Another abrupt ending, although the twist at the end was excellent. I enjoyed the pointlessness of Tankard and Murphy driving round looking for courteous drivers to reward with a goody bag. ( )

Excellent mystery. Multiple story lines, mystery and a bit of romance this fast-paced book is a page-turner. As always, Disher kept me guessing who was behind the murders and why until the final pages, and then every clue made sense. I'm also enjoying the slow unfolding of the characters in this series - even those who are on the dark sdie. ( )

Third outing in the Hal Challis series of Australia-set crime novels. I was taken by the crimes in this book, their casually brutal execution (!) and their grimdark motivation...greed. That said, there wasn't one victim of whom I did not think, "about damned time" or "yeah, well..." which to me means I'm in tune with Author Disher's choices. Far from glorifying murder and desensitizing the reader to its unspeakable cruelty and awfulness, this made me think extra hard about how I myownself respond to murder mysteries.

It's axiomatic that victims "R" us, or there'd be no more murder mysteries. We need to identify with the sleuth and the victim, as in recognize each one's ambiguous human qualities. Caricatures are seldom satisfying in this world of oft-told tales. Series mysteries are prone to that kind of series sag, the kind where a character becomes a caricature, because the entire charm of a series is familiarity. The setting, the sleuth, the choice of victims and perpetrators. The challenge for a writer of this genre's limited range of plots is to fit the skin of Series onto the bones of Plot without stretching either too hard, too far, too awkwardly. Any of these will lead to series sag, in addition to fatiguing the reader's suspense of disbelief muscles.

I'm an old hand at reading in this genre. I've been doing it for over 40 years. I'm not likely to miss the clues the author plants, though I'm far from infallible at connecting the dots as the author does. In this read, I had the right address but the wrong resident as the perpetrator of these cruel crimes. That's more than enough for me to feel a sparking pleasure in being fooled! I want to re-experience the pleasures of puzzling out a solution without the numbing almost-certainty of being correct each and every time. An Aussie friend clued me in to the way South African whites who emigrated to Australia in the Nineties are viewed. Likely fearful of retribution from the new government and/or the newly empowered black majority. Likely perpetrators of and/or sympathizers with violent, terroristic acts against the black people of their homeland, they run to a racist and safe haven. There wasn't a lot of doubt in my mind about the killer's motives, but my identification of them was pleasurably off.

The setting of these stories is one I like as much as I do the plots. I am always interested in fiction set in Australia because it's so hugely different from the US. The plants and animals are all like something out of science fiction, the people are startlingly diverse, the politics revoltingly familiar. The Mornington Peninsula has the agreeable quality of being familiar, the morphing from working communities to leisure centers is happening to my own South Shore of Long Island. The tensions between haves and have-nots are eternal and relatable. Inspector Challis and his struggles to do as much or more than ever with less and less in the way of support and resources rings sadly true fourteen years after this book was written.

Eternal and relatable as well are Challis's relationships, and that's really what hooks readers on particular series mystery reads. If we don't care about the people the sleuth cares about, we're not involved enough in the world they inhabit to come back for regular visits. Hal's relationships are interesting, a woman or two plus his colleagues; given the history Hal has, it's no surprise that he's undergoing big changes in this novel. One of those changes is forced by actions from without; it's the biggest change, and will have ramifications for a long time.

That bloody Dragon Rapide got a tiny thread as well. I'm ready for that to stop. But overall I'm a reader now, a happy consumer of these familiar-yet-different exemplars of ma'at. ( )

Psychologist Janine McQuarrie is shot and killed in front of her young daughter in an apparently random incident. It turns out that she is the daughter-in-law of Police Superintendent McQuarrie. It also turns out that she had recently been coerced by her husband into participating into some mate-swapping parties. She had in her possession many photos taken by her that certain prominent people might not want exposed. This is the latest case for Detective Hal Challis, Ellen Destry, and the other familiars at the Mornington Peninsula police department.

This mystery series is a police procedural, but it is very character-driven, starring Hal, but with a very important ensemble cast and with multiple story lines. I really enjoy the series and it deserves to be more widely read.

3 1/2 stars ( )

This is a straightforward police procedural. There's a crime. We know something about it that the detectives don't, but there are other things none of us know. We follow the detectives while they solve it, diverting occasionally into the background of their fraught lives and relationships, not all of them happy. But Garry Disher is so easy to read and follow, it's a delight. That doesn't mean there are no surprises. There are. Including right to the last paragraph. Pleasurable reading. ( )