Australian Crime Releases February 08

I've only found details of two new crime releases for February so far but both of them are very high quality and I reckon mystery / thriller readers should be looking forward to getting their hands on both of them.

The Tattooed Man by Alex Palmer (pub. Harper Collins Australia) : The sequel to Blood Redemption, the winner of the 2003 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel, has finally made it's way to publication. Det. Commander Paul Harrigan and Grace Riordan have returned in another extremely compelling novel that is as rich in character development as it the plot is complex. A crooked cop from Harrigan's past has just shown up dead in a high-profile multiple murder case. There's a problem for Harrigan though, the cop was hiding evidence that could incriminate him in a long covered-up murder. This is a murder mystery that takes on huge proportions and gets very ugly.


Fan Mail by P.D. Martin (pub. Macmillan Australia) : The 3rd book in the series featuring FBI profiler Sophie Anderson finds her moving out of Quantico and into the field where she thinks her talents will do the most good. Sophie is not your normal profiler, she experiences visions while working the murder and missing person cases. It's a "talent" that is beginning to be fleshed out in much greater details in Fan Mail and is starting to play a much more important, and accepted, part in her investigations. It adds a fascinating aspect to the books - think Patricia Arquette's character Alison in the television series Medium and you'll get an idea of Sophie Anderson's capabilities. In Fan Mail, someone is killing crime authors, using the details of the murders in their books as a blueprint for their own deaths. There's a pattern but Sophie has to figure out what it is. There's also a continuation of the ongoing story from the previous novel, The Murderer's Club, to add to Sophie's troubles.