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Whispering Death Garry Disher Text Publishing 2011 |
From the publisher's page:
Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour.
But there's plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis's Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that's a little too close to home. Not to mention a very clever, very mysterious female cat burglar who may or may not be planning something on Challis's patch.
Meanwhile, at the Waterloo Police Station, Challis finds his offsiders have their own issues. Scobie Sutton, still struggling with his wife's depression, seems to be headed for a career crisis; and something very interesting is going on between Constable Pam Murphy and Jeanne Schiff, the feisty young sergeant on secondment from the Sex Crimes Unit.
In his sixth Peninsula murder mystery, Garry Disher keeps the tension and intrigue ramped up exquisitely on multiple fronts, while he takes his regular characters in compelling new directions. Disher is a grand master of the police procedural, operating at the peak of his craft.
Reviews
Sue Turnbull in "The Age": "Disher is a fine writer about place and also people. Challis, in all his testiness and kindness, is a carefully crafted senior policeman in charge of a disparate group of juniors, each of whom has their moment in the spotlight as they go about the business of policing.
The business this time includes the spraying of derogatory comments on the ostentatious gateposts of the nouveau riche (''A cashed-up bogan lives here''), a bank hold-up and a devious female cat burglar who almost runs away with the show (shades of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander?)."
Bernard Carpinter in "New Zealand Listener": "...double Ned Kelly Award-winner Garry Disher brings all this [story] to vivid life with great characterisation, dialogue and plot movement, and a fair amount of shrewd wit. Excellent."
Graeme Blundell in "The Australian": "Disher works like a biographer, calmly attempting to assemble order in his characters' chaotic lives. Disher cares about their interlinked worlds as much as he does about labyrinthine plots, fetishised violence and the showy brainwork of his coppers. As always this grand master propels us methodically yet elegiacally."
"Mysteries in Paradise" weblog: "WHISPERING DEATH affirms that Garry Disher is a master storyteller, a tight and consummate plotter, a writer who could sit on any international podium along with richer and more famous crime fiction writers."
Karen on the "CrimeSpace" weblog: "WHISPERING DEATH is written in that beautifully dry, laconic style that Disher has bought to these police procedurals. He also does such a great line in caustic social commentary - be it in Challis having a go about politicians or to the nature of the graffiti showing up on those enormous (perfectly ridiculous really) property entrances that seem to have become the scourge of the tree / sea change areas. Graffiti with a social conscience and a particularly fine sense of the humour."
Bernadette on the "Fair Dinkum Crime" weblog: "Sometimes in fiction long-running characters feel like they're in a kind of suspended animation so that each time we meet them they're having the same problems (such as an unresolved sexual tension between two characters). Disher allows his regular characters to move on in their professional and personal lives in a way that is very natural and more satisfying for the reader, though it probably means the author has to work harder to find new sources of suspense and tension in each story."
"Australian Crime Fiction Database" weblog: "Suffice it to say that it is a very solid police procedural novel that crime fans will enjoy immensely. I am a little biased because I have enjoyed the previous Peninsula mysteries and am a long-time Disher fan."
Other
You can read the first chapter of the novel on the author's website.
