EIGHT MUST-READ

crime novels

1 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

The violent, complex first in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy fuelled the Scandi-crime cult. It’s a passionate, sinister and twisting tale with strong protagonists in journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander– and a tender love story.

2 The Broken Shore by Peter Temple.

Temple’s chilling thriller about a former city homicide cop posted to his quiet coastal childhood home is one of the best this country has produced. When a prominent local is bashed, the cop refuses to believe indigenous kids did it.

3 Misery by Stephen King.

Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of nurse Annie Wilkes, who rescues novelist Paul Sheldon from a car accident, only to bludgeon him with torture at her remote home. The book it’s based on is horror genius from Stephen King.

4 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler’s first novel was a revolution in crime writing back in 1939. When tough, cynical private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by a dying general to flush out who is blackmailing one of his two daughters, he is sucked into a web of pornography and murder.

5 6 A Taste for Death by P.D. James.

The seventh in the Inspector Adam Dalgliesh series is also one of the best. Two opposite-end-ofthe-spectrum bodies have been found with their throats slashed in a London church – one a baronet, the other a vagrant.

True History Of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey.

Ned Kelly, cattle thief, bank robber and folk hero, was hung at the age of 25 in the Melbourne Gaol in 1880. Carey’s tour de force is an autobiography, inspired by a fragment of Kelly’s prose known as the Jerilderie letter. Totally gripping.

7 The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

Matt Damon made Tom Ripley famous on the silver screen in 1999, but it was Highsmith who created the extraordinary character in 1955 – a restroom attendant and talented fraudster who poses as a Princeton graduate with deadly repercussions.

8 The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins.

Even though it was written in 1859, Collins’ novel is as powerful today as it was when it created a sensation in Charles Dickens’ weekly magazine All The Year

Round. It’s a brilliantly paced thriller which begins with protagonist Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter with “a woman in white” during an evening walk over London’s Hampstead Heath.