No One Will Know by Rose Carlyle was not at all what I was expecting. As usual I hadn’t read the backcover blurb just before starting so I got my villains wrong from the outset, thinking it involved those we’re introduced to early in the novel – namely the family of Eve’s partner. But then things take an unexpected twist – devastating Eve, until she’s offered a lifeline – a nanny job that will allow her to afford to keep and raise her child.
Edenhope by Louise Le Nay reminded me of Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar – as it was about a woman whose life was changed (saved, kinda) by a place and the people she met there. It’s a delightful book and could be heavy-going – given it deals with drug use, addiction and child neglect – but instead, through our narrator (Marnie) there’s a sense of hope, despite everything else. A reminder that there are good people willing to do good things.
I worried a little as I started A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw as it’s about dementia which hits too close to home at the moment. I recently read another book about someone with memory issues and mentioned in that review that my father had dementia and my mother (albeit at 80 years of age, so is expected) is starting to show memory lapses and some confusion. However, Maxine, one of our two lead characters here and who’s showing signs of memory loss is only 58.
Consolation by Garry Disher was the first book I’d read by the respected and renowned Australian author. It was the third book in his Constable Paul Hirschhausen (Hirsch) series and had won the 2021 Ned Kelly award for Best Crime Fiction in 2021. Disher came highly recommended, as did Consolation. And though I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it. I suspect my expectations were a tad high and though really liked Hirsch, it featured one of my pet hates – having multiple plots that don’t mesh or otherwise merge conveniently (though not logically) at the end.
Nevertheless, I very happily dug into Day’s End, the fourth in the series and enjoyed it more than its predecessor.
Tom Baragwanath is a New Zealand-born writer living in Paris. I mentioned recently (in my review of the anthology, Dark Deeds Down Under) I don’t read a lot of NZ authors so wonder if that’s why I was occasionally a little lost here with some terminology.
It’s often the case when I read French, Italian or Nordic crime fiction as I really (really) don’t understand their law enforcement hierarchy but here – weirdly (given our proximity to our good friends across the ditch) I found myself confused by phrases and colloquialisms.
Amy Suiter Clarke, author of Girl, 11 was born in America, studied in England but now lives in Melbourne. And everyone knows how much we Aussies like to adopt people born elsewhere as our own.
Suiter Clarke’s debut novel centres around the popular world of true crime podcasting. And like others who have offered similar books Suiter Clarke manages to balance past crimes – revealed via podcast interviews and research – with the events of the present. Indeed here it’s done particularly well as there’s a lag in revealing the podcast episodes that have aired when we first meet our characters. They’re referenced so there’s some foreshadowing of what’s to come but it’s timed perfectly to offer readers only a little insight into the fate that’s about to befall our characters.
This is the second in the series by Sarah Thornton featuring former lawyer Clementine Jones. We learned in the first outing Lapse, that Jones had been convicted of drink driving and a woman died as a result – although I did think there was perhaps more to that story. She spent a lot of time in the first novel keeping that secret, but it’s not the case here and her history seems to be more accessible.
Lapse was set in Katinga in rural Australia, but this opens with (the elegant) mention of tidal flats and the ocean. Here Jones is housesitting and Thornton certainly offers eloquent imagery of Australia’s coastline. The setting was of interest to me as it’s actually in my back yard… near the Great Sandy Straits, set in the tiny fictional town of Piama. (I assume it’s fictional as I’ve never heard of it.)
I’ve always regretted I didn’t read The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong*. It won’t surprise those who know how literarily illiterate I am that – because it came out late in the year – I actually assumed it was one of the Christmas-time sports books aimed at an easy gift for dads. 🙄
I’ve only heard amazing things about it so leapt at the chance to read Serong’s latest release. What I hadn’t realised about The Burning Island however, was that it is historical fiction (which isn’t a favourite of mine) and that it is actually the sequel to his earlier work Preservation.
It meant I probably didn’t appreciate the story on offer as much as I might otherwise have but I could certainly appreciate his beautiful prose and vivid descriptions of the islands of the Bass Strait and harsh coastline and living conditions of the time.