I finished Dave Warner’s first, City of Light, this afternoon. Perth in the 1980’s, bit like Power Without Glory in that you could put real names to some of the characters. Everybody was screwing somebody, either in business or in bed, and police officers were sometimes the executioners.
Quite a lot like James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, including The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.
The antihero is Snowy Lane, a Freo detective and fringe player for East Freo.
Next cab off…Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus, A Heart Full of Headstones.
I reckon Rankin has to be finished with Rebus now. He’s just an annoying prick now…upsetting everyone.
Will he continue with Siobhan Clarke and/or Malcolm Fox?
Rebus didn’t really go into a useful retirement like Harry Bosch.
The new Disher hasn’t arrived at discount stores in Warrnambool yet. I’ve had to go in 3 times this week. New Michael Connelly and Robert Crais due next week.
Kind of a funny question, having a crush on a book character, yet… Molly from Neuromancer, she just had something about her. Carrie-ann Moss had the same energy as Trinity in The Matrix
His debut ‘Greenlight’ was very good and the next ‘Either Side Of Midnight’, also featuring protagonist Jack Quick, was equally as enjoyable.
However, he has excelled with the latest effort ‘Everybody In My Family Has Killed Someone’ which is a funny and fabulous read and able to be read as a stand-alone as it contains no characters from the previous two.
Stevenson, among other things, is a stand-up comedian and his humour is very much on display in all his written work. Highly recommended!
Next cab off the rank is Garry Disher’s ‘Day’s End’. Eat your heart out, Noonan.
Grrr! They have it here in PF but i have an allergy to paying $34 when a 20 minute drive makes it $16
But I did pick up Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone for $1 at KMart. Loyalty bonus, I think.
In Melbourne next weekend so will head to Dymocks.
Getting through Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle MI5 book, but they’re all out of order. I think i have 3 in book form, 3 on Kindle and 3 on Audible…and only 1 double-up.
I intended to make a start on this one today and ended up reading the whole thing. It’s that sort of a book and I think any Disher fans will be equally enamoured with it.
In addition to a murder and the usual small town issues that Hirsch needs to attend to, he also encounters a group of anti-vaxxers/conspiracy theorists/cookers/sovereign nutters.
Finally got the new Connelly, Desert Star. Renee Ballard was talked into staying in the LAPD by the Chief, and she opted to run the cold-case unit with volunteers, one of whom is Harry Bosch. A councillor has financed part of the unit as long as they investigate the old case of his sister’s murder. Harry, of course, wants to have another go at an old case where a family of four was murdered, went cold and resurfaced when the bodies were found in the desert.
Well up to Michael Connelly’s usual standard.
One I picked up on Audible was City of Shadows by Michael Russell. Stefan Gillespie is a widowed Dublin policeman in 1934, just after De Valera, a very devout Catholic, gains power, which exposes massive differences in the various police bodies. Stefan and his partner are called to an abortion clinic and drag the abortionist, his nurse and a patient off to the Garda station, only to find that the patient has been sent to a convent of the Magdalen Sisters type because she’s not pregnant. Great scene with the Mother Superior, a “genuine Christian”, who’s outraged because the girl is a Jewess. Lots of dreadful Catholic types, Nazis, Zionist, radical pro-Hitler monsignor. Involvement with Danzig (now Gdansk) as the Nazis try to gain control. Very interesting and extremely readable, and best of all, it’s only the first of seven featuring Stefan Gillespie.
Picked up a couple at Dymocks on Sunday, and ordered 4 more to be delivered early next week…2 Dave Warners, one Benjamin Stevenson and the new Robert Crais.
Also got a couple more Liz Carlyle stories by Stella Rimington, former DG of MI5.
I don’t remember which of that trilogy I gave up on. I know I read American Tabloid and enjoyed it, but one of the next two was just too hard a read. Ellroy is a very difficult read.
Finished the second Dan Bentley book by Dave Warner. It’s based on, but not based on, the Claremont serial killings in Perth in the late 90s. And solved around the time the real Claremont killer was convicted about 2018.
Snowy Lane from City of Light is now a PI and asked to look into one of the girls missing. It’s notionally solved with the suicide of one of the suspects and the Task Force inspector eventually promoted to WA police commissioner, so it’s politically volatile to say the case is still open.
Snowy gets a gig searching for the missing daughter of a notional Gina Rinehart, who’s gone AWOL up in the Kimberley, and while they’re there, Snowy discovers something that’s important in the Claremont case. He teams up with Dan Bentley who’s the main detective in Broome (Before it Breaks).
And had a Gabriel Bergmoser (Hunter and The Inheritance) Audible “The Hitchhiker”. Bloke picks up a hitchhiker driving through the Outback. Gave up halfway through. Just too nasty. Bergmoser off the list now.
Onto the third Dan Bentley now…After the Flood…which was recently released.
Fly by Michael Veitch. From the cover: True stories of courage and adventure from the airmen of World War 2. A series of about 20 interviews of old flyers. Published in 2008. Fascinating and riveting, l would have preferred less Veitch scene setting and a bit more in depth story telling.
