Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a hardboiled who’s-got-the-loot thriller in which the police and the criminals are morally indistinguishable and largely interchangeable. Each solves some crime problems, of course; each devotes considerable time and energy to documenting their home city: Sydney, Melbourne and environs. And each uses films and film viewing as a lingua franca, a cultural currency exchanged among its characters (and readers).
Blindside by J.R. Carroll
Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 415 pp
Degrees of Connection by Jon Clearly
HarperCollins, $29.95 pb, 276 pp
Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood
Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 277 pp
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