“Murder mysteries can be absorbing puzzles and page-turners. But I don’t think they are junk literature, books to be read and then discarded.
They can touch on the largest of ideas. Mortality – what does it mean for our lives to know that they are finite, that we are all temporary? And knowledge – how do we acquire knowledge? What can we be certain of? What can we know about the inside of another’s head and heart? What is essentially unknowable?
In a way death and mystery are natural companions.”
Devastation Road is a page-turner clue-puzzle with light touches in which two young people encounter about mortality and deep grief. Available FREE at eepurl.com/gkapPD
Its sequel, The Elsinore Vanish, touches on the impossible, and the intersect between rationality and emotional intuition.
Evermore, the third in the trilogy, is about dreams and memory. How do we know what is real?
The Slipping Place is a darker murder mystery and a family drama for adults, set in Hobart. Intriguing and suspenseful, it explores the nature of mystery itself – people struggling to understand each other and their own motivation, the incomprehensibility of death … the profound intangibility of life.
Murder mysteries are not trivial.
JOANNA BAKER 