Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
Benjamin Stevenson
Michael Joseph ($32.99)

A locked-room murder mystery with black comic undertones, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone invokes the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, subscribed to by Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton and others. A crime fiction boffin, Ern Cunningham, attends a snowbound retreat for a family reunion. It’s going to be awkward. Ern has been largely estranged from them all since he dobbed his brother Michael in for killing someone. When a corpse is found on the slopes with the same MO as a serial killer, Ern is drawn to uncover the killer among his assembled relatives, including Michael, who has just been released from jail. The author adheres to classic strictures of mystery fiction while playing with the overdetermined, black comic caricature of something like Knives Out. As with that film, Stevenson’s novel is both overdone and underdrawn. It’s reasonably well-plotted, but tonally, an insistent striving for humour – Stevenson is a comedian – can undermine atmosphere and suspense.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Mirror Book
Charlotte Grimshaw
Vintage, $35

When life enters a novel it becomes fiction. But what if you want to reverse the process and return to the truth of the matter, what do you get? In Charlotte Grimshaw’s extremely well-written memoir about her family (her father is CK Stead) and a crisis in her own marriage, often as not, you get more fiction. Her family’s motto about experience was: It’s material. Make a story out of it. But in a house of fiction, fiction is apt to prevail. When Grimshaw tells her father that her mother doesn’t talk to her, he denies it, saying she’s always talking to you – the family frequently emerging as troubled and in denial. One of her early relationships is brutally violent, but mirroring the family she, too, goes into denial. All the same, this is a deeply affectionate portrait, but always probing and unflinching in its examination of family and self.

Dismal Diplomacy, Disposable Sovereignty: Our Problem with China and America
Carrillo Gantner
Monash University Publishing, $19.95

In the 1980s Carrillo Gantner, cultural counsellor at the Australian embassy in Beijing, negotiated the staging of Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination in Shanghai. It would take a giant stretch of the imagination to see that happening now. Gantner’s essay on the deeply damaging decline in Australian-Chinese relations over the last few years, which has seen Australia become, he says, “America’s shoe-shine boy in the South Pacific”, is an angry but measured examination of federal government failures and the hostile hype of the media (especially the Murdoch media) that has led to this state of affairs. But it’s also fuelled by long held Australian fears of the “yellow peril”. What the Chinese want, he argues, is respect, and our diplomatic failure to deliver this has merely made us politically irrelevant in Chinese eyes. Strong, timely stuff.

27 Letters to My Daughter
Ella Ward
Harper Collins, $32.99

When Ella Ward found out she had a rare cancer, her response was to compose a series of letters about life and its lessons to her nine-year-old daughter – a “miracle” baby born after she had been pronounced infertile. It reads like a message in a bottle, Ward through most of it talking as though she has died. Stylistically, it’s easy, flowing epistolary story-telling that takes in the generations that have preceded mother and child, a central tenet being that we are the sum of all we are now as well as the ghostly past of our forebears. She talks about families, the break-up of her own parents, about travelling and learning, taking on life in all its paradoxes and challenges, the pain and the pleasure – as well as such good sound advice as doing the dishes before bed. Often funny, and moving, but always haunted by the shadow of mortality.

The Kelly Hunters
Grantlee Kieza
ABC Books $34.99

Although Kieza examines the Kelly backstory, the constant run-ins with the police, harsh prison sentences, and, above all, the imprisonment of Kelly’s mother, who predicted “that there would be murder now” – his emphasis is on the hunt for the Kelly gang after they’d killed three policemen at Stringybark Creek in 1878, leading to an 8000 pound reward. It was a massive operation, and Kieza charts how it all came together, especially the employment of the Queensland Aboriginal trackers who so unnerved the gang while they were on the run. This is highly informed, often rollicking popular history that sometimes resembles the 19th-century penny dreadful accounts of the Kellys’ exploits and capture – the Glenrowan shoot-out, especially, with Kelly emerging through the fog from the town’s inn, armour-clad, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.