FEAST OR FAMINE

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales  by Edgar Allan Poe (1841, this edition 2012) is a collection of 19 short stories.    American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known for his macabre tales of horror, madness, violence, superstition, and the dark forces.    The title of this collection comes from one of his most well-known stories  The Murders in the Rue Morgue  about the ‘brutal, bloody, and baffling’ murder of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille in their home in the Montmartre district of Paris.    Another story is  The Tell-Tale Heart  that begins: ‘True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad?’  The Black Cat  is also good.    The Cask of Amontillado  is included in the collection too: ‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.’   However, the...

  The Chase  by Candice Fox (2021) is a crime thriller set in the Nevada Desert in America.    A man takes a bus load of people hostage: 12 women, 8 men, and 14 children. They are the family members of prison guards at the Pronghorn Correctional Facility in Nevada. The man demands the release of more than 600 inmates in the prison, including everyone on Death Row. His demands are met and 600 prisoners are freed – into the desert.    One of the released prisoners – the escapees – is John Kradle, convicted of murdering his wife and son. He hasn’t seen a sunset in ten years: and now he is looking at the tomato-red sun. He pulls himself together when he realizes that this is his chance to prove his innocence. But to do that, he must avoid capture because every law enforcer in the area is hell-bent on re-capturing the escapees.    In the vein of the 1963-67 television series and 1993 movie  The Fugitive,  the chase is on – multiplied by 600....

  Gone by Midnight  by Candice Fox (2019) is the third novel in the Crimson Lake trilogy, set in Queensland, Australia.   Former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, sending him into self-imposed exile in Crimson Lake in tropical Queensland. His wife Kelly has left him.  But, for the first time in two years, Kelly and their three-year-old daughter Lillian are visiting him, and he can’t wait to see Lillian again.     In Crimson Lake, Ted has joined forces with the weird Amanda Pharrell who established her own private investigations agency. But she has a past too. In her late teens, Amanda was convicted of murder, but she now has a PI license, and a reputation for effectively hunting down killers.    In the White Caps Hotel, three couples and single mother Sara Farrow left their four boys, aged eight years old, in a hotel room while they went to the hotel restaurant. The parents checked on their childr...

  Redemption Point  by Candice Fox (2018) is the continuation of the author’s first book, the crime thriller  Crimson Lake  (2017).    Even though former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he is still the most-hated man in Australia. After his wife leaves him, he goes into self-imposed exile in the remote town of Crimson Lake in tropical Queensland.    Claire Bingley’s father Dale despises Ted Conkaffey more than anyone else and plans a brutal revenge. But Dale gives Ted a chance to redeem himself – he must help Dale find the real abductor.    Ted draws closer to private detective Amanda Pharrell and joins her business – a private investigations agency. Her current case is assisting Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney’s first homicide investigation. Two bartenders are found dead behind the bar, on the beer-soaked floor.    Ten years before establishing her PI agency, when she was in her ...

Crimson Lake  by Candice Fox (2017) is set in Queensland, Australia, in contemporary times. The narrator is Edward (Ted) Conkaffey, a former detective accused of the abduction of a young girl, Claire Bingley, at a bus stop. He was found not guilty in court and is free, but his reputation is in tatters. The whole of Australia knows about the case and Ted, but no one is sympathetic.   Ted wants to go somewhere quiet, where he will be relatively unknown. He goes to Crimson Lake – tropical, crocodile country. ‘Crimson Lake and the houses that bordered it were hideaway hollows for people who wanted to live alone.’   His lawyer Sean introduces him to Amanda Pharrell, who owns a private investigations agency in Crimson Lake. The problem is: she is a convicted murderer.    Ted Conkaffey helps Amanda with the Jake Scully case. As he does, he contemplates the failure of his marriage to Kelly, the application for custody of his daughter Lillian, and the likelihood of Amand...

  Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Australia, I have access to an uncorrected advance edition reading copy of Jeffrey Archer’s pre-published novel  Traitors Gate  (2023).     Set in London from 1996, where Chief Superintendent William Warwick and his second-in-command Inspector Ross Hogan of the Metropolitan Police have been in charge for the past four years of the annual secret operation of the movement of Queen Elizabeth II’s Crown Jewels. Specifically, jewels in this case are the State Crown and Sword – from the impenetrable Jewel House in the Tower of London to the State Opening of Parliament and back again the next day. The code word for this operation is ‘Traitors Gate.’   Businessman and master criminal Miles Faulkner is back in London after four years of self-imposed exile in New York. On his Manhattan apartment wall is the painting by Peter Paul Rubens , Christ’s Descent from the Cross , that he stole from the Fitzmolean Museum. A forgery...

A Question of Belief   by Donna Leon (2010) is set in Venice, Italy, during a stifling hot summer.    Police Commissioner Guido Brunetti is tired of the heat and the tourists. He wants to go on vacation to the mountains with his wife Paola and his kids.    However, a friend needs assistance with the delayed cases at the local court, which looks like a creative way of corrupting the system – involving Judge Luisa Coltellini and Araldo Fontana.    At the same time, Brunetti’s colleague Inspector Lorenzo Vianello is suspicious of a man’s activities – it seems that the man is conning Lorenzo’s aunt into giving him money. She’s obsessed with fortune-telling tarot card readers and has been withdrawing large sums of money from the family business. Lorenzo asks his boss Brunetti if he can take some time during work to follow his aunt to catch the man.   So, before Brunetti can take vacation, he has to supervise two investigations: one official and th...