ‘whydunnit’ rather than a whodunnit. #ifthatmakessense
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