100 Books Like Messy Business

Tiverton, the setting for this book, is a typical outback small town—derelict houses, one pub, a harsh landscape, and a policeman back in uniform after a corruption scandal back in the big city. Hirsch’s patrol area is huge and he’s often as much a social worker as a police officer. He’s an outcast in all senses of the word, but his dogged determination to do his job right leads him into all sorts of trouble. I love the setting, the endless roads, the eccentricities of people living in the back of nowhere, and the murder mystery that takes you where you (and Hirsch) least expect it.

This is a story about women who are afraid to report rape and a female detective who is determined to change this.

Detective Antigone Pollard arrives at her small Australian hometown and is the victim of an attempted rape. She discovers that her boss and the other men in the town are protecting her assailant, as they have protected wife-beaters and rapists in the past.

I loved Antigone’s determination to change the poisonous town culture and to ensure her assailant is charged. One of the best moments in the story is when the browbeaten women of the town turn on their abusers. 

I love a good historical crime novel that’s set within a time I almost remember. It’s 1966 and Mick Goodenough arrives in Moorabool, demoted and depressed to be back. We all know killers often start by killing animals, so a dead, tortured dog raises Mick’s alert level, even though it’s dismissed by the other cops. A lone woman starts receiving weird, whistling phone calls and from there, the tension gradually racks up. Mick Goodenough has all the qualities I enjoy in a detective—intelligence, good hunches, and he loves his dogs.

I’ve never been to Broome in northwest Australia, but it’s renowned for the heat, the flies, and the beaches—but look out for crocodiles. I enjoyed Warner’s previous novel based on a series of murders in Perth in the 90s that, back then, had never been solved, so it was great to see his two detectives get together on a case that eventually circles back to the Perth killings. There’s something about the past catching up with us that I enjoy as a plot and character strength, and this book moves between past and present really effectively. The landscape is so barren that it’s almost like being on another planet!

Every Australian bookish girl knows Sybylla from My Brilliant Career. She is the original feisty heroine, the unashamed young feminist who rejects the isolation and low expectations of the bush and marriage at the turn of the twentieth century, wanting to strike out on her own as a writer. That her yearnings are so irrelevant to those around her and her ambitions unfulfilled act as a dare to all of us, and to me – to have that brilliant career, to tell your truths and have your independence, whether anyone else likes it or not. Equally as vivid, witty, and socially acute as Twain, if you read only one old and dusty novel about Australia, read this one.

Dyschronia is strange, complicated, overwhelming, frightening, and occasionally enervating – just like climate change. Jen Mills tells the story of a young woman in a small, dying town who can’t stop seeing horrible futures; or, perhaps, the story of a young woman who compulsively lies. You won’t forget the compelling and sickening scene of a town waking up to find the ocean has disappeared. This one is worth wrapping your brain around.

This may seem an odd choice, but many British who migrated to Australia subsequently returned to Britain and some, nicknamed ‘boomerang migrants,’ had lives of to and fro between Australia and Britain. I’ve chosen it because the experiences of migrants who don’t settle but either return or migrate onwards are often missing from histories. In Ten Pound Poms, the voices of people who returned or boomeranged are prominent, talking about intense homesickness, but also about a kind of reverse homesickness since the place they return to doesn’t match the way they imagined it while they were away and has changed during their absence. The book reminds us that people’s attachment to particular places and landscapes and soundscapes can be powerful, and that migration often involves complex feelings of belonging and unbelonging.

Kaaron is a heavy-hitting award winner and a regular in Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, and here are over two dozen reasons why.

Her stories hum with a dark, merciless truth that makes their often-outlandish nature all the more believable; the worlds we find here are weird indeed, the peoples who populate them lonely and unsatisfied, the fates that await them uncaring and memorable.

But the writing is far from dour, imbued with a wry humour and implacable intelligence, and while it ranges unrestrained across bizarre horror, grim fantasy, and deeply personal SF, Kaaron is always entirely in control.

Lend her your attention and she won’t steer you wrong – her imagination and integrity have been an inspiration to me for many years.

When Daniel Roke takes on an unusual job he does it for monetary and personal reasons and has no idea he is risking his life. Dick Francis takes you from Australia to the world of English horseracing with a clever plot that is unexpected and has a really wicked twist. He also can deliver some villains that inspire visceral dislike like no other author and doesn’t let you down in this intense novel. Well done and kept me doing the infamous reading into the night.

Finally, a book with WWII letters that doesn’t focus exclusively on the British or Americans! Some of the soldiers are also from Australia, New Zealand, and even Germany! It helps to have a broader view of the conflict and it is very interesting to observe the differences in points of view. Moreover, this book provides the reader with beautiful photos of the letter writers, in addition to their names and stories before and after the war. Unfortunately, there is little or no historical context surrounding each letter, which is not disturbing when one is already familiar with the subject but is essential to understand all their subtleties.