Stiff - Softcover

Shane Maloney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1877008494 ISBN 13: 9781877008498

Publisher: Text Publishing Company, 2003

Synopsis

Murray Whelan thinks the everyday life of a political advisor is complicated enough: but now there are intimations of intrigue among the party powerful and his ex-wife is mounting a custody battle over his beloved son. So when you throw in a Turk snap-frozen in a local meat plant, drugs planted under the bed, fascist funeral rites, a killer car and blood-sucking parasites, things are suddenly spinning wildly out of control. That's when red-hot Ayisha knocks on the door...

About this title

About the Author

As a result of references in Stiff to a mythical figure in Turkish folklore called Hodja, Shane Maloney was invited by the Turkish Ministry of Culture to give a speech in Ankara on the influence of Hodja on Australian literature. And he did. He is the author of five novels, and once worked as Peter Cook's minder. He lives in Australia.

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: Text Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1877008494
• ISBN 13: 9781877008498
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224