EXILES an Australian Crime Novel Of Buried Secrets and Murder

Exiles by Jane Harper is set in the wine country of South Australia, where a close-knit community still deals with the oppressive aftermaths of a local woman's disappearance and a man's hit-and-run death.

Federal Police agent Aaron Falk is on a personal visit to see old friends in the small town of Marralee. But he is slowly drawn into the past mysteries that yet cast a pall over the whole town.

A year earlier, young mother Kim Gillespie vanished without a trace from a fairground, her infant daughter left abandoned in a parked stroller. Five years before that, local accountant Dean Tozer was run down by a driver who was never found.

As Falk becomes more involved with the tight circle of family and friends connected to both Kim and Tozer, he begins to sense false notes that warn him someone among them may be a sociopathic killer.

Exiles is not a fast paced thriller. It is a character-driven, psychological crime novel that builds slowly toward harsh revelations. An engrossing and thoughtful mystery read.

STORM WARNING an Entertaining New Wyoming Crime Thriller

Wyoming state game warden Joe Pickett returns in Storm Warning, a new crime thriller from author C.J. Box. The popular series is set against a rugged Western landscape as Joe Pickett finds himself involved in often dangerous criminal situations.

Joe is on the track of elk antler poachers in the snowy Bighorn range when he stumbles on the dead body of a Chinese University of Wyoming professor. The death looks like violent foul play. When Joe reports it, he runs into an unexpected cover-up by the state governor and the local Sherrif.

As usual, Joe won't back off, but he soon finds himself up against some fake federal agents and a dangerous armed ring of sovereign separatists planning a major coup event. At the same time, a massive snowstorm is descending on the local region.

Storm Warning is a fast-reading crime thriller that longtime fans of the Joe Pickett series will devour eagerly. Highly recommended.

Stormy Mystery Swirls in Jane Harper's THE SURVIVORS

Set in the beach village of Evelyn Bay on the Australian island of Tasmania, The Survivors by Jane Harper is a tangled murder mystery that twists between the past and the present. 

The novel is narrated through the main character of Kieran Elliott, a local resident whose life is haunted by a tragic family incident from when he was a teenager. When the body of a young woman is recently found on the beach one morning, it sets off a police investigation that dredges up dark memories from Kieran's past.

Twelve years earlier, a massive storm hit the village, resulting in the boating death of Kieran's older brother, Finn. A young girl named Gabby Birch also disappeared in the same storm and no trace of her was ever found.

Now, in the present day, links begin to emerge between the body on the beach and the earlier case of Gabby Birch. As new facts come to light, Kieran is forced to question all his previous assumptions about the day of the great storm and what really happened then. The current murder case brings him to new suspicions about local residents. Someone he thought he knew may be a killer.

The Survivors is a brooding mystery that uncoils piece by piece as each new layer of false truth is peeled away. The novel is an addictive read that fans of author Jane Harper should enjoy.

 

V2 by Robert Harris a Superb Wartime Thriller

Set in 1944 in the later days of World War Two, V2  by Robert Harris chronicles the destructive attacks on London by the V2 rocket program of Nazi Germany. Launched from secret bases in occupied Holland, the V2 rockets flew over the English Channel carrying heavy explosive warheads that would wreck havoc daily on the British capital city. 

The novel follows the stories of two main characters. Rudi Graf is a top German engineer involved in the V2 launches, even as he has to hide his growing disgust with the the brutal Nazi political regime. Kay Caton-Walsh is an intelligence officer with an elite RAF unit, whose job is to locate the V2 launch bases so Allied planes can bomb them.

V2 is an outstanding wartime thriller, written and researched in superb fashion. The opening chapters describing the launch and flight of a V2 rocket until its impact in London are quite thrilling. 

This novel is most highly recommended. For those who haven't read this author before, Robert Harris has written a number of gripping political and historic thrillers including The Ghostwriter, Munich, Fatherland, and Enigma. 

ONE BY ONE a Chilling Murder Mystery

 One By One by Ruth Ware is a gripping murder puzzle with the classic Agatha Christie set-up of a group of clashing characters trapped together in an isolated setting, and one of them is a killer.

The setting is a vacation chalet high up in the snowy French Alps. Eight team members from a popular social media app company are at the chalet for a retreat. Tensions flare over a surprise offer to sell the company's app property. Some people there will make a lot of money from the offer. Some will instead just lose their jobs.

When a sudden avalanche slams into the chalet, everyone is trapped inside, cut off from outside help. Then the deaths begin to occur, one by one.

The plot unfolds in alternating first person chapters as seen from the viewpoints of two main characters: Erin, a hostess employed at the chalet, and Liz, a low level personal assistant with the company. As the two women narrate their thoughts, pieces of the murder puzzle slowly come together.

Careful readers may begin to pick up tell-tale clues and spot the killer before the he/she is unmasked. One complaint with the plot is the withholding of key information by the author, and some readers may feel misled on that account.

Nonetheless, One By One is an addictive read with a nail biting climax and Ruth Ware fans should be well entertained by the book.

Author John LeCarre R.I.P

 British author John Le Carre passed away recently. He is widely recognized for moving the Spy Novel genre from the escapist thrills of Ian Fleming's James Bond into the gray, gritty realities of actual intelligence work.

Le Carre's characters often operated in uneasy situations of moral compromise where the lines of right and wrong were blurred in the name of expedience and national interest. The psychological pressures on LeCarre's spies took their toll over time, corrupting some into personal crisis, others into political betrayal of country.

These are the best of Le Carre's Cold War novels:

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold  (1963)

Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy  (1974) - The uncovering of a Soviet mole inside British intelligence.

Smiley's People  (1979) - The defection of a top Soviet spymaster.

The Post-Cold War novels dealt with issues such as arms trading and the threat of Islamic terrorism:

The Night Manager  (1993)

A Most Wanted Man  (2009) - Vicious rivalry among American, British, and German spy agencies for possession of an Islamic defector. An overt example of the latent Anti-American streak that ran through Le Carre's fiction.

A Reporter Tracks a Killer in FAIR WARNING

 Author Michael Connelly brings back crime reporter Jack McEvoy in a new thriller, Fair Warning. McEvoy appeared previously in the best selling novels The Poet and The Scarecrow, where his reporting helped hunt down diabolical serial killers. 

Jack lost his prior newspaper job and is now reporting for a small investigative website magazine called Fair Warning. But when a woman he knew briefly is murdered by an unknown killer, it leads Jack to look into her death. He uncovers a pattern of similar murders of other female victims, all having their necks broken in an identical manner. McEvoy reaches the chilling answer that a serial predator is at work.

The killer is called The Shrike. Jack finds the link between the scattered victims. All of them had sent their DNA samples to an ancestry analysis service. The Shrike used that same service to find his next targets.

The LAPD is also investigating and they don't want McEvoy interfering in the case. But the police don't know about the serial killer pattern yet. Jack is way ahead of the cops and he wants to be the first to publish a story on The Shrike. But the killer is already watching what McEvoy is doing.

Fair Warning is another addictive read from Michael Connelly. The novel follows the methodical work of a crime reporter as it builds toward a wrenching final reckoning for Jack McEvoy.