3 crime mysteries
BURIED by Lynda la Plante, Allen & Unwin
This is the first in a new crime series from the creator of Prime Suspect and while it’s not as edgy in its characterisation, the twists and turns are vintage La Plante. Detective Constable Jack Warr is hot, charming and aimless. He moved to London with his girlfriend Maggie for her career but has little ambition to rise up the ranks. Then when a corpse is found in a burned out cottage with a heap of banknotes linked to a decades-old train robbery, Jack finally hits his stride.
THE SILENCE by Susan Allott, Harper Collins
It’s the middle of the night in 1997 and Isla Green is fast asleep in her flat in London when the phone rings. It’s her dad Joe calling from Sydney with some troubling news. In 1967 their next-door neighbour Mandy disappeared. Joe was the last person to see her alive and now he’s a suspect in her murder enquiry. Told in chapters alternating between the 30-year time frames, Allott builds the tension deftly in this debut thriller as suspicion is thrown on different characters.
THE BLUFFS by Kyle Perry, Penguin
There’s a whiff of Picnic at Hanging Rock to this crime thriller steeped in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. But here 1900 politesse is swapped for a dark drug underworld. On a range of mountain bluffs, a group of teenage girls go missing while on a school excursion. It’s the same place another group of girls disappeared 30 years earlier. Back then a haunting legend sprung up suggesting the girls were taken by “the Hungry Man” who “likes girls, with their pretty faces and pretty curls”.