August '08 - New Releases

What a month August promises to be with a couple of first crime novels published this month as well as a second action thriller by one of the short-list nominees for this year's Ned Kelly Awards. Australian books that crime readers should be looking forward to getting their hands on all three of these books.

The Build Up by Phillip Gwynne - (Pan Macmillan Australia) - I am reading this book at the moment and am enjoying it immensely, both for the setting and the engaging style in which it is written. Set in Darwin with occasional trips into the desert The Build Up is as much a biting commentary on the cultural viewpoint of a Northern Territorian as it is a murder mystery. A prostitute is murdered in a camp of disaffected Vietnam Veterans but her body does a disappearing act causing Detective Dusty Buchanon no end of problems. Most people already know that Territorians live by different rules to the rest of the country and Phillip Gwynne drives this point home in emphatic fashion in this classy mystery.

Second Strike by Mark Abernethy - (Allen & Unwin) - This is the second Alan McQueen thriller with the first, Golden Serpent recently short-listed for a Ned Kelly Award. This book fits directly into the post-911 terrorist fiction sub-genre with this threat coming out of Indonesia. Alan McQueen is an Australian spy, an ASIS agent with all the toughness and resourcefulness that makes these kinds of action/thrillers a wild ride from start to finish.

Ghostlines by Nick Gadd - (Scribe Publications) - For the third book to be published in August you're going to have to wait until the end of the month, August 30 in fact. Ghostlines won the 2007 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. According to the media release the story is about a washed up former investigative journalist who stumbles onto a story that grows from tragic accident into a major political intrigue and murder. They don't give literary awards to just anyone so you can be sure that this debut novel will be special.