Cirrus@Austlit

'A thief tries to extort money from an art owner. The criminal thinks he'd got the upper hand, but the owner's representative – a tough, shrewd woman – is determined to turn the tables on him.

'A previously unpublished story by the late, great Peter Temple.

'The Price by Peter Temple with Claudia Karvan and Mark Coles Smith'.

Source: Radio National Fictions.

'PETER Temple started publishing novels late, when he was fifty, but then he got cracking. He wrote nine novels in thirteen years. Along the way he wrote screenplays, stories, dozens of reviews.

'When Temple died in March 2018 there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his drawer. It is included in The Red Hand, and it reveals the master at the peak of his powers. The Red Hand also includes the screenplay of Valentine’s Day, an improbably delightful story about an ailing country football club, which in 2007 was adapted for television by the ABC. Also included are his short fiction, his reflections on the Australian idiom, a handful of autobiographical fragments and a selection of his brilliant book reviews.

'Peter Temple held crime writing up to the light and, with his poet’s ear and eye, made it his own incomparable thing.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Stephen Villani is the acting head of the Victoria Police homicide squad. But his first months on the job have not gone well: two Aboriginal teenagers shot dead in a botched operation he authorised in the provincial city of Cromarty; and, no progress on the killing of a man in front of his daughter outside a private girls' school.

Now five men are found dead in horrifying circumstances on the outskirts of the city. Villani's superiors and the media are baying for arrests. To add to his woes, some of the country's richest people are alarmed by the baffling killing of a young woman in the high-security tower where they live.

Villani, a man who has built his life around his work, begins to find the certainties of both crumbling. As the pressure mounts, he finds that he must contemplate things formerly unthinkable. Truth is a novel about murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal and truth.' (from Quercus website)

Australian and international writers each recommend the books that interested them during 2006. Nominated titles include books by Australian authors.

(International contributors, not listed for AustLit purposes, are Alan Hollinghurst, Lionel Shriver, John Banville and Sebastian Barry.)