Sisters in Crime Australia is dedicated to promoting women who write crime. Here are reviews of crime books (fiction and true crime) written by women.
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Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned.
Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately staged murder – Dr Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed. His daughter, Eve, is a glassblower, and the murder weapon is a shard of one of her broken vases.
When paramedic Megan Lowe is called to the scene of an attempted murder, all she can do is try to save the victim. But as the man is lifted onto a stretcher, she realises she knows him. She despises him. Why should she save his life when he destroyed hers?
The bodies of the first identified victims, Hilda White and Iris Marriott, were found in 1932. That year is often remembered as the year the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened with great fanfare, but at the time Sydney was still suffering through the Great Depression, with high unemployment and associated poverty and homelessness.
Hands up who’s ever wished they could live another woman’s life? Hands up who’s ever thought, wouldn’t it be nice to live in a house completely different (assume better) than mine, with a life completely different (think less housework and more sex) than mine?
First Rule: Make them like you.
Second Rule: Make them need you.
Third Rule: Make them pay.
This series has stayed with me. The reason is Amanda Pharrell. The series is based on the book Crimson Lake by Sydney Sisters in Crime member, Candice Fox. Fox created a character in Amanda who is difficult to like and more difficult to understand. Nicole Chamoun plays her to perfection. She is compelling from her first appearance.
Bruising classroom dynamics, manipulative parents and carers and horrendous small-town politics form the backdrop to a nail-biting thriller in which the tensions of ten years ago start to play themselves out, building to a violent climax in the present day.
Robyn escaped the past once. Now it’s back—and this time there’s no way out.
A compelling portrait of mental illness, memory, and the ways that the years when we ‘come of age’ can be twisted into trauma.
It isn’t strangers you need to worry about here. Blood lines run deep and in unexpected places. Every victim, every accused, we’ll know. The past runs alongside us all the time. Some days it spills into the open.
