In my post about The Broken Shore by Peter Temple I bemoaned my lack of access to Australian fiction, especially mysteries. Karen C, in the comments, pointed me to this site: Austcrime. It's a collection of reviews of crime fiction available in Australia. It provides reviews of crime fiction set in Australia and written by Australians and also has interesting reviews of English, Irish, Scottish, and other crime fiction written in English. I like it that the reviews are detailed and not uniformly positive. Whenever I come across a site that contains only positive reviews I am suspicious. I think those sites must just be quoting the press releases. In contrast, it's clear that Karen and the other reviewers at Austcrime are carefully reading and thinking about the books they review.
To my disappointment, much of the Australian fiction that interested me on this site doesn't seem to be available in the U.S. I think I will end up using the site more as a way to find crime fiction from Great Britain and Ireland, which is more commonly available here. Nevertheless, it's worth checking out.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
1 comments:
I like the reviews on AustCrime - and several of the reviewers have their own blogs also, it seems. Like you, I share the frustration that many of the books are not available in the UK, but I keep hoping! I have recently acquired a copy of R D Martin's Body Count, so I will see if that lives up to the reviews. I am also looking forward to Gabrielle Lloyd one of these days. Personally, I think you'd be very hard pressed to do better than Peter Temple - I think he is brilliant - I have read about six of his books, now.
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