In the late autumn, down windy streets raining yellow oak and elm leaves, I went to George Armit’s funeral. It was a small affair. Almost everyone George had known was dead. Many of them were dead because George had had them killed…’ Jack Irish however, has no shortage of friends. Jockeys and journos, lawyers and standover men, people in nameless occupations who aren’t in the phone book. These days, though, the only family he sees are Irish men in faded football team photographs on the pub wall. So when Des Connors, the last link to his father, calls to ask for help in the matter of a missing son, Jack is happy to lend a hand. But sometimes prodigal sons go missing for a reason. As Jack begins to dig, he discovers that Gary Connors was a man with something to hide. And his friends are people with darker and more deadly secrets.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon Review
Something has been happening recently to shake up the perceptions of long-term crime readers. And if you’re somebody who thinks you know all the important writers in the field, you may have to think again. Peter Temple (who won the 2007 Crime Writers Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger) has been one of the most prestigious names in the field in his adopted country of Australia (Temple is originally South African), and his breakthrough win (for The Broken Shore) has made it imperative that readers seeking the very best crime fiction investigate his work. The series of books featuring his tough and resourceful protagonist Jack Irish already have a devoted Aussie following, and Black Tide, the second outing for Irish, is an utterly compelling piece of work, full of the quiet observation and acutely observed scene-setting that is Temples forte. Jack, adrift in his world of low-rent journalists and shifty lawyers, is asked by a man who is the last link to Jack’s father to track down a young man who has disappeared. But as Jack probes into an increasingly murky situation, he begins to suspect that the missing man, Gary Connors, has been leading a very complicated life. His friends and associates in particular are a sinister bunch, and Jack finds that in order to make any progress in the case (as well as, simply, survive), it’s necessary to play by some very flexible rules.
If you discovered Peter Temple via the wonderful Broken Shore, be prepared for something different here. There is the same deft conjuring of atmosphere (not to mention the astringent characterisation) that was such an important part of Temples award-winning novel) but the semi-detached copper of that book is here replaced by a protagonist who is more in the long line of detectives that stretch back Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. So a different Peter Temple from that we might be used to, but nonetheless beguiling for all that. —Barry Forshaw
Review
Characterisation, dialogue and the quality of the prose are all top-class — Sunday Telegraph
Discovering Peter Temple has been the highlight of my year —
Mark Billingham
Temple’s prose is polished and slick, his dialogue spot-on and his sense of place entrenched firmly in contemporary Australia —
Sun-Herald
About the Author
Peter Temple was born in South Africa in 1946, and emigrated to Australia in 1980. He published nine novels, including four books in the Jack Irish series. He won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction five times, and his widely acclaimed novels were published in over twenty countries. The Broken Shore won the UK’s prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger for the best crime novel of 2007 and Truth won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first time a crime writer had won an award of this calibre anywhere in the world. The Jack Irish series was adapted for TV with Guy Pearce in the lead role. Peter Temple died on 8 March 2018.
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