Book Reviews - Sisters in Crime Members

It's odd, the things that can occur to you when you're reading books.

In the case of SILENT FEAR I just could not stop thinking how glad I was to be a reader and not a writer.  Honestly, how do these people come up with such consistently good characters and excellent plots?  Howell makes her life that little bit more difficult by always bringing in a Paramedic thread,...

“Killing The Rabbit” is Alison Goodman’s first crime fiction and it is a beauty.  The book is set between Australia and Japan with some intriguing meeting of the cultures.  The strict cultural norms are highlighted in the first sentence – “The forecaster could only come to one conclusion: there was no company protocol for hiring an assassin.”...

This novel is the fourth in a series featuring Sophie Anderson, an Australian criminal profiler working in the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI.  She is brought in to help solve the murder of an unknown victim whose throat was ripped out by someone or something that left no clue.  As Sophie builds a profile of the killer, her knowledge of martial arts leads her to the shocking...

Forbidden Fruit is the fifth in the Corinna Chapman series by Kerry Greenwood. Greenwood is a prodigious writer, best known for her Phryne Fisher novels. Forbidden Fruits’ Corinna is an ex-accountant who left her life of regular hours and tailored suits behind to run a small, successful bakery off Flinders Lane in Melbourne, Earthly Delights.

Those who know and...

Genius Squad is the sequel to Catherine Jinks’ 2006 Davitt Young Adult award-winning, Evil Genius. Cadel Piggott, boy genius, returns, but this time he’s trying to make it on the side of good, rather than evil. Cadel is faced with the grim prospect of killing time in a well-meant foster home where computer time is doled out in excruciatingly small time periods,...

A fast-paced and enjoyable read, SHATTERED SKY is Helene Young’s second novel set in the surveillance world of the Border Watch pilots. In the first novel, Wings of Fear (formerly titled Border Watch), co-pilot Lauren survived a missile strike mid-air only to lose a close friend at the hands of terrorists. A year later, Lauren has been promoted to captain and this is her story. Several...

I hadn’t read either of Alex Palmer’s first two, award-winning novels. So when the opportunity came to review her third novel for the Sisters in Crime, I jumped at the chance to address this oversight.
It’s a challenge for an author to write in such a way that any book in a series can be picked up and appreciated by someone who hasn’t read the...

Matter of Trust delves into old friendships, family and relationships in this fifth novel with David Cavanaugh, the Boston criminal Attorney in the lead.

Cavanaugh answers a call from an old school buddy Chris Kincaid, now a US Senator that takes him back to his hometown, Newark in New Jersey.  Another old school friend, Marilyn, has disappeared and when a body is hauled from the...

Tara Sharp has a rather unusual gift, one which she considers a curse. She can read people, in particular their auras. She can read their emotions, and given she sometimes has trouble keeping her mouth shut, at times this almost renders her unemployable. Her parents despair of her holding down a job, and send her to a family friend for counselling. Tara is surprised and nonplussed when the...

Subtitled “Constance Emilie Kent and the Road Murder”, this is the well-researched life of Constance Kent who grew up in a dysfunctional English family, came to Australia and lived to celebrate her one hundredth birthday.  Road is a village in Wilshire, England, where Constance lived with her father, step-mother, and numerous siblings and half siblings.  Five years after...

In Kiss of Death, PD Martin has tapped into the zeitgeist and woven a story around idea of modern day vampires living in Los Angeles.  FBI profiler Sophie Anderson is called in by the local police when a body of a woman is found with puncture wounds in her neck and seems to have been drained of blood.  Sophie finds herself investigating a sub culture of people who believe...

It took seven years for Honey Brown to release her first, most readable novel and it’s certainly a very successful start to this writer’s career. 

Although Red Queen, is a dystopian psychological thriller, it also expertly explores the relationship between brothers when in the extreme situation of surviving in a world almost destroyed by a mutating virus....

Good crime fiction, for me anyway, frequently goes hand in hand with a spotlight on social issues.  If it incorporates a good, strong sense of place and great characters that you can really feel something about, then even better.

THE HALF-CHILD is Melbourne author Angela Savage's second Jayne Keeney book.  This book is set in Thailand, but the focus this time is on the...