Among the many recommendations that cover the inside and outside of this book, one of the reviewers describes Maloney's style as 'literary'. I think that is a massive over-rating, but the language is certainly colourful, clever and often very funny. Very much in the Paul Keating tradition (PK is an PM who made us all laugh by calling his successor, John Howard, 'the dessicated coconut' and so forth.) Maybe it's the Irish Australian tradition. The plots of Maloney's stories are usually devices through which he can take the piss out of Australian political life and, in this one, the arts scene. 'Comic futility' is the description I like best.

I read my first one of these in April last year. This one is set in the 1980s and the "hero", Murray Whelan is a lowly electorate 'fixer' working for Charlene Wills, state Labor upper house member and Minister for Industry. The publishers must've asked Maloney for a 'bio', because it says "Shane Maloney is co-director of the Brunswick Institute, a weatherboard think-tank financed by his wife." This self-deprecation kind of sets the tone of the book. Murray Whelan also has a weatherboard, though in the book its roof springs a leak, causing the ceiling to fall in and the power to short-circuit and he's a single dad whose wife's career has taken her to Canberra, from where she definitely doesn't finance him. The story is all about this, as well as corporate swindles, murder, attempted murder, and Labor Party backroom deals. Very enjoyable.

Alison Goodman, Killing the Rabbit, Bantam, NY, 2007
I finished the last of my "Sisters in Crime" haul from several weekends ago in Melbourne. Of the four books that I bought that night, this was easily the best, even though it isn't really what I would normally consider to be on a theme that I'd enjoy. I was hooked by what the author said at the meeting in the pub: she said she'd been intrigued by the idea of resorbtion since she was 12 years old. Resorbtion is what some small rodents do in times of stress such as drought - re-absorb their foetus into their body. Goodman has made a sort of scifi thriller (it isn't a whodunnit) in which a genetic mutation has occurred that enables a small number of women to achieve resorbtion voluntarily. A multinational corporation specialising in the production of contraceptive drugs, sees voluntary resorbtion as a major threat to business and decides to slow down the evolutionary process by eliminating these women. [the evolutionary benefit of resorbtion to the species is not at all clear, but don't let this get in the way of the story].

The main thing I wasn't too keen on in this book was the violence, but this was more than outweighed by other things that I either enjoyed immensely or simply intrigued me. The names of the main characters were excellent - they were futuristic while also playing on words. If resorbtion suggests rabbits, for example, the two main characters were a fox (Hannie Reynard) and a ferret (Mosson Ferret) - both trying to reach the rabbit woman before the corporation's hired assassin does. Second, the future Melbourne portrayed in the novel is racially/ethnically all mixed up. The corporation might be global, but ordinary people also have global connections. Third, there isn't even a tiny scrap of G W Bush's 'good v evil' crap in this story. The hired assassin is written in the first person, which makes it impossible to see him as evil - in reality he is a very moral individual - while the hero and heroine both suffer from abnormalities - she has Crohn's disease, he has alopecia universalis. Not that either of these is a character flaw, they just go against the usual traditions of fictional heroism, and it turns out that while both are worried about their 'body images', it's their creative egos that turn out to be far more vulnerable. Fourth, there is a guerrilla organisation called the PMS, made up of invisible women (only those who are actually post-menstrual will get the joke). Fifth, the idea of the urban 'underbelly' and it's existence separately from and occasionally intertwining with normal life is really well portrayed (we all know about the mafia and the triads, etc, but most people's lives are not really affected by them). Sixth, it raises all sorts of unanswered questions about who controls women's fertility and what the implications are of different modes of control.

The publishers (Bantam) have packaged this book as an airport thriller for the mass market. I don't read many of those, but I thought this was at least equal to a couple of John Grisham novels that I have read.

Shane Maloney, Sucked In, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2007
I wish I'd invented the name of this genre, but I have to defer to somebody else - possibly The Age reviewer who described Maloney as "the master of a genre of his own making" on the back cover.

It's a funny book and I will definitely read more of these (it seems to be the sixth in a series of "Murray Whelan thrillers"). There isn't really a murder - more of a stuff up in the political machinations - and there's almost more suspense hanging over the question of whether our "hero" will get the girl than the whodunnit part. If you've never been in or near the Australian Labor Party, the humour might be lost on you. It seems that Whelan started out as a lower level apparatchik, but by this novel he has risen to state MP and ends up as a federal MHR by the end of it. Another genre to which it could belong is that of the "almost libellous" political novel begun by Frank Hardy in the 1950s, except that Hardy was serious about his politics and Maloney isn't. The state premier in this book is called Kenneth Geoffries. The real one at the time was Jeff Kennett. Fortunately he doesn't have much to say about this person beyond his bizarre haircut and puffed up manner. If I was a Melburnian I'm sure I'd recognize more of the characters.