We’re celebrating Crime Month here at Booktopia for all of July with a collection of the best in recent crime fiction! Here to help us celebrate today is Christian White, author of the breakaway hit The Nowhere Child and The Wife and the Widow.
Christian is on the blog today to show us his ultimate crime bookshelf – the books that he loves and that have shaped his own writing. Read on …
Dark Places
by Gillian Flynn
This showed me what a crime book could be, and inspired me to write my own.
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Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting, surviving for over twenty years on the proceeds of the ‘Libby Day fund’. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate. When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious murders and they think her brother Ben is innocent.
Buy it here
The Stranger Beside Me
by Ann Rule
My favourite true crime book by my favourite true crime author.
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Ted Bundy was everyone’s picture of a natural ‘winner’ – handsome, charming, brilliant in law school, successful with women, on the verge of a dazzling career. Fast-forward to 24 January 1989, Ted Bundy is executed. He had confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five young women, coast to coast.
This is his story: the story of his magnetic power, his unholy compulsion, his demonic double life and his string of helpless victims. It was written by a woman who thought she knew Ted Bundy, until she began to put all the evidence together and the whole terrifying picture emerged…
Buy it here
The Outsider
by Stephen King
A seamless blend of crime and horror from the big man himself.
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When an eleven-year-old boy is found murdered in a town park, reliable eyewitnesses undeniably point to the town’s popular Little League coach, Terry Maitland, as the culprit. DNA evidence and fingerprints confirm the crime was committed by this well-loved family man. Horrified by the brutal killing, Detective Ralph Anderson, whose own son was once coached by Maitland, orders the suspect to be arrested in a public spectacle. But Maitland has an alibi. And further research confirms he was indeed out of town that day.
As Anderson and the District Attorney trace the clues, the investigation expands from Ohio to Texas. And as horrifying answers begin to emerge, so King’s propulsive story of almost unbearable suspense kicks into high gear.
Buy it here
Red Dragon
by Thomas Harris
My favourite of the Hannibal Lecter series and one of the best serial killer books of all time.
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Sexual hunger; demonic violence; sinister logic – the lethal components of a deadly formula driving a psychopath in the grip of an unimaginable delusion; a boastful killer who sends the police tormenting notes; a tortured, torturing monster who finds ultimate pleasure in viciously murdering happy families, and calls himself … The Red Dragon.
Special agent Will Graham has been assigned to similar cases before, cases where he was able to see and feel WITH the madmen, anticipate their moves and, most terrifying of all, be vulnerable to their horrifying brutality. Now Graham is reluctantly lured out of retirement, to find an opening to the evil mind of the Red Dragon.
Buy it here
The Safe Place
by Anna Downes
A debut so good it made me jealous I didn’t write it myself.
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For struggling actress Emily Proudman, life in London is falling apart. So when she is offered a live-in job working for a wealthy family on their luxurious coastal property in France, she jumps at the opportunity to start over.
The estate is picture-perfect, and its owners exude charisma and sophistication. But as Emily gets to know the family, their masks begin to slip, and what at first appears to be a dream come true turns out to be a prison from which none of them will ever escape – unless Emily can find a way to set them all free.
Buy it here
Christian White
About the Author
Christian White is an Australian author and screenwriter.
His debut novel, The Nowhere Child, won the 2017 Wheeler Centre Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript. Since publication The Nowhere Child has been shortlisted for major awards including the Australian Book Industry Awards’ General Fiction Book of the Year and Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, and the Indie Book Awards’ Debut Fiction Book of the Year. Rights to The Nowhere Child have been sold in 17 international territories, and acquired for a major screen deal.
His second and most recent novel, The Wife and the Widow, was released in September 2019 in Australia and January 2020 in the US. It became an instant bestseller and has been shortlisted for the 2020 Indie Book Awards for best fiction.
Born and raised on the Mornington Peninsula, Christian had an eclectic range of ‘day jobs’ before he was able to write fulltime, including food-cart driver on a golf course and video editor for an adult film company. He now spends his days writing from home in Melbourne, where he lives with his wife, filmmaker Summer DeRoche, and their adopted greyhound, Issy.
He’s currently working on his third book.
The Wife and the Widow
Set against the backdrop of an island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is a thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local who is forced to confront the evidence that her husband is a murderer.
But nothing on this island is quite as it seems. Only when these women are pushed to the edge can they uncover the whole, crushing truth about the men in their lives...
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