Gabrielle Lord

Wow! I have just finished this book and I am blown away by it. The front cover has a quote from Sunday Age 'As good as Patricia Cornwell'. Well, from my perspective, Gabrielle Lord is 10 times better than Patricia Cornwell. I can't understand why her books are not more widely known if this is an example of her craft.

Harry Doyle is a cop who used to be in Homicide but now works with police dogs tracking criminals and finding drugs. His personal life is in shambles with his wife having an show more affair, his older daughter staying out and carrying on with a married man and his younger daughter arranging to meet someone she has been chatting with on the internet. He continues to work but one dog is killed as he helps stake out a house where there has been a report of screams and shots. The woman in the house was murdered but the perp has disappeared. Then Harry is called into the country to help investigate a murder. And from evidence collected it is concluded that the same person was responsible for both murders. Harry decides to get back into the homicide business and investigate so he is away from home when his younger daughter goes missing.

We slowly learn more about Harry and his wife throughout the book. Harry is a very complex character who has kept a lot of things hidden from his wife. In turn, she has encouraged the secretiveness by being overly critical and demanding. So, as they work through the crises that face them, they are also realizing their parts in the disintegration of the marriage.

I was on tenterhooks for most of this book and the suspense continues right up to the end.

The descriptions of the Australian land and its fauna and flora were an additional delight. show less

Conspiracy 365 is a series of 12 novels, released one per month, following the story of 15 year old Callum Ormond. Callum's life is turned upside down after the death of his father from a mysterious virus. Before his death his father has provided clues to the mystery of his virus, and whatever it is in the background of the family that Callum needs to know about, but it's not until he is directly threatened himself that he's forced to find the answer.

These books are targeted at kids between show more 10 and 15 and whilst they are obviously meant specifically for young boys, they would work equally well for girls. But we were lucky enough to receive January-May as review books, and we're definitely going to be going out and buying the rest of the year as they become available. We're both reading these books, so we'll both be commenting on them giving the girl and boy perspective (albeit from people "slightly" older than the target group!).

From Him:

Conspiracy 365 is an interesting approach to young adult fiction, combining a web site with competitions and previews and a monthly release of a novel in serialised form. Each novel ends in a cliff hanger which, by the chat on the website, has been an outstanding success in getting readers hooked onto the story.

The story follows Callum being chased by a number of groups all intent on discovering some secret, although Callum himself is trying at the same time to figure out what the secret is they all want.

In the January instalment, Callum finds himself almost drowned after a boating accident, kidnapped, and a fugitive after being wrongly accused of an attack on his family. So Callum, with only his friend Boges believing him, hides out and tries to put the scant facts together about the Ormond family history and what it means to Callum and his family today.

There was only one technical issue in this that I had a problem with, and that was the use of the mobile phone. I kept wondering why the police did not trace Callum via his mobile, or at least get access to his call record to figure out he was in constant contact with his friend. In an otherwise brilliant story, this kept nagging at me.

From Her:

This series is a very interesting, layered idea, obviously designed to try to make reading more appealing to media-savy consumers - particularly boys. The novels are supported by a website, membership cards, online media and so on. Regardless of the supporting environment, the quality of the story-telling has to hold up in order to grab and keep any reader's attention, although in this case, the supporting multimedia environment is very nicely done.

And the storytelling does hold up. There are tricks and methods used in these books that an adult reader might feel slightly less comfortable with (cliffhanger endings, personal jeopardy and so on), but for young readers, used to a TV world, would probably seem perfectly reasonable and very very appealing.

Callum is on the run from the end of this book, supported and aided in his quest by his best friend. The quest combines an excellent level of physicality as well as online / technological research - the acts spread across both boys in a very realistic manner. Callum's survival living wild in the city, being pursued by people whose motives he doesn't understand is very tense, and scary enough to really give the reader a sense of peril.

The overall sense of tension built around Callum's fate (and in my case a big worry about his best friend), the intricate nature of the quest and the clever layout of clues, along with the way in which Callum sticks to his quest regardless of the amount of pressure placed upon him, well it was excellent.

Roll on February. show less

Other Australian female authors in the past, Kerry Greenwood and Jennifer Rowe to name a couple, have set their murder mysteries around a beauty farm. So what Gabrielle Lord is doing in a sense is giving it a modern take - treatments implementing DNA and modern surgery techniques.

Add too a couple of extra elements - beautiful girls being drugged by a vampire - their memories ensuring no-one will believe them, thinking they are drug-induced; and a young woman returning to work with a young show more child to care for.

Gemma Lincoln has this idea that she will be able to slowly re-immerse herself in her investigative work, but the nature of her job, and Gemma's own character, ensure that a slow resumption is just not an option. Young mothers reading DEATH BY BEAUTY will find themselves wishing that they had all the backup resources that Gemma has. Add to that the fact that Gemma is living with a man who is not the baby's father, and things become complicated.

Gabrielle Lord has been occupying her time with writing YA thrillers and this is the first Gemma Lincoln novel for 5 years. It shows that Lord has not lost the touch and kept up with the times. I didn't like Gemma Lincoln any the more for it - but that is probably just the way she strikes me.

The story is a chilling one about how much money there is in the industry of helping women retain their beauty and even making them look 10 years younger. show less

Set in Sydney, Australia, Death by Beauty is a reasonable crime novel slash mystery thriller. It's the 5th in the series but there's enough back story so that reading this as a stand alone I really didn't feel I was missing anything character wise.

What is does seem to be missing though is that factor that takes a book from okay to good, the elements are there but the way the story comes together is just a tad too predictable and the trope of the working woman balancing attractive ex-partner show more with attentive and caring current partner really didn't do much for my reading experience.

At any rate, it's reasonable, it will fill in some time even if you can see whose responsible coming form a mile away. show less