The Age
The paper has not been very good at putting its book reviews on its website. If they do appear they do so very late in the week. Which partly explains the lateness of this week's entry. Sue Turnbull on Fan Mail by P.D. Martin, which is "... the third and best book in this series so far, picking up where The Murderer's Club left off. This is an interesting gambit, suggesting that Martin conceives her books less as a set of stand-alone investigations, and more as an episodic serial. The experience of reading Fan Mail will therefore be comletely different for those who have read The Murderer's Club compared with those who haven't, since a piece of vital information will be available to the former that is withheld from the latter." And on "The Tattooed Man, Alex Palmer's second novel to feature Sydney-based senior policeman Paul Harrigan and his now lover, Grace Riordan, is a worthy successor to the multi-award winning Blood Redempton."
Michael McGirr on Addition by Toni Jordan and Vinyl Inside by Rachel Matthews: "Both these first novels charm their way past readers' defences. They have such honest affection for their characters that it becomes hard to resist two writers with sufficient wit and imagination to put a smle on some tangled situations."
Peter Craven on The Formalesque by Bernard Smith: "Bernard Smith is one of the titans of the academic world and he has done much to establish the systematic study of art history in this country...He is also, in a complex way, rather more than an art critic and this is some testament to the grandeur of his achievement. He is an academic of the academics, a great scholar as well as a great critic and a historian in anyone's book - and by the most exacting scholarly standards."
