The May crime review
These are the crime books have been read and reviewed by our excellent booksellers this month – all in one place!
Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater
Reviewed by Lian Hingee, digital marketing manager
'disquieting ... with a carefully paced story that ratchets up to a propulsive climax.'
If you’ve picked up Death of a Bookseller hoping for a cosy crime read featuring a bespectacled protagonist with a penchant for cardigans, you will be sadly disappointed. If, however, you’ve picked up Death of a Bookseller expecting a slow-burning thriller that presents an uncomfortable insight into the mind of a psychopath, then you have the correct book in your hand.
Laura Bunting is a part of a crack team of booksellers who’ve been brought in by head office to try and save the ailing Walthamstow branch of Spines bookstores. With her winged eyeliner, vintage dresses and hand-rolled cigarettes, she’s the archetypal Bookstore Girl, but her sunny disposition starts to crack when she encounters her new co-worker Brogan Roach (‘like the bug’). Roach is everything Laura is not – sullen and solitary, with a pet snail and a macabre obsession with true crime podcasts and serial killers. But Laura and Roach have more in common than expected. They’re yin and yang, dark and light, two sides of the same coin, and what draws them together is murder.
Alice Slater’s debut is a disquieting, at times nauseating novel with a carefully paced story that ratchets up to a propulsive climax. It features one of the most unsavoury first-person narrators I’ve encountered, and an unsettling denouement that kept the book in my mind for days after I finished it. Ripe for adaptation for the screen, this is a perfect read for fans of You and Killing Eve.
The Fall Between by Darcy Tindale
Reviewed by Margaret Snowdon, Readings Carlton bookseller
A policeman’s daughter, now a detective in the force herself, returns to the Hunter Valley where she was born. We discover that she wants to keep an eye on her aging father – a man who has been cruelly struck down by a degenerative disease. But also, where else would there be the opportunity for buried family secrets to cross paths with cranky old farmers, gruesome murders, the usual human fallibilities of greed and stupidity, and a lapse or two into moral turpitude?
Will Detective Rebecca Giles discover the link between a spate of jewellery thefts and murder before the summer heat and her libido bring about her undoing? Luckily for Giles, her mostly male immediate work colleagues seem to be essentially okay blokes, and refreshingly removed from misogynistic Roger Rogerson stereotypes. It’s Giles herself, with her unresolved family issues, and city boarding school attitudes, who is tripping herself up.
The Fall Between is a good read with the right combination of reader opportunity to guess some things, but also to miss others and keep the reader’s attention – and the tension. I found myself feeling not quite in the country at times, and although there are some great character cameos, occasionally I found them at odds with the narrative. Candice Fox has endorsed this first adult book by Darcy Tindale as ‘rural noir at its very best’. Giles is vanilla noir compared to Eden in Fox’s Hades, but admittedly Hades isn’t set in the country. Fox’s words fuelled my anticipation as I opened the book, distant echoes of Wake in Fright hovering on the edges of my mind. There’s a second Detective Giles book in the offing and I can see a promising future for her in which she develops better taste in men, loses some privilege and drinks less but better wine – she’s living in the Hunter Valley, for Pete’s sake.
The Other Side of Her by BM Carroll
Reviewed by Kate McIntosh, manager of Readings Emporium
Ryan and Mia are an ordinary, everyday, couple living in regional NSW with their son, Elliot. Mia is going back to work after years out of the workforce. Caring for her child has been a full-time job as she and her husband learnt to manage Elliot’s ADHD. Their new young Irish au pair, Tara, is supposed to make the transition easier, but instead her utter lack of interest in the boy, her moods, and her constant hangovers, are only making things worse. And then Tara dies.
Two years later, Beth is barely scraping by. Not long out of an abusive relationship, she is determined to provide her daughter Tilly with all the love and security she deserves. They have somewhere to live, Beth has a job, and although she constantly fears her ex-husband will attempt to destroy their new lives, she and Tilly are doing okay.
Until someone breaks into their house. Until someone steals Beth’s car. Until suddenly Beth is about to lose everything, again.
The first half of this book had me completely hooked. How are these two stories connected? They seem so removed for each other, each enthralling in their own way, but you know at some point they must collide. And then they do, and the race to the finish is on.
The Other Side of Her has the perfect level of misdirection and suspense. On the surface it is a story about motherhood, about the lengths a parent will go for their child. And in Beth’s case, this is true. But Mia? Does she do what she does to protect her son? Or to protect herself? I wish Tara had been a more fully developed character, it was hard to care about the untimely demise of a selfish, bratty teenager, but otherwise this is a well thought-out, intriguing novel that will have you double checking your locks every night.
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
Pierre sutcliffe, Readings Carlton bookseller
Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools is mandated by the Massachusetts State Legislature and takes effect on Thursday morning, 12 September, 1974. The buses that transport Black students to South Boston High School are accompanied by police escort into scenes of violent protest by the largely Irish American residents of South Boston. The White students mostly refuse to attend the schools in the Black neighbourhoods.
In this highly charged atmosphere, we are introduced to Mary Pat Fennessy who is waiting for her teenage daughter, Jules to come home from a night out with friends. As she waits, she hears that a Black teenager has been killed nearby and that five White teens were seen fleeing the scene. Her investigation and emotions propel this story and it is testament to the author’s skill that we care so much about such a deeply flawed and, at times, unlikable person.
Dennis Lehane has written many books, starting with the early gritty crime series that included Gone Baby Gone (made into a film directed by Ben Affleck and starring his brother Casey). He then wrote the masterpiece Mystic River, which this novel sits comfortably next to. Some of his more recent historical novels have felt a bit dry and listless and maybe weighed down by research. This book feels like he has lived his childhood in Southie in the 1970s and grew up with these events, people and attitudes around him. It pulsates with a raw vitality and visceral atmosphere.
Once again, Lehane deals with the terrible effects that violence, alcoholism, racism, and neglect have on children. Currently, Lehane mostly makes his living producing and writing (lucratively) for television such as The Wire and Black Bird. This feels like a labor of love and is one of the best literary crime novels I have read for a long time.
