Is a dead body the easy option to spice up a lacklustre plot? Could a novelist be papering over the cracks in their book by flipping the switch to murder mystery?
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I've certainly wondered, but reviewer Hanne Melgaard Watkins assured me this week it wasn't the case in Holden Sheppard's The Brink, a new young adult novel published by Text.
But she couldn't give the rest away - so you'll have to read the book.
That's not the only body that turns up this week. Vera - you know her from the television crime series - has to piece together what's happened after a kind of school reunion goes horribly wrong.
And Karen Hardy speaks to Vikki Petraitis, the true crime author who's turned her hand to a novel.
We reviewed her book, The Unbelieved, last week.
Petraitis says, "It was a refreshing change to seek justice within the pages of fiction, because in real life, it's much harder to find," she says. "When you live in the world that I live in, where you are writing about these things all the time, to fictionalise it, there was this sense of hope, which sometimes isn't there in real life."
Read the interview here.
And if you're in Canberra, you can see Petraitis at an ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author event in conversation with Chris Hammer at 6pm on August 29. Registrations at anu.edu.au/events
You can find all the books we've reviewed this week below. And I welcome your thoughts and feedback on what we've been reading. You can reach me by email at jasper.lindell@canberratimes.com.au
You know her from TV. Now read Vera in action in this gripping novel.
Brenda Blethyn has played Ann Cleeves' detective Vera on television for more than a decade now, and even Cleeves admits, "I do have Brenda in my head now when I write".
Our reviewer Anna Creer considers Cleeves' new novel, The Rising Tide (Macmillan, $34.99) this week.
"The Rising Tide, the 10th in the Vera Stanhope series, is set on Lindisfarne, Holy Island, off the Northumberland coast, linked to the mainland by a causeway but isolated twice a day by the rising tide," Creer writes.
"Fifty years ago a small group of sixth form students, led by an idealistic young English teacher, Miss Marshall, had come to the island for a weekend course called Only Connect, part Outward Bound, part encounter group, part team-building session."
But when they return five decades on, secrets threaten to unravel and one of their group turns up dead. As Creer writes, what more could you want in a crime novel?
Does Big History bite off more than it can chew in an account of everything?
Big History is a compelling idea: a coherent narrative of absolutely everything, ever.
David Baker's The Shortest History of the World (Black Inc, $24.99) takes on this challenge.
But as our reviewer David Ferrell discovers, there's a danger in trying to explain too much in not enough pages.
"Baker's explanations are however liable to be so reduced as to be undefended - reliant upon an audience's willingness to be amazed, and their faith in the author's scientific authority," Ferrell writes.
Still, there's much to be said for a book that inspires people to look more deeply at the world around them - and think about how it works.
Five teens and what no one needs: a dead body
William Golding's Lord of The Flies (Faber) is one of those books that has become a broad cultural touchstone - perhaps even bigger than its actual readership.
Hanne Melgaard Watkins wasn't sure whether Holden Sheppard's The Brink (Text, $24.99) needed Lord of the Flies-style antics - the sense that violence only lingers very slightly beneath the surface once there are no adults in charge - but she was proven otherwise.
"We meet the main characters of The Brink while they are driving together to Leavers. The dynamic in the LandCruiser is a microcosm of the week as it plays out: Nerdy Leonardo is panicking but trying to hide it. Footy jock Mason is goofballing, drinking, and secretly lusting after his best mate. High-achiever Kaiya is too practical for her own good, too practical to be the type of friend Valentina needs her to be. And Val is taking selfies and clinging to Jared: her boyfriend, their driver, the volatile sun at the centre of everyone's orbit," Melgaard Watkins writes in her review.
This story, set in that formative summer right after the end of high school, comes highly recommended.
Poetry that moves in unanticipated, yet rewarding, directions
Geoff Page praises Lisa Gorton's latest collection of poetry, Mirabilia (Giramondo, $25).
Page writes that the collection "cleverly and movingly takes its readers in some unanticipated and strangely rewarding directions".
Gorton takes aim at the spoilt nature of some luminous male poets, what Page says is a telling satire.
"By her own admission, the 'poem combines quotes from Wikipedia biographies of the poets and, sometimes, of their mothers'. Their cumulative impact, however, is devastating," Page writes in his review.
Facing off with digital Godzillas in the book trade
The book trade - which was going along happily enough before the disruption of the internet - has faced challenges not seen since moveable type was invented.
So Colin Steele discovers in his review of John B. Thompson's Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, $61.95).
But some absurdities remain as publishers face the commercial realities of publishing in the 21st century - a much more complicated place for books.
"I once asked a young ANU academic if she was concerned that her first book was priced at nearly $200 and would be bought and read by few people. She ruefully replied that the priority of university research metrics was more counting the physical publication of the book itself than the effective distribution of its content," Steele writes.
Innocence lost when a school girl goes missing
In Dirt Town (Macmillan, $32.99), Karen Hardy writes of Hayley Scrivenor's new novel, schoolgirl Esther Bianchi goes missing and her father is the first suspect, as the secrets of the small outback town of Durton are revealed one by one.
"Scrivenor joins the ranks of Jane Harper, Sarah Bailey, Emma Viskic, Shelley Burr and Vikki Petraitis, among so many others, whose novels bring a unique perspective to a story," Hardy writes.
Scrivenor says: "We think of childhood as quite an innocent time but, in my experience, I think children are very aware of what's going on, even if they don't always have the language to express it or communicate it."