Foreign Bodies

Critic Stephen Miller goes globetrotting for his latest review in January Magazine, tackling a couple of crime-fiction works from arguably opposite ends of the earth.

The first is Adrian Hyland’s Moonlight Downs (which, under its original title, Diamond Dove, won a Ned Kelly Award last year). It focuses on Emily Tempest, “a half-Aboriginal roustabout” who returns home to the Australian Outback, only to become involved in the murder of her surrogate father, tribal leader Lincoln Flinders--a seeming victim of organ harvesting. Miller knocks Hyland for his heavy application of atmospherics, “so thick that not one but two glossaries are in the front of this book.” However, he finds in Tempest a protagonist worth getting to know better. “She’s tough as nails and vulnerable to a fault,” he writes, “not a bad combination for an intriguing amateur sleuth.”

No matter Moonlight Downs’ strengths, though, Miller still prefers The Fourth Man, by K.O. Dahl. Introducing Oslo, Norway, Detective Inspector Frank Frolich, “a sad sack of a man with little going for him other than work,” Dahl’s tale finds Frolich becoming obsessively involved with a woman named Elisabeth Faremo--only to discover that her brother is a chief suspect “in the murder of a young security guard working at an abandoned warehouse.” Complications increase in number when Elisabeth disappears, “after first providing her brother with an alibi for the warehouse crime--an alibi that is more than merely suspect, since Frolich knows she was with him at the time, instead.”

You will find Miller’s review of both novels here.

By the way, author Dahl is blogging all this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. All of his posts can be found here.