Clan Destine Press Blog — Book Reviews

The Attackby Catherine Jinks Publisher/Year: Text Publishing/2021Entry in The Davitt Awards 2022 Publisher description Robyn Ayres works as the camp caretaker on Finch Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Queensland. Her current clients are a group of ex-military men who run a tough-love program for troubled teens. The latest crop looks like the usual mix of bad boys and sad boys. Then Robyn takes a second look at a kid called Darren. Last time she saw him his name was Aaron, and Robyn was his primary school teacher. And she was somehow at the centre of a...

A freezer full of body parts is the tip of the criminal iceberg for intrepid Western Australian Detective Inspector Eve Rock. Butchered bodies and their questionable use; a murdered man in a skip; a brazen multi-million-dollar haul from a safety deposit facility; thefts from a high-end jewellers and art galleries… All in day’s work for Eve and her team. The festive season has spawned a spate of bizarre crimes which, at least, reassures Eve that others’ bad habits far exceed her own. It also gives her a watertight excuse to avoid her dysfunctional family, and to spend time with her...

By Narrelle M Harris To celebrate the upcoming Clan Destine Press book History Bones by Lee Harper and Atlin Merrick, I'm sharing my review of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. One of two dozen subjects in the upcoming History Bones, Frances Glessner Lee crafted detailed dioramas of unsolved crimes, dioramas still used to train Baltimore police detectives. Here I review a fascinating book about Lee's 'Nutshell Studies.' I first saw Corinne May Botz’s book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. It is a collection of art photos taken of Frances Glessner Lee’s dollhouse recreations of murder scenes. The dioramas were...

By Narrelle M Harris It’s always fabulous to have new zombie fiction set in Australia, and it’s ten times as grand when the zombie fiction in question has as much personality, drama and heart as Alison Evans’ new YA book, Highway Bodies. The story is divided into three-chapter sections: the first from the point of view of a teen near the epicentre of the zombie outbreak; the second from a group of young musicians taking a week away in the country to work on songs; the third a pair of non-identical twins whose mother is a nurse at a hospital...