Death in the Faculty: Crime & Academia

This Melbourne Sisters in Crime event on 22 July 2016 was a sell-out – and included a big turn out from the academy, with at least five professors in attendance. The debate about the long-standing relationship between crime fiction and academia was led by Sue Turnbull, a Professor in Media and Communications, University of Wollongong …

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Carmel Shute to be honoured at Ned Kelly Awards

  The NED KELLY AWARDS shortlist has been announced along with the news that this year the Australian Crime Writers Association will honour our very own Carmel Shute with a Lifetime Achievement Award. As we all know, Carmel – a founder and longest-serving National Co-Convener of Sisters in Crime Australia – has spent a quarter of a …

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Out of the Ice – Ann Turner

Review by Suzanne Bozorth-Baines Simon and Shuster 2016 Synopsis When environmental scientist Laura Alvarado is sent to a remote Antarctic island to report on an abandoned whaling station, she begins to uncover more than she could ever imagine. Reminders of the bloody, violent past are everywhere, and Laura is disturbed by evidence of recent human …

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Smoke and Mirrors – Robin Bowles

Review by Suzanne Bozorth-Baines Echo Publishing 2015 Synopsis It is a tragedy and a love story as well as a murder – the story of how celebrated interior designer Stuart Rattle met his untimely death, killed by his beloved and loving partner, Michael O’Neill. The bizarre circumstances were the talk of Melbourne society, design circles, …

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Solved! The case of Mary Fortune, the pioneering crime writer who vanished

Lucy Sussex, a literary historian, novellist and a long-time member of Sisters in Crime, has solved the mystery of where pioneering crime writer, Mary Fortune, is buried. Jason Steger, The Age’s literary editor, reports: (Courtesy of Fairfax Media.) Sometimes the biggest mysteries have the simplest solutions. That’s certainly the truth in the case of the …

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Tinder dry fiction: Q&A with Jane Harper

Q&A. Jane Harper has had a meteoric rise as a crime novelist. Last year, she won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and, The Dry, her first novel, was published by Pan Macmillan in June. Rights have already been sold to over twenty territories and it has been optioned for a film …

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Psychiatry and Crime

ANNE BUIST: My first venture into crime was a six-month stint at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre – a maximum security prison for women. As the prison psychiatrist, not an inmate. This would have been not long after it opened in 1996. A modern low rise sprawl of buildings behind security fences in a desolate …

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Wildman – Alecia Simmonds

Affirm Press 2015 Review by Suzanne Bozorth-Baines Synopsis n April 2012 a man was shot dead by police on a remote farm in New South Wales called the School of Happiness. The victim, who was high on a cocktail of drugs and who suffered from mental illness, had been threatening attendees of a hippie festival …

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A Guide to Berlin – Gail Jones

Random House Australia 2015 Review by Suzanne Bozorth-Baines Synopsis A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way to the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep …

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