Derek

Staff Review: Derek writes:Tony Cavanaugh is a great new voice in Australian crime writing. I'm a self-confessed 'un-fan' of Australian crime writing. I prefer my antagonists to be sloshing through the snow in lower 6th Avenue, or pottering around the back streets of Prague. But Tony Cavanaugh has proved that there are Australian writers who can tell a compelling story set closer to home. Cavanaugh's protagonist, Darian Richards was the hottest star in the Victorian Homicide Squad. A copper with a perfect clear-up rate. But sixteen years and one case he couldn't crack has driven him out of the force and into early retirement in Noosa. His idyllic lifestyle is interrupted as a succession of young girls goes missing from the Sunshine Coast. All young, all blonde, all pretty. At first the police treat the disappearance as simple runaways, but Darian knows the signs, and even before the local police will admit it, he is certain there is a serial killer at work. So he begins an investigation that takes him outside the local police, and brings him into conflict with the local head of detectives, an old adversary he refers to as Fat Adam. After the sixth victim is taken, we readers are brought into the abductor's head, reading alternate scenes from his viewpoint and from that of Darian. At this point Winston, the abductor, the killer of children, boasts he is way in front of the police, and in the sense that he's way in front of the local knuckle-draggers, it's true. But Darian has resources the local cops don't have. One of those is Isosceles, a computer geek operating from high above Melbourne's CBD, who can hack almost anything. Darian has tasked Isosceles with finding the exact location where the girl's cell phones were turned off, and armed with this information makes an early breakthrough. But Winston is a cypher, a figure that despite owning the requisite white van that serial killers the world over seem to prefer, manages to hide in plain sight. He changes his modus operandi, and abducts his analyst, who he refers to as 'Helen Big Tits', to distinguish her from the pre-pubescent girls that are more to his taste. Darian uses superior intellect and Isosceles' technology and eventually his girlfriend as bait to trap Winston, but there are no happy endings in Noosa.Promise is a fast-paced, action packed filled thriller, set among the sand dunes and palm trees many of us know. In Darian Richards Tony Cavanaugh has created an intelligent, pragmatic hunter, and one I hope we see again very soon.

Staff Review: Derek writes: I've been a great fan of Michael Robotham for many years now and with each passing book his writing becomes more confident and each book more difficult to put down. I was pleased to see that the retired detective Victor Ruiz was reprised for this book, and that Joe McLaughlin has a small walk-on role. It's a much bigger book than some of its predecessors, starting in Baghdad where freelance journo Luca Terracini is following a story about the millions missing from the reconstruction effort. Banks are being robbed, 18 in this year alone, and the money is never recovered. Robotham paints the mean streets of Baghdad with a seasoned eye, and you can pretty much taste the fear and the threats. Meanwhile in London, Ruiz is at his tailor, actually Ruiz doesn't have tailor, he's at a tailor, being measured for a new suit for his daughter's wedding. He's enjoying a quick glass of lunch in a local pub when a fight breaks out between a young couple. Ruiz intervenes, sends the bloke packing and takes the girl home, who proceeds to drug and rob him. Which is quite embarrassing for an ex-copper. But when Ruiz tracks down the couple he finds the boyfriend has been tortured to death and the girl is on the run. He surmises that they have played this game before and have obviously stolen the wrong item from the wrong person. So the two stories come together in London in a tense thriller which has a great sense of place, is an excellent read and redefines the old line about being unable to be put down.

Staff Review: Derek writes: I really enjoy Pelecanos writing, although I do think that over the last few years hes been becoming more moral and a little mellower. Although the hard edge has softened, the great characters which drive his narrative are still there, and Spero Lucas is one of them. Spero has recently returned from Iraq, and has parlayed his muscle and his brain into a job as a private investigator for a powerful defense attorney. Generally speaking he finds things that are lost. For a cut - and Spero's cut is forty percent. When Spero does a small job for his attorney and gets a kid off a joy-riding charge, the kids father is grateful. He has another job for Spero, finding a lost parcel, but the lost parcel is a stolen drugs shipment and the father is a high-profile crime boss awaiting trial in prison. The guys who've been ripping off the drugs are about as a nasty, amoral, unwashed bunch as you'd ever hope not to meet. They're completely without scruples, and Spero realises that to deliver on his promise to return the missing drugs, he's going to have to meet their menace with menace and their violence with violence. And along the way, Spero will risk his family, his lover and his self respect. As always George Pelecanos delivers in terms of the location, but its the characters that set the book alight. Ricardo Holley is perfectly drawn as the small time hood with the big dreams who will corrupt all those around him, even his own son, the patrol cop Larry. His offsider Nance, who Holley has coerced into his drug theft sting is reluctant to escape from Holleys grasp, even though he wants to simply return his quiet car rebirthing racket; and the two hitters, typically Pelecanos drawn low-lifes, have no idea how deep they're in. But its the character of Spero, who shines through it all. Hes trying to do the right thing by his mom and his brother, trying to hold his new relationship together, but he's still conflicted by the enormity of his task. When the dust settles, some will be maimed, some will be dead, but Spero will hold his head high. Another cracking book from George Pelecanos.

Staff Review: Derek writes: I've just about finished reading The Devotion of Suspect X and I'm ready to give it my tick of approval. It's just been published here after its release in Japan in 2005 where it became an overnight sensation and a best-seller. Partly, I suspect, because it's such a great page-turner. It's a mystery, but it's not your typical who-dunnit, because we know from the opening pages that Yasuko diddit - and with what. Yasuko lives a quiet life with her teenage daughter, working her days in a Tokyo bento shop, and is pretty much oblivious to the unspoken infatuation from her next-door neighbor Ishigami. One night Yasuko's ex-husband pays her an unwanted visit and in the heat of the moment Yasuko's comfortable world changes forever. Then Ishigami, a reclusive maths teacher, who up to this point has only admired Yasuko from across the counter of the bento shop, steps in to help her avoid arrest, using his considerable puzzle-solving skills to throw the police off the scent. The detective assigned to the case, Kusanagi, is baffled by the puzzling, mysterious nature of the crime, and enlists his chess buddy, physicist Yukawa to help him solve the mystery. Yukawa is a former classmate of ishigami and the action of the book really centres on the mental tussle between Ishigami, the socially awkward maths genius, and Yukawa, the crime-unravelling physicist. The emotion of the book is reflected in the title, and that's the devotion of Ishigami to his neighbor Yasuko and although the book is crime thriller, it's also a story of obsessive love.

Staff Review: Derek writes: When God Was A Rabbit is a book that is totally outside my genre. Until the success last year of local boy Brendan Cowell's How It Feels, I didn't think that actors could, or would, write. But Brendan proved me wrong on that and so has Sarah Winman, an actor living and working in London. Whenever I read outside my genre, it's because someone I know has told me I'd love a book. And so it was with this one. I was sharing a drink with Jane Streeter, who owns a great bookstore in the UK, and apropos of nothing she said, "Do you cry, Derek?" I told her that my colleagues at the store say I have a strong feminine side, and therefore it's OK to tear up at times. (Jane didn't know that this was actually a fib, and the things they say are much worse.) So she told me that she'd just finished When God Was A Rabbit and so I picked up a copy and found it enjoyable, funny, moving and just occasionally, tearful. It's narrated by Elly, born in the memorable year of 1968 and we follow her life and that of her family for the next thirty years. Her three decades are punctuated by world events, from the crash of the tourist bus in Austria in the year of Elly's birth, to the collapse of the twin towers twenty three years later. Elly's is a story of a magical childhood, together with the joys and heartbreak that brings; and the trials and tribulations of a young woman. Elly's extended family are a bundle of eccentricities; she shares a special bond with her brother Joe, her parents are both strong and yet fragile and her Aunt Nancy is one of fiction's great lesbians. There are moments that make your heart soar and moments when you'll wipe a tear away. Take Jane's and my word for it, When God Was A Rabbit is a very special book.

Staff Review: Derek writes: This is the first book by Chris Morgan Jones and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. It's been compared to John LeCarre, and although that's a fair comparison, it's clear that Jones is writing about a business he knows very well. He is in fact the inspiration for his lead character as before he penned this book he worked for a New York company called Kroll for eleven years. Kroll is the world's largest investigations company: it checks out people before deals, advises clients on disputes, investigates and helps recover money from frauds. It does this all over the world, and gets involved in some very interesting situations. Jones worked in the London office and specialised in Eastern European work, particularly for Russians and in Russia. So Ben Webster is based on Jones himself and the company he works for, Ikertu Consulting is a stripped down version of Kroll. Ikertu is hired by a client to expose the shadowy dealings of a Russian oligarch Konstantin Malin, and although it's just another job for Webster, there are issues in his past life which make Malin a particularly juicy target for him. There are two main characters in the book, Webster and his quarry, Malin's front man, Richard lock. Lock is an English lawyer who lives in Russia and is the richest foreign investor in that country. He is, on the surface, the owner of a huge private energy conglomerate, but Webster can find no possible way that Lock can have acquired his wealth. He believes that if he can turn lock, he can discredit Malin. So begins a global game of cat and mouse, with Ben Webster's tenacity matched against the unlimited resources and muscle of the oligarch. As Webster puts the pressure on Lock, his predecessor is murdered – obviously Malin is housekeeping to ensure no-one speaks, and Webster realises that he and his family might well be at risk. This is an absolutely first-class geo-political thriller from this new writer, and I for one hope that Jones has a few more war stories in his kit bag.

Staff Review: Derek writes: I've always enjoyed Don Winslow's writing; from The Power of the Dog through to the Winter of Frankie Machine and its two younger siblings, and then, just a year ago Savages. Each so very different yet so enjoyable. Here, Winslow has taken a famous novel Shibumi, written by Rodney Whitaker writing as Trevanian and with the permission and support of Whitaker's estate, has written a novel that takes its roots from a hinted at in Shibumi. And again it's a great piece of writing and so different in genre and pace from the other three I mentioned. I have to admit to never having read Shibumi, so the character of Nicholai Hel was unfamiliar to me. But people who know the Hel character agree that Winslow has done a perfect job of styling a Nicholai Hel the readers of Shibumi would recognise as the precursor to the espionage agent who appears in the 1979 book. We meet Nicholai Hel in 1951 in Japan where he has been serving three years in solitary confinement for the murder of his mentor. Hel is a formidable assassin, linguist and scholar and he is sprung from prison by the American authorities who want him to travel to China to kill the Russian Commissioner to that country. Hel's American handler, Ellis Haverford, puts Hel through a rigorous training program. He is billeted with the beautiful Solange, a French concubine who trains Hel in cuisine and helps him prepare his language for the task ahead. But Solnage and Hel fall in love and vow to be reunited if Hel survives his mission. Then Hel is off to China and the story begins, a tale of espionage, of double dealing, double crosses, truths and half truths where nothing is ever what it seems. Hel travels through China and down the Mekong River to Saigon at a time when the French are nominally in control of the city but the Viet Mien are exerting their muscle. In fact the whole book is set against the instability and unrest of Southeast Asia in the early fifties and sets the scene for the Vietnam War which followed a decade or so later. Don Winslow has meticulously researched this period and has provided a novel which is authentic to its source material and yet is just as satisfying if, like me, you'd never heard of Nicholai Hel.

Staff Review: Derek writes: I've been a great fan of Michael Robotham for many years now and with each passing book his writing becomes more confident and each book more difficult to put down. I was pleased to see that the retired detective Victor Ruiz was reprised for this book, and that Joe McLaughlin has a small walk-on role. It's a much bigger book than some of its predecessors, starting in Baghdad where freelance journo Luca Terracini is following a story about the millions missing from the reconstruction effort. Banks are being robbed, 18 in this year alone, and the money is never recovered. Robotham paints the mean streets of Baghdad with a seasoned eye, and you can pretty much taste the fear and the threats. Meanwhile in London, Ruiz is at his tailor, actually Ruiz doesn't have tailor, he's at a tailor, being measured for a new suit for his daughter's wedding. He's enjoying a quick glass of lunch in a local pub when a fight breaks out between a young couple. Ruiz intervenes, sends the bloke packing and takes the girl home, who proceeds to drug and rob him. Which is quite embarrassing for an ex-copper. But when Ruiz tracks down the couple he finds the boyfriend has been tortured to death and the girl is on the run. He surmises that they have played this game before and have obviously stolen the wrong item from the wrong person. So the two stories come together in London in a tense thriller which has a great sense of place, is an excellent read and redefines the old line about being unable to be put down.

Staff Review: Derek writes: Michael Robotham has written three or four books in this series and I think he's just getting better and better. His primary character is psychologist Professor Joseph O'Loughlin and although he's very definitely an Australian writer, Robotham sets his books in the English countryside near Bath, which gives him a wider canvas. One of the many things I like about the O'Loughlin character is that he's suffering from an early onset form of Parkinson's disease, that he control's with medication, but which looms as much as any other character in the plot. O'Loughlin's sidekick, retired policeman Victor Ruiz, is also well-drawn, complete with his rough edges and his fondness for boiled sweets. O'Loughlin is separated from his wife but still sees a lot of his two daughters as they live in the same village. Charlie, his older daughter, has a 14 year old friend called Sienna Hegarty who turns up at the family home late one night, traumatized by shock and covered in blood. The police immediately discover that the blood is not hers, but at Sienna's home they find her father Ray, a retired copper, face down in a pool of blood with his throat slashed and his skull caved in. Although the blood covering Sienna was her father's, she claims no memory of that night, and as Joseph O'Loughlin tries to unlock the secrets of Sienna's memories, he's concerned that she shows no regrets about her father's death. What was happening behind the doors of the Hegarty household, and how is it going to affect O'Loughlin's already strained relationship with his older daughter? And what influence does the charismatic teacher Gordon Ellis have over the girls and what part did he play in the death of Ray Hegarty? It's another first class psychological thriller from Michael Robotham.

Staff Review: Derek writes: This is the first novel by Anne Holt who served as Norway's Minister for Justice in the mid 90s and it's a good first novel for anyone who likes a cold, Scandinavian crime story. The book opens with a train wreck. The 601 from Oslo is approaching the highest point on its journey, 1200 metres above sea level, when the engine leaves the iced rails close to station 1222. Miraculously, and fortunately for the plot, the only fatality is the train driver. With the outside temperature at minus 20 the passengers are quickly rescued and conveyed to a local hotel which has been closed for the winter. They are safe there and they begin to settle in until as dawn rises one of them is found murdered. The book is narrated by retired police inspector Hanne Wihelmsen who with outside help still days away, reluctantly begins an investigation. Although she is duty-bound to discover the perp, Hanne wants nothing to do with any of it. She is retired and trapped in a wheelchair by a bullet lodged in her spine, and she also feels a lack of authority to pursue the case. Then another death occurs and as the passengers begin to panic Hanne must discover why the rear carriage on the train was a locked and sealed, who is being held on the isolated top floor of the hotel and of course, whether the killer will strike again. If you like these "locked room" detective mysteries, Anne Holt is a fresh new voice.