Winner of the Colin Roderick Award for Australian writing, the Ned Kelly Award for Australian crime fiction, and the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award.
Peter Temple's The Broken Shore is a transfixing and moving novel about a place, a family, politics and power, and the need to live decently in a world where so much is rotten.
The Broken Shore, his eighth novel, revolves around big-city detective Joe Cashin. Shaken by a scrape with death, he's posted away from the Homicide Squad to the quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up. Carrying physical scars and more than a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. But when a prominent local is attacked in his own home and left for dead, Cashin is thrust into what becomes a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby aboriginal community--everyone seems to want to blame them. Cashin is unconvinced, and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a burglary gone wrong.
Peter Temple is currently being hailed as the finest crime writer in Australia, but it won't be long before he is recognized as what he really is--one of the nation's finest writers, period. Born in South Africa, Temple is writing a dynamic kind of literary thriller that ultimately defies classification.
About the Author :
PETER TEMPLE is the author of eight crime novels, five of which have won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction. He lives in Victoria, Australia.
Review :
"Flinty, funny, subtle, and smart . . .Temple ranks among [the crime genre's] very best practitioners." --Entertainment Weekly
"Having read the new novels of Michael Connelly and Martin Cruz Smith, I have to say that Temple belongs in their company. . . . Murder, rape, suicide, child abuse, police brutality, shootouts--but always in the context of gorgeous writing . . . Throughout, Temple finds time to please us with flashes of writing that range from poetic to brutal." --The Washington Post
"A grim, brutally involving crime novel [from] a master of the genre . . . Temple develops a complex tale threaded with the racism and corruption so embedded in Australia's ways and means that the scene is as vivid as the crime. . . . A compulsive read . . . It's one of those books you can't wait to finish and then can only regret that it's ended." --Daily News (New York)
"The extra emphasis on character, as well as subtle commentary on race and class divides, add many welcome layers to Temple's already-outstanding acuity for plotting and pace and his almost musical ear for dialogue." --The Baltimore Sun
"A mature and measured account of the kind of crimes committed in the dead quiet of rural Australia . . . Temple offers some provocative and painful views of Australia's inner landscape." --The New York Times Book Review
"This deeply intelligent thriller starts slowly, builds inexorably, and ends unforgettably." --Booklist (starred review)
"[Temple] writes so beautifully." --Salon.com
"One of the year's best mysteries . . . Drop everything and read this book." --Rocky Mountain News
