Karen

The author bio for S.R. White reads thus:

S.R. White worked for a UK police force for twelve years, before returning to academic life and taking an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He now lives in Queensland, Australia.

He's the author of the Dana Russo series (HERMIT / PRISONER / RED DIRT ROAD and WHITE ASH RIDGE), and now this standalone, PACIFIC HEIGHTS with another standalone due out in March 2026, DEAD FALL LAKE. On the plus side then a good sized catalogue, on the negative side, why has it taken me so long to latch onto these novels....

PACIFIC HEIGHTS is an unusually structured police procedural, with five witnesses to the stabbing murder of a local waitress, late at night, in the courtyard of a block of flats, most of which look inwards. Lay-down misère you'd think, it's certainly what Detectives Carl 'Bluey' Blueson and Lachlan Dyson thought, bit of a doddle, exactly the thing for a couple of cops whose careers have taken a downward trajectory in recent times. Sure it's a small investigation team, just those two, the first constable on scene who turns out to be a diamond in the making, a couple of assisting uniformed officers, and a tricky dynamo of an admin assistant. The whole thing seems to hinge on what the five witnesses saw being pieced together into a full picture. Only one of them, the man discovered beside the body covered in the victim's blood, has quite the back story involving one of the detectives, even if he did call emergency services first. Along with three others in the building, all of them also calling for help, all of whom turn out to be pretty adept at answering just what they are asked, and nothing more. Then there's the building caretaker, tucked away in a room doing machinery maintenance, right beside the murder scene, who didn't see or hear anything. None of this is at all helped by the fact that every single witness only saw a little bit of the puzzle. Obscured viewpoints, different angles, different states of awareness, and then there's the question of who would want to stab a young woman right outside her own home. Even as it becomes increasingly obvious that the victim was a piece of work in her own right.

Starting out with pretty high hopes, these two detectives have to firstly get into the rhythm of a working partnership, deal with the complications of the witness and a shared fraught past, and then fathom what is the question that they haven't realised they should be asking.

To be honest it's not really that hard to pick the likely suspect in this scenario, but this was a novel very much about the journey, not the destination. The building of a partnership between two similar, yet different cops was engaging, as was the working relationship they had to develop with their admin assistant and the young constable, the four of them rapidly becoming a good team. Switching the investigation from that seemingly lay-down scenario to a more messy, complicated, odd feeling set of testimonies and a young victim who may have more than a few skeletons in her own closet, happened seamlessly, as the detectives struggled to nail their obvious case to a suspect, and an arrest. The interactions between this small team were really the focus of this novel, pulling in a little of the personal, but really concentrating on the difficulties of how you recover a career from a mess of your own making whilst still doing the job itself.

All in all, the focus or structure of PACIFIC HEIGHTS felt different, and the end result was engaging reading, especially given it's not going to be too tricky for a reader to pick the suspect, their motive and a couple of very good theories as to how opportunity came about.

Ernest Cunningham is dying, in his own words, on the ice-cold floor of a steel box about the size of a fridge with, he's calculated, around fifteen hours of air left inside it. You'd think, under those circumstances, the dwindling ink in his pen would be put to good purpose, getting to the point, maybe sharing some messages for loved ones, some wisdom from his previous record of solving murders, anything but the story of a bank heist, well 10 bank heists to be precise. And a lot of information on exactly how he ended up in this predicament. But, being Ernest Cunningham, he also plays fair.

I was raised on a diet of Golden Age detective novels - the 'fair-play' mysteries where the clues are front and centre for the reader - which came in mighty handy when I found myself getting caught up in, and transcribing, real-life murders. I've always prided myself when I chronicled those three cases in my first three books, on being a reliable narrator. Everything I show is the truth, exactly how I saw it. The reader and the author solve the mystery together. There are no hidden facts or deliberate omissions.

Any readers who have encountered the first three novels in this series: EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE, EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT and EVERYONE THIS CHRISTMAS HAS A SECRET will attest to the fact that (with hindsight mostly) the author (be it Stevenson or Cunningham) has done just that. But that hindsight bit is the "clue" here. Don't know about any other readers, but the rides here are so hectic, so much fun, so multi-layered, and almost multidimensional, with interwoven timelines, suspects aplenty, complicated plots and epic levels of murder and mayhem, that I'm always struck at the end by what I missed and darn well should have seen at the time. I mean it is all there, but I suspect it will be only on the third or fourth reading of the books that you'll get all those ducks / clues / deaths / timelines / motivations / involvements and suspects lined up neatly. Notes may be required. A whiteboard came in handy here.

In EVERYBODY IN THIS BANK IS A THIEF, the blurb, to be fair again, does warn you up front

Ten suspects. Ten heists. A puzzle only Ernest Cunningham can solve.

So you know it's not a straightforward bank robbery, and you even know up front who the suspects are:

THE BANK ROBBER THE MANAGER THE SECURITY GUARD THE KID THE FILM PRODUCER THE PRIEST THE RECEPTIONIST THE PATIENT THE CARER ME

The complications come about as the various "heists" are identified, including (but oh so not limited to) a missing Manager's Brother, the past of this particular bank, the film that's based on Cunningham's earlier books, the reason Cunningham and his fiancée Juliette are even in this bank in the middle of nowhere, and some pretty spectacular and gruesome spontaneous combustions. The whole "mystery" hinges, unsurprisingly on the various connections amongst this cast of characters. Good luck pre-guessing any of those. Even better luck come the end of this highly entertaining and absolutely enthralling novel if there just isn't the occasional "clue" that you find yourself wondering how the bloody hell you missed it!

Book Five now in the Reggie da Costa series of historical crime fiction set in and around Melbourne (with some trips to Geelong incorporated in this one), THE WHITE FEATHER MURDERS really has cemented these novels as a favourite in these parts.

If you're new to the series, it really would be best to start out at the beginning, although in that first novel, Reggie isn't quite to the forefront nor quite as engaging as he later becomes. That's not to say that the first novel, THE DEATH MASK MURDERS, isn't a great introduction to this series as the historical setting, and sensibility is right there from the beginning.

A bit of background though for those that haven't read any of the books, Reggie is the senior crime reporter at Melbourne's Argus newspaper. He's a bit of an endearing dandy with a love of fine clothes, fast cars, and his hopelessly daft mother. Her social life, and messed up love life is an ongoing theme through these books, as is Reggie having to step in and fix things for her on an ongoing basis. As is the case again late in the action of THE WHITE FEATHER MURDERS.

The main cast now also includes brother and sister Ruby and Dusty Rhodes, who first appeared in book 3 in the series, A DEADLY GAME, when Ruby's twin sister disappeared and Reggie got involved in the search. Now engaged to Ruby and with Dusty as his sidekick reporter at The Argus, Reggie's got himself a very useful crew of allies with Ruby fearless, and Dusty dogged when it comes to chasing down leads, both committed to keeping Reggie, his mother, and the people they care about safe, whilst also solving baffling cases. This time it's multiple deaths that are connected by the white feathers left at the scene, and the scurrilous poison pen column regularly appearing in rival newspaper (and Dusty's previous workplace), The Truth. Add to that a corrupt and very dodgy policeman and things get very dangerous for life, limb and careers all round. All whilst the wedding of Reggie and Ruby gets closer if Reggie can make it in one piece.

It's a series that really does benefit from reading in publication order, simply because there's quite a bit of backstory to the personal and professional lives of these characters, although it shouldn't be a trial to work your way through them, nor would it be an absolute loss to start with this current release. There's a strong sense of history and place about these books, combining a lot of the Melbourne Underworld from the time (there's a strong thread about the death of Squizzy Taylor through this novel), the newspaper world (is it sad to mention that I'm old enough to remember The Truth and it's particular "style" of journalism - I mean hard to forget their headline at the time of Billy Sneddon's death....), and the way that society functioned at the time. In particular the expectations used to restrict and control women, the way an interstate move would be considered enough to escape a reputation for corruption, the lack of immediate communications, the amount of staking out, and physical running about to chase down leads or find out information.

At the core of it though is an interesting plot, with the lack of obvious connection between a very different set of victims, a firebrand president of the Melbourne Woman's Christian Temperance union, a drug addicted nurse, a hypocritical politician, a very dodgy doctor and a priest. Individually maybe targets, but what made the writer of an anonymous poison pen column hate them enough to expose them? What's the significance of the white feather thing? Can Reggie da Costa work it out before the killer disappears back into anonymity?

Mikael is a young man, half Finnish, half New Zealander, who never really knew his father, or the story of his mysterious death. In search of answers - about himself as well, he teams up with Pekka Wall, an acerbic editor and translator of famous science fiction novels, as eccentric as his oldest friend, Mikael Långberg, the brilliant theatre director who had died many years ago in questionable circumstances, during the final days of a notorious Cabaret production. Officially ruled a suicide, unofficially anybody who knew Mikael Senior did not easily accept that verdict.

In pursuit of the truth, young Mikael, and Pekka dig through (as the blurb puts it) layers of performance, paranoia, and betrayal to discover that the truth, and solving a murder aren't always comfortable bedfellows.

Right from the outset, THE BIRTHMARK MURDERS, isn't a straight-forward undertaking. The author deploys a lot of layering here, wrapped up in huge amounts of cultural and descriptive passages, that lend themselves to more immersive reading that might require an expectation switch on the part of some crime fiction readers. The humour is as dry and dark as you can get, redolent of the cultures that the novel inhabits. The prose is on the long-form side of storytelling, again, fitting with the idea of long, cold winters, hot fires, a glass or two, and some tales being drawn out from dark corners.

It's not the fastest read in the world, and there were some points that this reader, confronted as she is daily by an out of control MtTBR, really wished that a little judicious darling killing had been undertaken, but that's more about me than it is about this book. Once settling into the style and the direction the author was pulling me in, the novel is very different, and very engaging, whilst never pretending to be anything other than what the blurb says it is:

Darkly funny, emotionally layered, and rich with a Finnish atmosphere, The Birthmark Murders is a mystery that dances between satire and sorrow, theatre and truth, love and obsession. Prepare to laugh, flinch, and turn pages late into the night.

On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.

Teenagers from an exclusive boarding school, a deep dark English wood, myths of haunting, rituals and rumours, and Halloween combine in ONE DARK NIGHT to create a creepy, claustrophobic thriller that's steeped in family and community simmering tensions.

The story is told from three main viewpoints: School Counsellor Rachel, her ex-husband DC Ben Chase, and their rebellious teen daughter Ellie. Rachel works at Folly View College, an exclusive upmarket boarding school, is very recently divorced from Chase, who has a new girlfriend which is causing quite a bit of tension with Rachel and the fallout isn't helping teenager Ellie who is rebelling against her parents and the world in general.

The discovery of the body of one of Ellie's school friends, battered and broken at the bottom of a stone folly deep in the woods where the students were partying on Halloween doesn't help the family dynamic as Ellie's parents come to realise she's been keeping a lot of secrets from them, and Chase's investigation is complicated by the involvement of his fractured family in the school, and the group of teenagers who are integral to explaining what happened that night.

Tension then, a lot of of it of the domestic variety, a lot of it revolving around the school with a creepy caretaker and handsome art teacher to add to the mix and a bully and a troubled homeless recluse at the fringes. The storyline here is bolstered considerably by the creepy sense of place, creating an atmosphere that infects everything and everybody, well supported by a sense of pace that never quite allows the reader to settle, always pushing, always keeping the pieces of the plot moving deftly around the storyboard.

Whilst the mystery itself is well served by ONE DARK NIGHT, upon reflection, it's the underlying messages that have the most potency, not just that bullying and gaslighting exist, but how the online world can be used as a toolkit to find the vulnerable, hone the targeting, and manipulate the unaware and unwary.