As part of the end of year on 4MA, everyone posts their top tens for the year (and the books that didn't work for them), so I thought I'd quickly duplicate the list of just the local books that I really enjoyed this year:
The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave
Truth, Peter Temple
Fifty Grand, Adrian McKinty (he lives here now :) )
Burial, Neil Cross
Deep Night, Caroline Petit
A Year to Learn a Woman, Paddy Richardson
Blood Moon, Garry Disher
Splinter, Michael MacConnell
Dark Mirror, Barry Maitland
The Billionaire's Curse, Richard Newsome
Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the scent of adventure to the lonely housewives of England's south coast. Set adrift by his wife's death, he hits the road one last time - with his young son in tow.
At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead.
Villani's job as head of the Victoria Police Homicide Squad is bathed in blood and sorrow. His life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superiors and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling.
This knockout punch of a thriller from a critically acclaimed author follows a young Cuban detective’s quest for vengeance against her father’s killer in a Colorado mountain town
A man is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. He is an illegal immigrant in a rich Hollywood resort community not unlike Telluride. No one is prosecuted for his death and his case is quietly forgotten.
Six months later another illegal makes a treacherous run across the border. Barely escaping with her life and sanity intact, she finds work as a maid with one of the employment agencies in Fairview. Secretly, she begins to investigate the shadowy collision that left her father dead.
The maid isn’t a maid. And she’s not Mexican, either. She’s Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and she’s looking for answers: Who killed her father? Was it one of the smooth- talking Hollywood types? Was it a minion of the terrifying county sheriff? And why was her father, a celebrated defector to the United States, hiding in Colorado as the town ratcatcher?
Adrian McKinty’s live-wire prose crackles with intensity as we follow Mercado through the swells of emotion and violence that lead up to a final shocking confrontation.
Leah Kolbe's father, a dealer in antiquities, left the business to her when he died. Now the Japanese have occupied most of mainland China and threaten the British colony of Hong Kong where Leah lives. When they unexpectedly invade, her fiance becomes a prisoner of war, interned under the harshest conditions with the rest of the colonialists. She escapes to Macau, arriving there penniless after everything - including her shoes - has been stolen.
Leah finds a job at the British consulate and is accepted into local Portuguese society. But when she is asked, she agrees to become a spy and to take a Japanese armaments manufacturer as a lover, putting her life in constant peril.
Special Agent Sarah Reilly has just been decorated for bringing down one of America's worst serial killers. Refusing extended leave, she goes straight back to work in the Boston field office. But the murder of a child, Milo Kane, sees her transferred to LA to head up the FBI's investigating task force.
Within weeks, public sympathy for Milo's parents splinters into suspicion, and the LA District Attorney rides the wave against them. Sarah suspects that the parents are withholding something and when she discovers their former bodyguard is missing, she inches closer to finding answers.
Someone has stolen the world’s most valuable diamond and a constable lies unconscious in the British Museum, two sedative darts protruding from his backside.
Not something Gerald Wilkins knows or cares anything about.
Not until he finds himself on a private luxury jet heading for London to attend the funeral of a great aunt he has never met. Not until he inherits her estate, worth twenty billion pounds. Not until he opens a bundle of envelopes from his dead great aunt.
Was she murdered? Who stole the diamond? And what is the mysterious casket that everyone seems to be looking for?
With the help of the Valentine twins, the rat-fearing Sam and the gymnastic champ Ruby, Gerald’s got a mystery to solve. A mystery that will take them into secret passageways, a musty bookshop, an ancient crypt, a ruined tower and a colossal cavern where the secret of a priceless treasure lie