Book Reviews

Spoofs are a serious business in literature, particularly when murder is involved. Pulling off a send-up of hard-boiled detective and spy novels is like singing badly on purpose –  it ain’t as easy as it looks.

This volume of fifteen short stories, the third in a related series by Australian writer Gerry Burke, provides the reader with everything the crime spoof genre has to offer. Burke’s writing style is terse, the read is quick and no one is bothered by any pesky Oxford commas in these fifteen short stories.

Our narrator is Patrick Pesticide, aka Paddy Pest, a self-referenced ‘discount […]

Reviewing self-published fiction can sometimes feel like a thankless task, even when you’re being paid for it. You can find yourself slogging through a book so woeful that you wonder how the author could possibly think it was ready for publication. Other times, you’ll be excited by a premise or intrigued by a character, but ultimately disappointed because the book doesn’t quite reach its mark. Then, there are those rare occasions when you find yourself in the hands of an author so unarguably gifted that your critical faculties are temporarily cut off. Within pages, you’ve slipped into the experience that […]