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This week’s reviews include legal thrills, and locked-room spills, and calls-to-arms about our interactions with nature and the erosion of US democracy.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Proving Ground
Michael Connelly
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Mickey Haller is back. The LA-based defence attorney was introduced in Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), and has since been adapted into a film and a Netflix series. The latest twist in his career sees him move from the criminal courts into public-interest litigation – fighting a battle against tech bros and the unregulated training of AI. A chatbot has advised a 16-year-old boy that it’s fine to kill his ex-girlfriend for disloyalty – so, he does. Mickey brings a civil suit on behalf of the dead girl’s family, suing the company responsible for the chatbot. Journalist Jack McEvoy is along for the ride, hoping to write a book. He becomes a crucial part of Mickey’s investigation when the corporation tries to bury it with mountains of data. A whistleblower is dredged from the info dump, but the case is fraught with peril, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. This unregulated and unethical emerging industry stands to lose trillions if it loses, and Mickey must find a way to outmanoeuvre an opponent with serious money and legal muscle, and the power of superintelligence on its side. A new and topical courtroom thriller from one of the best in the biz.
Shred Sisters
Betsy Lerner
Verve, $34.99
Literary agent and memoirist Betsy Lerner (The Forest for the Trees, The Bridge Ladies) tackles sisterhood and mental illness with wry style in her debut novel. Olivia and Amy are chalk and cheese. Ollie’s extroverted and charismatic, with a chaotic sense of adventure; Amy is unconfident, shy, with a love of rules-based-order. They’re growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1970s and 80s, and when Ollie’s promise twists into mental illness no psychiatrist seems able to diagnose accurately, her family is left to cope with her erratic and destructive behaviour as best they can. As that behaviour takes dramatic turns for the worse, it takes its toll on them all. Most of the novel is written through the eyes of younger sister Amy, whose own life is nearly derailed by Ollie, and unfolds over decades with great economy and incisive observation of both the inextricable bond of sorority between the sisters, and the terrible suffering that can be inflicted on us by those we love. Lerner is loath to waste a single word, and the characterisation’s more intensely rendered for that. It’s a tragicomic, wise, emotionally complicated domestic novel that also immerses the reader in the shortcomings of period psychiatry.
Everyone in this Bank is a Thief
Bejamin Stevenson
Penguin, $34.99
Comedian Benjamin Stevenson has struck the motherlode of popular fiction, with HBO currently adapting the first of his Ernest Cunningham mysteries, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. The books are classic locked-room murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie mould, each with a superabundance of suspects and a devious puzzle for readers (and Ernest) to solve. The latest pits Ernest against bank robbers. He’s trapped in a bank with his fiancée Juliette. A boring loan application turns to high drama when the bank is struck, seemingly by crims responsible for a series of high-profile heists. It’s a hostage situation, and the race is on to find out who’s stealing what from whom before things get ugly. A bank robber with a disdain for money, a silent priest, a talking bird, and the bank’s staff are all under suspicion, in a caper that comes with a flurry of ingenious twists and a comedic nudge-and-wink to the reader.
Park Avenue
Renee Adhieh
Bedford Square, $32.99
With her adult debut, popular YA author Renee Adhieh has created a Korean-American thriller full of intrigue, danger, and money. Lots of money. Jia Song comes from a hard-working family of bodega owners. She’s always dreamt of unlimited wealth, and at 34, she’s well on the way. Assuming nothing goes wrong, she can expect to rake it in as a high-powered lawyer at an elite New York firm. Then, she’s introduced to the dysfunctional Parks – a family so rich they make the opulence of Crazy Rich Asians look low-rent – and becomes involved in a toxic dispute. The paterfamilias is divorcing his wife while she’s dying of cancer, and the Park children are outraged, convinced their father is hiding assets and trying to diddle their mother out of her rightful due in the divorce settlement. Jia is tasked with a globetrotting odyssey – travelling from New York and Seoul to the Caymans trying to track down the missing funds, only to be frustrated at every turn by bickering siblings and their billionaire father, who’s determined to thwart her efforts. Expect lavish luxury, poisonous personalities, and a corrupt conspiracy as this international legal thriller plays out.
The Girl with Ice in Her Veins
Karin Smirnoff
MacLehose, $32.99
Stieg Larsson started the Millennium series with the now iconic Scandi noir, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and completed three books before his sudden death from a heart attack in 2004. David Lagercrantz took up the pen for the next trilogy. Now it’s Karin Smirnoff’s turn, and The Girl with Ice in Her Veins brings the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, to another dark pass. Spring may have touched Sweden’s far north, but black operations are afoot in the small town of Gasskas. Multinational corporations are laying waste to the environment, with only committed activists like Lisbeth’s niece Sala taking a stand against their depredations. When a young journalist is murdered at a protest, another investigates, uncovering a scandal from which Lisbeth can’t turn a blind eye. A hacker friend of hers, Plague, has gone missing, and when Lisbeth discovers that she – and her niece Sala – are on an underworld hit list, she takes it as a declaration of war and arms herself accordingly. Faithful yet original, The Girl with Ice in Her Veins marks a new episode in a series that’s earned its place in the pantheon of contemporary crime classics.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
(Be)Wilder. Journeys in Nature
Darryl Jones
NewSouth, $32.99
In an abandoned wasteland, on a sign saying “Danger Keep Away”, sits an elegant bird called a wheatear. While in decline globally, the wheatears in this spot are thriving even though, as ecologist Darryl Jones observes, “there is little that is ‘natural’ about this place.” His message is two-fold. Firstly, that nature is more resilient than we imagine, and secondly, that to journey in nature you don’t have to go far from home. Although he recounts thrilling expeditions to remote wilderness in Borneo and conservation initiatives in wildlife reserves in Africa, the co-existence of humans and animals in urban environments is equally important to him. Whenever he visits somewhere new, he examines the roads from a creature’s eye view. What can be done to make it safer for the animals crossing them? His story of fauna overpasses is one of a number of heartening examples of how thoughtful planning and care can make a big difference. Jones is a beguiling storyteller with a flair for casting our responsibilities to the nonhuman world in a new light.
Fight Oligarchy
Bernie Sanders
Penguin, $19.99
“Trump and the Oligarchs” could be an amusing band name were the situation in the US not so dire. Early this year, Independent senator and activist Bernie Sanders began travelling America, urging people to join the fight against Trump and the billionaires who now run the country. This plain-speaking, urgent polemic lays bare the truth about the small number of extremely wealthy people controlling the political system, the economy and the media. The concentration of corporate power is breathtaking. For example, three huge firms are the largest shareholders in the main car manufacturing companies, oil companies and pharmaceutical companies in the US. Billionaires are rewarded with tax breaks while the position of ordinary Americans becomes ever more precarious as Trump undermines Social Security and the unions. Fight Oligarchy is a rousing call to action that outlines what needs to be done to fix the broken system and how citizens alarmed by the erosion of democracy can make a difference.
Pleasure and Pain
Chrissy Amphlett with Larry Writer
Hachette, $24.99
From prim little ballerina to surfer girl to unruly rocker in a school tunic. Chrissy Amphlett’s path to stardom mightn’t have been smooth, but her ambition was unwavering. Her onstage persona as frontwoman for The Divinyls, her unique voice and raw lyrics marked her as one of a kind in the Australian music scene of the 1980s and 90s. Living with MS later in life, Amphlett was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. Before it felled her, she made I Touch Myself an “anthem for breast health worldwide” says her husband Charley Drayton in a postscript to this updated version of her autobiography. Amphlett doesn’t spare herself as she tells of the manic creative energy that propelled her and the wild and thoughtless behaviour it sometimes engendered. The memories of bandmates, ex-manager, friends and family inserted into the text fill out the picture of Amphlett as gutsy, incandescent, uncompromising and sometimes downright scary, especially if you were an audience member foolish enough to heckle her.
Poems & Prayers
Matthew McConaughey
Headline, $36.99
Actor Matthew McConaughey began writing poems in a bathtub on the central coast of NSW as an unhappy 18-year-old exchange student. It was his way of making sense of what was going on his life, and he’s been doing it ever since. The poems and prayers in this collection still exude a quality of teenage angst as they grope for meaning and purpose in self-described ditties that rhyme. Although McConaughey was also reading Byron in that bathtub, he is not one for literary language, preferring down home, straight-talking with irregular rhythms that suggests song lyrics rather than formal poetry. As such, this is not a book for literature students. But for those for whom sentiment and candour are more important than style. And there are even moments of humour: ‘God,/ forgive me, I’m trying./ And God replied,/ “Thank you, I would rather you arrive/ late to my house sweating, in a pair/ of runners and a hoodie, than arrive/ early elsewhere in a tuxedo” ’
Just Saying
Hugh Mackay
Allen & Unwin, $24.99
Meaningful sayings can be like guiding stars. They don’t contain the whole cosmos, but they do help illuminate it. The 25 adages that Hugh Mackay ponders in this collection are necessarily idiosyncratic, a reflection of his taste and values. Some he has chosen to take issue with, such as Socrates “The unexamined life is not worth living” because it harshly judges those who can’t afford the luxury of navel-gazing. Others, he fleshes out to reveal as more complex than they appear. Karl Marx said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people.” As Mackay notes, the full quote is much more nuanced than the dismissive-sounding, truncated version we’re all familiar with. Perhaps the most satisfying meditation is on the quote attributed to the Buddha, “Change is never painful; only the resistance to change is painful.” This paradox contains the tension that governs our lives and Mackay does it justice.
