Crime fiction has always reflected the anxieties of the moment, as this most recent batch of thrillers clearly reveals. If I was to make a list of the things that scare me right now, it would include the right-wing media, tech billionaires without a skerrick of social conscience, tall buildings, data centres, reality TV shows (yes, really), cults and bushfires. If any of these fears press your buttons, prepare for a heart-thumping read knowing that at least in fiction, the bad guys usually get their comeuppance. If only this were true in real life.
Full Circle by Chris Hammer (Summit Books $35)
Full Circle is Chris Hammer’s first standalone crime novel, and it’s not like the others, except for the map: there’s always an excellent map. The setting is an imaginary Georgian-style manor house on the Mornington Peninsula just past Sorrento where, since the seasonal tourists have left, “the cashed-up retirees have reclaimed their kingdom”. This is a book all about the power of money, who has it, who hasn’t and what they will do to get it.
Travis Somerland is a former undercover cop who has lost his job, his lover and his future when he gets a job as a driver working for a financial genius who owns the impressive Montechino mansion. The charismatic Felix Clapton is about to execute a run on the stock exchange that will make him billions and hopefully destroy the corrupt Murtrie family who control the right-wing media but are seeking to diversify.
That’s the scenario for the first fast-moving 90 pages before the narrative takes a sharp detour that will complicate the next 400. Full Circle may be long and convoluted, but it’s also a sharply observed critique of dynastic family ambitions and what happens when money matters more than people or the social good.
King’s Ransom by Matthew Reilly (Pan Macmillan, $35)
Another impressive building figures in the prolific Matthew Reilly’s latest thriller. King’s Ransom begins with a dash from Los Angeles to New York on a Gulfstream G550, an apparently very expensive jet with a maximum speed of Mach 0.89 which costs more than US $7000 to make the trip. Such are the observations of the skinny, bespectacled but “brilliant” private detective Sam Speedman, who we hardly need to be told registers somewhere on the autism spectrum. While Sam’s bread and butter work usually involves “catching unfaithful husbands in the act”, he’s been summoned by the kidnapper of a billionaire tech-bro and his children. The evil genius has constructed a series of elaborate puzzles for Sam and four more of America’s “best” detectives to solve if they are to save the family. It’s competitive sleuthing.
The detectives’ first challenge is located in a penthouse apartment occupying the top three floors of a “supertall” apartment tower in Manhattan. Here they are provided with a riddle, a deadline and four objects on a bed, including a watch, an iPhone, a chess piece and a seven-foot wide, quad-rotor, aerial attack drone. At this point, I couldn’t help thinking this was crime fiction for the gamers and those who relish jet and drone specifications. Reilly obviously knows his readership, which as one bookshop owner told me, are usually males aged 20 to 40. And so the game unfolds courtesy of one daft challenge after another, requiring Sam to engage in death-defying feats such as jumping onto a moving helicopter, diving into a lift shaft and being buried alive. There’s an action movie in there, too, probably starring a younger version of Tom Cruise.
Chain Reaction by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Bantam, $35)
This brings us to Lee Child’s Reacher, a role which the petite Cruise once misguidedly assumed, although he’s now been replaced by the more appropriate man-mountain Alan Ritchson who at 6 feet three inches is still two inches shorter than our fictional hero. While the Amazon Prime show is only up to No.13, Chain Reaction, written by Lee Child and Andrew Child (the British-born Grant brothers) is No.31 in the series and right on point.
General Susan Turner, head of a new and secretive law enforcement agency within the US military, needs the help of her former lover and colleague, Major Jack Reacher. Turner suspects she has a traitor in the ranks and needs Reacher off the books and on a plane to Colorado to investigate the apparently random stabbing of one of her agents. With a fat roll of cash in his pocket, Reacher is swiftly relocated to Summertown, a small municipality boasting immense fields of solar panels, five data centres and a small but decent motel, not forgetting a diner.
A lot of incidental conversation happens around tables where Reacher, the diner connoisseur, devours large quantities of artery-clogging meals and peach pie. Occasionally funny and very fast, Chain Reaction is prescient when it comes to the kinds of cybercrime that can demolish democracies. Reacher in top form.
The Cruise by Naïma Brown (Allen and Unwin, $35)
If they haven’t already, someone should option The Cruise, a crime novel that lifts the lid on the making of a reality TV show, skewering just how tightly constructed these TV series are, particularly when it comes to the casting and the edit. Bailey Collins should know – appointed director of the second season of the reality TV show The Cruise in which young couples hook up (or not), she is about to cast a former high school boyfriend who sexually assaulted her as one of the 10 contestants vying to win.
Since that unfortunate incident, Bailey has changed her name, her appearance and joined an international group of women who call themselves the Squad, each of whom has their story of abuse to tell. As Bailey micro-manages the elimination games on their luxurious mega-yacht, it becomes clear she is out for revenge not only for herself, but on behalf of all women. This may be a revenge fantasy, but it’s a telling one.
Helidon by Nikki Mottram (University of Queensland Press, $35)
Back in the realer world, Nikki Mottram’s third book in a series featuring child protection worker Dana Gibson is again located in the Southern Tablelands of Queensland. Following the eponymous Crows Nest and Killarney, we are now in Helidon, 21 kilometres from Toowoomba, where Dana is based. It’s unbearably hot, there are bushfires and “the sky a curious yellow”.
As a small girl sits on the verandah of the Helidon Hotel sucking an ice cube, shots are fired. A bikie is killed, her older sister seriously wounded and the police officer at the scene makes an immediate arrest, claiming it’s just a bikie dispute, case closed. Except, as Dana tells her detective boyfriend, it isn’t. As they argue about due process and fall out, the only person who witnessed what took place, the traumatised child, is not speaking. Her mother, who hails from a commune with a cult-like leader, is obstructive, and the child goes missing.
This is the set-up for a thriller that doesn’t shy away from the challenges faced by those on the frontline in regional centres, police and child protection workers as they struggle to manage workplace challenges and impossible caseloads. Dana is also on something of a personal quest, finally confronting her own self-defeating tendencies. It’s a lot, but Mottram steers Helidon through to a fine, fiery finish.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
