Leila McKinnon
Leila McKinnon is a journalist with the Nine Network.
SIGNAL LOSS, by Garry Disher, Text Publishing.
It’s the kind of Australian gangland killing that’s so grubby and pseudo comical that it could almost be real. Two hitmen sent on a job from Double Bay to Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula botch things up so effectively that they never make it back to Sydney. And so on a “hot, wind-storming day” Inspector
Hal Challis, looking “as if he’d summoned the wind and would ride it to the finish”, starts an investigation that will take on the community ice-crime epidemic, a spate of farm machinery thefts and the search for a missing child. His girlfriend, meanwhile, who is the head of the sex crimes unit, is hunting a serial rapist and keeping a wary eye on her sister’s new and slightly suspect boyfriend. It’s small town Australia in all its narrow, tinder-dry, community-minded gloriousness.
CROWN OF BLOOD, by Nicola Tallis, Michael O’Mara Books.
Lady Jane Grey was a 17-year-old girl. She was brilliant. She was fluent in eight languages, and translated a piece on marriage from Latin to Greek as a gift to her father. Unfortunately, his ambition and his plotting would cause the death of his remarkable daughter, and rather less regrettably lose him his own head. Jane was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s beautiful and charming youngest sister, Mary, and Charles Brandon, the man she married for love after being widowed by the elderly French king. Jane’s own marriage was just part of a plot to put her on the throne. Her reign was reluctant, and counted in days. Nicola Tallis tells her tragic story with understated compassion and reveals the stupid decisions, not of her making, that led her to the block.
EGGS OR ANARCHY, by William Sitwell, Simon & Schuster.
Winston Churchill wasn’t the only one with a rather demanding wartime job. Fred Marquis, later Lord Woolton, had to feed 41 million people against overwhelming odds. At the outbreak of World War II, less than a third of the food on British tables was produced at home. With English ships under siege around the world, black marketeers waiting to pounce on any vulnerabilities, and a rigid government bureaucracy to deal with, Woolton was fighting his own war. There’s a delicious story about Woolton dealing with a recalcitrant Egyptian sugar supplier by threatening to transport Queensland sugar to Egypt and take him on. And the periodic appearances of Churchill, grumpily bemoaning rationing, are a treat.
WHERE DEAD MEN MEET, by Mark Mills, Headline Review.
Luke Hamilton is not the sort of young man who normally attracts assassins. He’s a fairly ordinary Englishman, living and working in Paris in 1937. But his would-be killer, Borodin, is not the sort of hired gun to shy away from a job. So what on earth’s going on? I suspect I have already said too much. But plenty of throat-in-mouth action unfolds from this very intriguing beginning. The body count is high, the gunfights are old-school and gripping, and Luke teams up with just the right person. In fact, Where Dead Men Meet is not only worth a read, it could be just the start of a new series. Luke is like a newborn Jason Bourne: he’s unsure of his identity, always on the run, but he remains such an innocent that it’s a miracle he even makes it past the first few chapters.