Kittyhawk Down - Hardcover

Disher, Garry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569473943 ISBN 13: 9781569473948

Publisher: Soho Crime, 2005

Synopsis

"Taut and terrific, Kittyhawk Down is crime fiction at its best."-The Age

"Compelling and atmospheric."-The Weekend Australian

"A dark, absorbing read."-Australian Booksellers & Publishers

"[An] excellent thriller."-Melbourne Weekly

Homicide detectives spend their working lives around murderers, but rarely are they related to one. Inspector Challis' wife is that exception. She is serving a long term for an attempted murder because she tried to kill her husband: Hal Challis. It's given him new insights into the criminal mind, and also enormous pain. But he's moved on, dating a newspaper editor he's taken with and making friends. Two crimes interrupt. A two-year-old girl has gone missing, and an unidentified man is fished out of the sea at Bushrangers Bay. A second murder cuts into his life. This time, it's a friend, a woman who ran an aerial photography service. Her work provides the clues linking the crimes.

Garry Disher is the author of over 40 books for adults and children. His crime fiction includes numerous anthology stories and the Wyatt novels, including Kickback, winner of the 2000 German Critics Prize for Crime Fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Garry Disher is the author of over forty books for adults and children. His crime fiction includes numerous anthology stories and the Wyatt novels, including Kickback, winner of the 2000 German Crime Fiction Critics Prize. The first in his Detective Inspector Challis murder mystery series, The Dragon Man, won the German Crime Fiction Critics Prize in 2001. Chain of Evidence

Reviews

In Australian author Disher's gripping second police procedural (after 2004's The Dragon Man), Melbourne homicide detective Hal Challis contends with the pressure of two unsolved murders and his inability to sever all ties with his wife, Angela, who years earlier was convicted of conspiring to have him killed by her lover and remains a suicidal prison inmate. Challis's current relationship with journalist Tessa Kane gets put on hold after his wandering eye fixes on Janet "Kitty" Casement, an aerial photographer. When someone threatens Kitty's life, Challis enlists his team to probe a maze of connections involving a loan shark and a letter-writing crank known as the Meddler. As the story neatly advances from the viewpoints of characters both major and minor, Disher artfully employs misdirection to conceal the identity of the criminal targeting the photographer. Even unsympathetic figures like the Meddler and a lecherous, reactionary police officer come across as three-dimensional. While Disher is not yet in the same league as a Peter Robinson or an Ian Rankin, fans of those authors will find much to like in this dark whodunit. Agent, Jenny Darling (Australia). (July 6)
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Procedural fans looking for something a little different will devour this one. It's the second Detective Inspector Hal Challis mystery (originally published in the author's native Australia), and it finds Challis embroiled in another case involving murder, murder, and more murder. Disher, who has been writing crime novels for almost two decades, has the procedural form down cold, but he adds enough dark overtones to elevate the series into the Ian Rankin league. (Challis' wife, for example, is currently in prison, serving time for being an accessory to attempted murder--the intended victim being Challis himself.) Unlike Rankin's Rebus novels, or any of the other noir-tinged procedurals, the Challis tales do not take place in an urban setting. In Disher's hands, however, the rural Australian backdrop generates plenty of its own menace. Tell procedural devotees to take a break from the familiar American and British mean streets and sample a little noir under the Australian sun. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Crime
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569473943
• ISBN 13: 9781569473948
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288