crime novels | Author, editor, caffeine-addict, wannabe ninja

By Festivus Eve it’s another Pimpus! Slithering up onto the slab today is another amazing Aussie author, Alan Baxter… whose names completes that alliteration rather nicely! Devouring Dark is the latest offering from Baxter that mixes crime and horror – crime noir, if you will – while offering grey characters whose choices aren’t so much between ‘good and bad’ rather between ‘bad and holy shitballs’.

Devouring Dark follows Matt McLeod and his dance with the darkness, with death, and the choice(s) he makes in how to deal with the power he has and where that leads. Hint: not good places. These are my favourite kind of stories as they deal with that power of choice and allows the reader those ‘what if’ moments where we wonder if we’d make the same choices, the same deals if we suffered the same fate.

Death in all its form runs deep through the book and provides an almost narrative on society’s views and take on death and how we deal with it.

Here’s the blurb:

Matt McLeod is a man plagued since childhood by a malevolent darkness that threatens to consume him. Following a lifetime spent wrestling for control over this lethal onslaught, he’s learned to wield his mysterious paranormal skill to achieve an odious goal: retribution as a supernatural vigilante.

When one such hit goes bad, McLeod finds himself ensnared in a multi-tentacled criminal enterprise caught between a corrupt cop and a brutal mobster. His only promise of salvation may be a bewitching young woman who shares his dark talent but has murderous designs of her own.

I mean: ‘supernatural vigilante’. It’s got a nice ring to it! And that cover is to die for! (Yes, I punned.)

If you’re looking for a tale of the darker kind, of crime bosses and corruption, and for those souls who have a direct line to death, then this is definitely a book for you.

Recommended for those who love horror, crime stories, supernatural tales, and just straight up action-based badassery.

Next in the Festivus of the Pimping of Books we’re going to hit some crime. Death and drugs and deception, oh my! Catherine Lee is an Aussie crime writer, and her Cooper & Quinn Dark Series is really starting to gain some well-deserved traction. Combining murder mystery and police procedural, and set in the heart of Sydney, I was hooked from the first book.

Lee’s narrative is sharp, and the crimes she ‒ or rather Detectives Cooper and Quinn ‒ tackle, could almost be ripped straight from the headlines. That’s the thing with Lee’s books, the crimes committed (and investigated) mirror the society we live in, and while not a didactic narrative on the world’s state-of-play, it does make you think.

Dark Edges is the fifth novel in the series (there are two novellas), and the twists and turns in this story don’t let up. Just when you think you have a handle on it… bam! But that’s what I like in a crime/mystery novel – you discover as the detectives do. And Lee seems to be ramping up the tension and odds with each book.

Dark-Edges

Here’s the back-cover blurb for Dark Edges:

A football player in the prime of his life is found dead from an apparent drug overdose. Was it an accident, suicide, or something more sinister?
Detective Charlie Cooper is struggling just to keep awake after some upheaval on the home front. But life is busy for everyone, and Cooper is intrigued from the start with this baffling case. Jimmy Dallas was a rising star with everything to live for – would he really have stuck a needle in his arm the week before the biggest match of his career?
Joel Maguire, for one, does not believe his best mate would have knowingly injected himself with anything. Reeling from the shock loss, and dealing with some issues of his own, the Rangers’ star player struggles to put one foot in front of the other, let alone play finals football.
Australian rugby league takes centre stage in the fifth book of Catherine Lee’s page-turning Dark Series. Strap yourself in as Cooper and Quinn tackle the controversial issue of drugs in sport.

Each of the book works as a standalone, so you don’t necessarily need to read them all, but with over-arching character development for both of the detectives, and some secondary characters popping up now and then throughout the other books… well, BOOKS! Who doesn’t love to read books?

I can’t recommend this series enough. Cooper and Quinn are well-developed, well-rounded characters, each with their own flaws and quirks. Having the setting pretty much in my own backyard is a such a welcome change to the generic US-based books that flood the market.

Recommended for those who love crime, murder mystery, police procedural, stabby-stabby, shooty-shooty (yeah, that sounded way better in my head). Look, just buy the book… hell, buy the whole series.

Available in all formats.