Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor

 

Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor is another story of crime in a small Australian country town. Hayley Scrivenor has absolutely nailed it! Hayley has created the town of Durton, nicknamed Dirt Town by its inhabitants, seven hours west of Sydney and populated with interrelated families and others who have lived there either their entire lives or for many years. 

When a young girl goes missing DS Sarah Michaels and DC Wayne Smith who were on their way back to Sydney from another job are called in to investigate. Although Sarah is still suffering from the break up of a personal relationship she is able to channel her energy into the new assignment and she and DC Smith begin a thorough investigation into little Evelyn’s disappearance.

The plotting is superb with events over a four day period being shown from different points of view. I liked that something that was happening to one character at one time was then presented as happening to another character at the same time. Sarah Michaels keeps an open mind and has a notebook in which she draws triangles looking for relevancies in all the different pieces of information she is amassing.

Sarah also has an acute sense of smell which seems to help her, I guess, when she is building profiles. I completely identified with her reaction to car freshener, by the way.

Crime fiction is one of my favourite genres, and outback Australian crime fiction keeps getting better with each new voice. How lucky we are to have so many talented writers in our lives!

I highly recommend Dirt Town and, hopefully, Hayley Scrivenor will be following it up with lots more terrific books.

Published by Macmillan

The Murders at Fleat House by Lucinda Riley

 

Before reading this book make sure you find yourself a time and place where you will not be disturbed. It is a completely satisfying, utterly absorbing murder mystery set against the background of a private boarding school in Rural Norfolk.

Detective Inspector Jazz Hunter has escaped London intent on leaving the police force and living the quiet life, renovating her newly acquired cottage and indulging her passion for painting. Jazz’s new plan is ticking along nicely until she is asked to look into a suspicious death at Fleat House in St Stephen’s school and she suddenly finds herself back with her colleague DS Miles attempting to unravel a mystery which involves past happenings at the school and their links to the present. 

Jazz is trying to leave her own unhappy past behind and her personal story adds to the enjoyment of reading this book. It has everything you need in a top class murder mystery including brilliant character development in all the side stories. There is even a little teaser in there, hinting at a possible change in Jazz’s future. It could have been the start of a terrific series.

Very sadly, Lucinda Riley died in June 2021 before this novel was published. Her eldest son, Harry Whitaker, has written a loving foreword in which he says he is sure Lucinda would have wanted to edit and update the manuscript, having written it in 2006 when Harry was just thirteen,  but he took the decision to leave it as it was, wanting to preserve her voice. It is an outstanding crime novel and, along with all of her other best selling books, leaves a proud and wonderful legacy for her family.

Published by Macmillan 

Jack and Jill Went Downhill by R J Gould

 

Jack and Jill Went Downhill is an exploration of the relationship between two people from their initial meeting as university students,  tracking their lives over the ensuing years and giving great insight into the development of their individual personalities and characters along the way.

Jack and Jill have a lot of highs counterbalanced by a lot of lows, and R J Gould delves, skilfully and sensitively, into the question of the effects of heredity and environment by introducing both sets of parents and their family homes. Once the rose coloured glasses come off and they see each other as ordinary, flawed human beings, Jack and Jill are faced with the challenges of day to day living and whether they can see their future together. A lot happens to them, individually and as a couple, and they each have to find their own ways to live their best possible lives.

This is a highly entertaining, compulsively readable book written with RJ Gould’s usual warmth, wit and deep understanding of the human condition. I loved it!

Bad Actors by Mick Herron

 

Any fears I had been having that I might have had my fill of Slough House soon disappeared with the first chapter of Bad Actors. River Cartwright is missing in action but the remaining dogs are perfectly capable of grabbing the reader’s attention and running with it.

Diana Taverner’s position as First Desk is under threat from a nasty little man by the name of Anthony Sparrow, and the plot evolves from that point. There is a sweet new character, John Bachelor, “the milkman”;  however, there is still nothing sweet about our old friend, the disgusting Jackson Lamb, grottier than ever and being as horrible as only he knows how while seeing and knowing all and, in a strange way, taking care of his underlings. They might be losers but they’re his losers.

Mick Herron is a brilliant writer and I can’t resist at least one quote: “Early sixties by a mortal calendar, but managing to exude the impression that he’d overseen the Siege of Mafeking”. Bad Actors is equally as clever, witty and exciting as its seven predecessors.

Mick Herron is the master of spy fiction for our times!

Baskerville: an imprint of John Murray

A Caring Life by Keith Cox

 

Keith Cox’s autobiography starts with his childhood in country New South Wales and goes on to detail his remarkable life as a nurse, eventuating as a nurse practitioner specialising in the care and treatment of cancer patients. Keith has devoted his life to bringing care and comfort to those who have needed him, and along the way he has made enduring friendships and earned the everlasting gratitude of countless people.

In the earlier part of the book Keith talks of his large, loving family and the beginnings and evolution of his career. The next section, though, was where I became emotionally involved with the story. Keith tells stories of his involvement with his patients, and anyone who has been close to a cancer sufferer will understand how someone like Keith can bring great comfort to patients and also to their families. His goodness and kindness shine through from the pages and his competence and efficiency were obviously recognised by the leading cancer specialists in the State.

I was especially interested in Keith’s visits to hospitals and care centres in Papua New Guinea. It seemed like hospitals and health care conditions hadn’t changed since we were there in the late 1980s to the time he was there, and for the same reasons. I must admit I had to put the book down for a while because of the tears welling in my eyes after reading about Keith’s efforts in Moresby and Lae. 

Keith has undertaken a lot of good works which I hope a lot of people will read about. He is a religious man who practises his religion in the way it is meant to be in his love for his fellow human beings.

To quote Anthony Warlow: Keith Cox “… is one of this country’s silent heroes.”

Published by Macmillan

The Rat Catcher by Kim Kelly

 

This is a book Henry Lawson would have been proud of.  It is a lovely story about Patrick O’Reilly who loved Rosie Hughes.  In Sydney in 1900 Patrick took a job with the Plague Department as a rat catcher; the bubonic plague was raging and rats, of which there were thousands in the city, were being infected by fleas and had to be caught and killed. Patrick needed the job in order to have enough money to live on and to send some back to his mother in Ireland.

Patrick’s one big problem was that he loved the rats as he did all creatures and although he understood it was necessary to eliminate them if the plague was to be beaten he hated the cruelty he had to inflict on them.

Rosie Hughes was a beautiful Irish girl whom Patrick loved from the moment he met her. This was all very sweet, but life in old Sydney was harsh and a constant battle for survival. Kim Kelly captures the sights, sounds and smells of the city as well as the day-to-day struggle for survival, the prejudices  and the stark contrast between rich and poor. We are very fortunate that so many old buildings are still standing and anyone who knows Sydney well will find that Kim has recreated a time and a mood that they can put themselves into through places like the Queen Victoria building, the old department stores, the Quay and so on. 

Lots of old terraced houses were still standing when I was a child and, of course, The Rocks area is a wonderful reminder of Sydney’s early days and books like The Rat Catcher are a brilliant way to keep our history alive.

Congratulations, Kim Kelly (and not just on behalf of my Irish ancestors) on this terrific evocation of our early days!

Published by Brio Books

Nothing but the Truth by The Secret Barrister

 

SB’s views at the start of their career on the outcomes of prosecutions, criminal trials and the dispensing of justice have been formed, quite naturally, through newspapers and John Grisham type novels. They find the reality is not, as in every other aspect of existence, black and white, one size fits all.  Courts are overwhelmed, police are understaffed and the mitigating circumstances behind criminal acts in a huge, multicultural society make nothing simple. The hardest thing for a defender or a prosecutor to handle would have to be the massive delays between bringing a matter to court and following it through.

The true-to-life, although obviously disguised, cases written about are shocking and sad in equal measure; however, there are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments. In the midst of their heart-breaking, back-breaking every day working life, the Secret Barrister is a very funny person who retains a brilliant sense of humour.

This is a wonderfully honest look at a justice system seriously in need of an overhaul but there is always hope as long as there are people like the Secret Barrister keeping watch.

Published by Picador.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

 

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami has been translated from the Japanese. Fuyuko is a proof reader who, in order to do her job perfectly, cannot become immersed in the subject of any manuscript she is reading. She, therefore, never actually reads books or becomes aware of happenings outside her working life, so absorbed is she in her work.

Fuyuko’s workmates eventually give up on trying to include her in their after work socialising activities and she spends all of her time away from work in her tiny flat where in her self-absorption she has no interest in reading or listening to music but she finds comfort in drinking beer and, it seems, an extraordinary amount of saki!

Throughout the course of the novel a former co-worker works hard at building a friendship with Fuyuko, and Fuyuko herself ventures forth and eventually establishes a kind of a relationship with a man who says he is a physics teacher and she asks him to talk to her about light, a subject she finds mysterious and full of wonder.

Every page of the book is filled with the minutiae of Fuyuko’s daily thoughts. She lives inside her own mind and finds it difficult to venture out and respond to what is happening around her. It’s an extraordinary book, unlike anything I’ve ever read.

Is it okay if my favourite part is how (but not why) soil soup is made?

Published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

 

I’ve loved stories that feature bees and beekeepers and the almost mystical relationship between them ever since I read David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon a long time ago. When the bees appeared in The Dance Tree I knew this book was going to be something special, even though it wasn’t always easy reading about the trials of life in sixteenth century Strazbourg. 

The extraordinary ‘dancing plague’ which happened in Strazbourg in 1518 has been sometimes interpreted as seizures brought on by eating infected grains but was most likely, apparently, a mass religious hysteria. The drought at the centre of The Dancing Tree was one of the extreme weather events which happened in the sixteenth century; people were starving and religion was used in horrifying ways, basically, as a means of controlling the masses. Superstitions which are unthinkable to us in our present time were accepted without question which made it possible for people to hold themselves responsible for the tribulations they suffered every day.

Of course, even in those extremely oppressive times, human nature was always, eventually, going to win out over artificial restraints. Lisbet, the character around whom the story of The Dance Tree revolves, is a woman whose life experiences keep teaching her that kindness, compassion and love are always going to be the driving forces in her life, over fear and superstition. Her relationship with the bees fills her with empathy for fellow creatures, her childlessness fills her with sadness but also with hope, she discovers tolerance comes much more naturally than bigotry.

How lucky for us living now that people in past times survived and rose above incredible seeming tribulations, ensuring that civilisation would endure.  Thank you, Kiran Millwood Hargrave for writing this wonderful, inspirational book.

Published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan