Stiff: A Murray Whelan Mystery - Softcover

Maloney, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611458099 ISBN 13: 9781611458091

Publisher: Arcade, 2014

Synopsis

Don’t you just hate it when someone tries to kill you and you don’t know why?

Single father Murray Whelan thinks the life of a parent and political operative is complicated enough. His ex is staking out the moral high ground for a custody battle, and rumors of an early election are starting to fly in the upper echelons of Australia’s Labor party. When a Turk is found snap-frozen in a local meat plant, Murray cops the job to head off possible fallout for his boss, Charlene Wills, a member of Parliament and the Minister for Industry. But the meat industry smells decidedly fishy when Murray starts asking too many questions. Suddenly things are spinning fatally out of control as he finds himself the object of an elaborate intimidation plot: drugs planted under the bed, fascist funeral rites, a killer car, and bloodsucking parasites. That’s when red-hot Ayisha, the Turkish Welfare League’s answer to activism, knocks on his door.

Stiff brings back the wisecracking ace of reluctant detectives in a mystery that is fast, furious, and very, very funny.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

About this title

From the Author:

Shane Maloney, winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction, is also the author of The Brush-Off, Nice Try, and The Big Ask. He is a newspaper columnist in Melbourne.

From Kirkus Reviews:

It's no skin off Murray Whelan's nose when gargantuan Ekrem Bayraktar, shift supervisor at the Pacific Pastoral meat-packing plant in Coolaroo, is found squeezed among the higher-grade meats in Pacific's #3 freezer. But when you're the electorate officer serving the constituents of Charlene Wills, Australia's Minister for Industry, you never know which constituents may need service. Soon, Charlene's Machiavellian adviser Angelo Agnelli is hissing that Murray (The Brush-Off, 1998) needs to investigate the possibility of labor discontents at the Pacific Pastoral plant in order to keep rising municipal councillor Joe Collicato from challenging Charlene. It's a circuitous route to an investigation, but once Murray discovers that Bayraktar's crew included the Turkish equivalents of Robert Redford and Santa Claus, nothing can pull him off the scentnot his impending divorce and child-custody suit; not his budding friendship with Ayisha Celik, of the Australian Turkish Welfare League; not the episodes in which his house gets broken into and he nearly gets run down by somebody driving Bayraktar's car; and certainly not the unsought and comically premature confession he hears to Bayraktar's murder. Americans willing to take in the dirty linen of the political system Down Under will come away with a middling mystery, some finely honed action scenes, and an earful of Maloney's lovely epitomes of the Australian Labor Party, ``an organization which, next to itself, loves the working man best.'' -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1611458099
• ISBN 13: 9781611458091
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240