Discover the new crime books our booksellers are excited about this month!
Five Found Dead
Sulari Gentill
My fellow crime fiction enthusiasts here at Readings and I are big, big fans of Sulari Gentill, and we all get very excited whenever she has a new book out. Five Found Dead is a standalone novel and marks a bolder departure from her most recent works, The Mystery Writer and The Woman in the Library, both of which had me guessing and guessing again. I say bolder because the setting for this book is none other than the legendary Orient Express.
Ever since Agatha Christie’s masterwork Murder on the Orient Express, this train has had a special pull for writers and readers alike. Gentill resurrects this famed rail service with wonderful aplomb – its final journey was in 2009 – for a thoroughly entertaining mystery.
What should be a celebratory journey for Australian twins Joe and Meredith Penvale – Joe having recently recovered from a long bout of cancer and himself an increasingly famous mystery writer – soon turns into a ride from hell when a cabin is found strewn with blood, but there’s no body to be found. The tension, and isolation of their setting, is enhanced by a COVID outbreak in the end carriages. True to form, more bodies pile up, prompting a sweeping investigation into a truly bizarre ensemble.
Sulari Gentill is a master storyteller, and she’s thrown a lot into this book to make it into the suspenseful yet wholly fun whodunnit that kept me guessing right up to the clinch point.
Reviewed by Julia Jackson.
The Stolen
Vikki Petraitis
Like every good crime novel, The Stolen is more than a story of misfortune and greed. In this novel, true-crime reporter, podcaster and author Vikki Petraitis examines the rise of the men’s rights movement here in Australia and the impact this has on how women are considered in the media and at home. A particular concern of the men’s rights movement of late has been the issue of fathers’ rights. This novel works hard to portray the true (and, at times, heartbreaking) ramifications for women of the incautious application of this sentiment.
Luckily for readers of this book, the narrator, Detective Antigone Pollard, is a feminist, and her pragmatic approach to detective work highlights the double standards of those on the men’s rights movement bandwagon. A baby has been taken by its father and is missing. The father then dies in a (tragic) car accident. The media goes wild for the story and the baby’s mother is blamed for the death. Yet the baby is still lost and the search for the baby and the kidnapper is uncovering more than Antigone bargained for. And, of course, she has her own family mystery to solve.
This easy read is thought-provoking and an evocative portrait of society. Set in Deception Bay, a seaside town filled with tourists and only one excellent café, the problems of misogyny and secrecy are apparent – both now and in the town’s past. I was particularly enamoured by the stories from talkback radio: distressing and yet quite funny. Readers of Jane Caro’s crime novels will be pleased here with the social commentary and the twisting plot. Those who have not previously encountered Vikki Petraitis’s fiction work will be delighted. This author is doing more than spinning a story – she is aiming to change opinions.
Reviewed by Chris Gordon.
🕵️ Also recommended are:
Dust
Michael Brissenden
Lake Herrod, a once-thriving community, now lies in the shadow of a nearly dry lake. The town and its residents are left clinging to what little remains.
When Aaron Love discovers a fresh corpse near the cracked lakebed – along with evidence his missing father is alive and linked to a web of organised crime – he is thrust into a world of deception, injustice and betrayal. Aaron and haunted detective, Martyn Kravets, team up to uncover a web of conspiracy that reaches far beyond the community.
Clown Town (Slough House Thriller, Book 9)
Mick Herron
Spies lie. They betray. It’s what they do.
Slow horse River Cartwright is waiting to be passed fit for work and decides to kill time by investigating the secrets of his legendary late grandfather’s library. First Desk Diana Taverner doesn’t appreciate threats, so turns blackmail into opportunity. At Slough House, Jackson Lamb wants everyone at their desks – Taverner is plotting mischief and that means people are going to get hurt. If they ignore his instructions and any harm befalls them, it is hardly his fault – but if they don’t all come home, there’ll be a reckoning.
A Slowly Dying Cause
Elizabeth George
Amid the beauty of Cornwall’s coastline, the body of Michael Lobb is found in his family’s tin and pewter workshop.
His violent death sparks an investigation led by Detective Inspector Beatrice Hannaford. It emerges that Lobb had resisted selling land to a mining company but as the case develops it reveals a family full of secrets, cryptic alibis and shifting motives. This intrigue soon draws in her colleagues Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers, who must search for a killer in a community that has very little trust in outsiders.
The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer
Ragnar Jónasson, translated by Victoria Cribb
One winter evening, bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing. There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it’s leaked to the press. As he interviews the people closest to her – a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge – he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than her stories.
As the investigation becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of a very unexpected life.
Suspicion
Seichō Matsumoto, translated by Jesse Kirkwood
Onizuka Kumako is a fierce, beautiful woman with Yakuza ties who seduces customers and commits petty crime in Tokyo bars. When she marries rich widower Shirakawa Fukutaro their newlywed bliss is cut short when their car mysteriously plunges into the harbour and Fukutaro is killed.
Under suspicion of murder, Kumako repeatedly proclaims her innocence. As pressure from journalists mounts, public opinion rises against her. But when a scrupulous defence lawyer takes on her case, doubt begins to creep in.
The Hollow Girl
Lyn Yeowart
It’s 1973 and Detective Sergeant Eleanor Smith is finally assigned her first homicide case. A woman’s body has been discovered at Harrowford Hall, a home for unmarried mothers deep in the Victorian countryside, which has for decades sold itself as a refuge for ‘girls in crisis’.
When Detective Smith arrives at the once-grand Gothic mansion, she finds it all but deserted. What’s more, the home’s overgrown graveyard suggests the apparent poisoning of Nurse Chapman is not Harrowford’s first suspicious death.
🕵️ Discover more new crime novels here.
