Anthony Horowitz is one of those authors who has been on my radar for a long, long time. I’ve never read his popular Alex Rider series, but they’ve been on my to-read pile for years. Midsummer Murders was a family staple when I was in high school, and Foyle’s War is one of the best crime and historical dramas ever written for the television in my opinion (why oh why ITV did you cancel it? Please tell me there will be more, Horowitz. Please). I’m also interested in Horowitz’s sanctioned Holmes stories, House of Silk and Moriarty. Even if I’m not a fan of Holmes stories, I do enjoy some good Moriarty fan fic. As part of his transition to adult fiction, Horowitz’ most recent two stories are meta crime. I haven’t read Magpie Murders (yes, it’s on my list too), but when I read the super interesting interview I re-blogged from Sophie Masson about The Word is Murder with Mr Horowitz and saw that there was an e-book sale happening, I jumped right in with Horowitz’ most recent. And what an odd beast it is too…

Where Magpie Murders sees Horowitz experiment with the book within a book trope (an author is killed and his editor reads his manuscript to source clues), The Word is Murder goes much further. In a Holmes/Watson dynamic, the fictional detective Hawthorne teams up with author, Anthony Horowitz, to uncover who killed Diana Cowper just after she arranged her own funeral. Diana’s son is famous and much of the story follows various people involved in acting and the fame game.

I enjoyed this unusual crime read, though I suspect writers and avid crime trope and genre fans (such as myself) are more likely to enjoy the novel’s central gimmick. Horowitz posits that he writes the novel at fictional private (sometimes police) consultant, Hawthorne’s request and the novel is written in the first person from Horowitz’ perspective. There is a lot of time dedicated to Horowitz’ own experiences writing crime drama for TV and plotting books, which I found fascinating as a crime writer. Judging by Goodreads reviews, other readers mileage may vary. I did find that sometimes Horowitz became too obtrusive in the story, too self-aware and this detracted from the very well-written, very clever mystery around Diana Cowper. Inventing fictional characters who had CVs rooted in the real world was also a bit distracting for me as I’d seen most of the dramas mentioned and knew no such actor had been in them!

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve never read a Horowitz novel before so had no idea what to expect in terms of writing quality (I knew he could plot a crime story from various dramas). There is no denying that Horowitz is a brilliant writer. I found myself reading passages of dialogue and trying not to weep in despair at how trite my own conversation passages in my manuscript read compared to his. He has a way of sketching strong characters quickly through conversation which brings his story to life.

The overall crime plot was clever, even if I guessed a portion of it. Towards the end there were a number of twists I didn’t see coming and I had no clue who the murderer was till the big reveal. Aside from the more obtrusive Horowitz biography moments, this is a taut, suspenseful work.

The Word is Murder: 3/5 inky stars

You can purchase this book from Book Depository.

From Penguin Random House author, Deborah O’Brien (author of historical fictions including the best-selling Mr Chen’s Emporium and romances such as The Trivia Man) comes a new novel that marries O’Brien’s love for the historical with her love for a good romance with depth.

From the press release…

It’s 1966, and a mountain pygmy possum – a species that scientists considered to be long extinct – is discovered in the Victorian High Country and transported to Melbourne where newspapers dub it ‘the world’s rarest creature’. Thirty-year-old Dr Katharine Wynter is a palaeontologist who’s more comfortable with ancient bones than live human beings, particularly men – an exotic species of which she has little personal experience, apart from a predatory professor who has made her working life hell. Having studied the tiny possum in fossil form, Katharine is curious to see it in the flesh, but her visit is disrupted by the presence of wildlife photographer, Scott King, taking pictures for an international magazine.

Soon Katharine and Scott are thrown together on a quest to locate the miniature marsupials in their habitat – the rugged Australian Alps. Along the way, the timid scientist discovers a side to her character she never knew existed, while the dashing photographer abandons his bravado and confronts memories he’s hidden for decades.

As for the elusive possums, the cute little creatures lead their pursuers on a merry chase…

Book Review

I very rarely read romance of any kind, and especially not the new craze that is rural romance. However, when Deborah approached me about her latest novel, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot on the strength of another novel of hers I’d read in the past which allowed for romance in a historical setting with a real sense of pathos and authenticity. Deborah is an author who doesn’t take the easy story-telling route and I knew that any romance story she told would be complex with fully fleshed out characters. I wasn’t wrong.

The two protagonists of The Rarest Thing, Katherine and Scott, both have dark ghosts that haunt their chances at relationships despite their appealing natures. Katherine may be an intelligent and relatively successful academic (given her status as woman in a university in the 1960s) but she faces the derision and the exploitation that some women faced in positions of previously male dominated roles. Scott is handsome, creative and therefore in no shortage of opportunities Katherine imagines, but then, he has his own terrible family secrets.

The novel is prefaced by a quote from Oscar Wilde: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. Though ostensibly about an expedition to find a pygmy possum, really this story is about coming to terms with who one is as a person and remembering to make the most of every moment. Both Katherine and Scott start The Rarest Thing living part-lives, either because of fear or because of repressed emotions and doubts. In the end, as they find possums, each other, and finally true love, the two realize they can move beyond automaton existence and truly live.

The Rarest Thing is a beautiful, truly Australian romance between two people who have complex and rounded pasts. I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys Australian nature, history, a positive message and a dash of mature, adult romance.

The Rarest Thing: 4/5 inky stars

Stay tuned tomorrow for a follow up Q&A with the author!

About the Author: Deborah O’Brien is an Australian writer and visual artist. She is the author of the bestselling Mr Chen’s Emporium, its sequel The Jade Widow, plus A Place of Her Own and The Trivia Man, as well as a dozen non-fiction books.

www.deborahobrien.com.au/

Sometime around when I first started getting involved with the Australian spec fic scene, I told myself I needed to get my head above my comfortable reading parapet and venture to new parts of the imagination. This blog was a part of doing this. I only half kept my promise. I never read or reviewed horror. That was because I’m a scaredy cat when it comes to descriptions of violence, bodily fluids and guts being slung about and also because I am an idiot. Good horror of course goes beyond such things.

Last year at the Aurealis, I chatted with Jason Nahrung (an Australian horror writer) and told him about my horror reading conundrum. He told me, ‘Read Perfections. It is psychological horror and reads like literary fiction and even if you hate the horror, you’ll like the beautiful language.’ When Kirstyn’s novel was re-published as a physical print I took him up on his promise. I was not disappointed.

From the blurb:

Two sisters. One wish. Unimaginable consequences.

Their lives swiftly unravelling, the two sisters find themselves drawn into a tangle of lies, manipulations and the most terrible of family secrets.

Jason was right. I loved the language, but I also found myself enjoying more than that. From the big things like a story set firmly in Australia (I used to think the spec fic scene was awash with only European and American settings, which is true to an extent, but since writing myself I have found a lot of brilliant Australian writers with the seeds for their stories planted in parts of Australia. Kirstyn is another to add to the list), an outcast goth sister who I could relate to, hard truths about feminism, gender politics, sexuality and careers which didn’t make me want to murder the author and creepy plot twists that I didn’t see coming to the small things like an Emilie Autumn shout out (seriously guys, Opheliac is one of the greatest songs ever) and pockets of prose that sing like good poetry. This story has the added bonus of being accessible to both genre and non-genre readers, being planted firmly in the real world with relationship trauma and family ties and fractures explored, even as magic plays a part in the horror that unfolds.

I really enjoyed this novel of dark desires and bitter spells and hope that I can find my kindle after a spell State-side so that I can download Madigan’s Mine and the Aurealis winning short story collection, Caution: Contains Small Parts also by McDermott.

You can purchase Perfections through the Twelfth Planet Press website here. You can also find Kirstyn’s work on e-reader.

Perfections: 4.5/5 inky stars

What The Ground Can’t Hold follows the stories of five unlikely companions forced to rely upon each other when they are trapped at an Argentinian refugio in melting and treacherous snow. Though all are from different backgrounds and walks of life, all have a link to Argentinia’s Dirty War…

From the blurb:

Two Americans are presumed dead and nine people are trapped in a cabin after an avalanche in the remote Andes…
Among them is Emma, an Australian faced with an impossible decision that could see her parents jailed. Jack, a teenager obsessed with Jack Kerouac, guided by a skewed moral compass. Carmen, a tango dancer whose estranged father is dying of cancer. Pedro, the cabin manager who’s in hiding from those who love him most and Wolfe, an American on a deadly family quest.

I have to admit that this isn’t usually my kind of novel. I usually find literary novels mind numbingly dull. However, Shady is Sub Dean of Creative Writing at my old University and with the book launch coming up on Saturday, I was interested to see how this debut novel panned out. I also love historical angles in my fiction. This is ironic as probably the part of the story I was disappointed in was the stuff dealing with the Dirty War. I don’t know much about this chapter in Argentinian history at all and the novel assumes that you do have that background knowledge. On the plus side, this means that characters feel very real and natural in their interactions with others, but it does make the story a bit confusing in parts for those who know little about Argentinian history.

I absolutely loved that we got to see five different points of view centred around reactions to the Americans leaving – and presumably dying – at the hands of an avalanche, with each person struck by a different aspect of the two boys personality. They both seemed like nasty pieces of work but depending on each character’s personal circumstance, depended on which piece of nastiness they most picked up upon. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, the landscape is so well described you start to shiver and the characterisations are spot on. Characters act like real people and they sound like it too! Even though each character speaks to us in the first person, Shady makes sure she differentiates each character with their own unique voice. The ending is suitably ambiguous given the nature of the moral questions that Shady poses about forgiveness, apology, fear and regret.

Though I would have liked more on The Dirty War, this wasn’t the point of the story, rather a facet of it. Instead,What The Ground Can’t Hold took me by surprise, didn’t let me go and has lingered on in my mind long after the final pages were shut.

What The Ground Can’t Hold: 4/5 inky stars

This review copy was supplied by the author through the South Coast Writers Centre

I was given a free copy of Jay Mountney’s Silkskin and the Forest Dwellers months back but with finishing university and a new job, I scarcely had time to read, let alone *think* about her story in a way that would do it adequate blogging justice. I can now honestly report that I have read both of Jay’s novella’s (I bought Lord of Shalott because I am a sucker for Arthurian stories). Both stories use a fairy story/legend as its basis gaining some originality and freshness to the tale appropriated through use of gender swappage and unconventional, non-heteronormative depiction of love and romance (Oh yes these are adult and mature happily ever afters. Homophobes need not apply.)

Silkskin and the Forest Dwellers retells Snow White in a doubly interesting way by making Silkskin- the Snow White stand in- male, homosexual and presumably non-white. The story ends as predicted- with the evil queen defeated and normalcy restored to Silkskin’s kingdom. The fun to be had with this kind of appropriation is in finding the subversions. I would give this story a higher starred rating if not for the author’s decision to write in an old fashioned style. Though there is no rule that says you cannot do this, after all it worked for past story tellers, I found it distancing and this made it hard for me to care about Silkskin. I also felt that the story could have been more fleshed out and that this coupled with the distancing third person narration made the story seem rushed in places.

I am a total Arthurian legend sucker so I fell like a stone for Lord of Shalott. The Lady/Lord Jocelyn felt suitably poetic in the first person and I loved their description of the woven tapestry. This novella really displayed Mountney’s ability to write well. However, like Silkskin’s tale, I also felt that the story became rushed in the second half, especially since Merlin had not been introduced till the last part of the story. I also wonder if it would not have been more interesting to follow Tennyson’s poem to its natural conclusion with;

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, “She has a lovely face;

May God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott.”

A cross dresser misfit holed up in a tower ‘lent grace’ by Lancelot would be just as subversive as The Merlin healing Jocelyn’s broken heart (and on a random note I really hate the description of ‘The Merlin.’ He will always be Merlin Emrys to me thanks to Mary Stuart. I have a lot of faith invested in the historical Merlin). Be that as it may I really enjoyed this novella and especially the first half which I found to be achingly beautiful.

Silkskin and the Forest Dwellers: 2.5/5 inky stars

Lord of Shalott: 3.5/5 inky stars

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jaymountney