Book review: Tamam Shud, by Kerry Greenwood (Amazon / Book Depository) In December 1948, my dad told me, the body of a man was found at the bottom of the steps on Somerton Beach. He was clean, manicured, well-nourished and well-dressed and had no visible wounds. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing all... Continue Reading →
Dark, Darker, and Darkest: A Journalist Lights Up the Dark Web
Book review: The Darkest Web, by Eileen Ormsby (Amazon / Book Depository) In The Darkest Web, Australian lawyer and journalist Eileen Ormsby breaks down "the internet's evil twin" into three levels of badness: dark, darker, and darkest. I have spent the past five years exploring every corner of the dark web, one of the few who is... Continue Reading →
25 Years of a Mysterious Australian Cold Case
Book review: The Phillip Island Murder, by Vikki Petraitis and Paul Daley (Amazon / Book Depository / ebook available directly from Clan Destine Press) Listening through back episodes of the eerie and excellent Australian true crime podcast Casefile, I came across one that featured such a perplexing story: that of the 1986 murder of 23-year-old Beth... Continue Reading →
A Cancer Con Exposes the Sick Side of “Wellness”
Book review: The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano Amazon The front cover of the book whispered of a back-to-basics approach to wellness, lifestyle and nutrition. Of course, Gibson had no expertise in any such area. But that didn't matter. Her credentials were listed in the first words of the... Continue Reading →
A Darkly Funny, Sweet Coming-of-Age Story Between Two Countries
Book review: Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, by Sofija Stefanovic Amazon My mother said, "just imagine this situation we're in is a massive black cloud falling from the sky, and be like a net. Allow it to pass through you." I pictured a net through which a black cloud is squeezed, dispersing into many pieces; I imagined holding... Continue Reading →
Cleaning the Pain of Others’ Lives With Lessons Learned From Her Own
Book review: The Trauma Cleaner, by Sarah Krasnostein (Amazon / SecondSale.com) This is how it ends, sometimes, with strangers in gloves looking at your blood and your too-many bottles of shampoo and your now-ironic Make Positive Changes postcard of Krishna and the last TV channel you flipped to on the night you died and the... Continue Reading →
Drowning in the past
Book review: The Drowned Man, by Brendan James Murray (Amazon / Book Depository) A chance meeting in a fish and chip shop with a veteran sailor of the WWII battle cruiser HMAS Australia was the catalyst that eventually led to this extensively, even exhaustively, researched story. Brendan James Murray encounters an elderly man who proudly... Continue Reading →