REVIEWING AUSTRALIAN CRIME FICTION

Soho Crime's mandate is to publish "atmospheric crime fiction set all over the world." Their author list includes the likes of Colin Cotterill, whose novels are set in 1970s Laos, Martin Lίmon, whose series features American army investigators in South Korea in the same time period, and Henry Chang, whose contemporary crime novels are set in New York City's Chinatown.

I've had pretty good luck exploring Soho Crime's titles as a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books, and that luck held when I selected Australian Garry Disher's Signal Loss for review.

I must confess I hadn't heard of Disher before, despite the fact he's published 40 books to date, but I enjoyed reading Signal Loss. Here's why I liked it.

Our challenge as readers is to find new writers with new voices and new perspectives. Many of the old familiar bestsellers have written themselves out, and their new publications are often not worth buying. Thankfully, Soho Crime is opening up our horizons and bringing us new names to try out.