Crime Month: What’s on Nicola West’s bookshelf?

July is Crime Month here at Booktopia — a month-long celebration of crime fiction and edge-of-your-seat thrillers, as well as the readers who devour them. Today, debut author Nicola West (Catch Us the Foxes) is on the blog to share some of the books on her shelves that she loves the most. Read on …

Night Film

by Marisha Pessl

My all-time favourite thriller (and a huge inspiration for Catch Us the Foxes), Night Film follows a disgraced investigative journalist as he tries to get to the bottom of the apparent suicide of a reclusive director’s daughter. Somewhere between a bizarro version of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, the novel’s pitch-perfect antagonist, Stanislas Cordova, gives new meaning to the term ‘cult filmmaker’.

Buy it here

The Spiral

by Iain Ryan

Perhaps the strangest thriller you’ll ever read – I was absolutely blown away by The Spiral’s inventiveness. A brash and ballsy choose-your-own-adventure-style novel that makes Black Mirror’s interactive episode ‘Bandersnatch’ look like a Goosebumps’ story.

Buy it here

Goodwood

by Holly Throsby

Holly Throsby’s charming debut is a cosy small-town mystery with hints of my favourite television show, Twin Peaks. It lacks some of the twisted darkness I typically like in my thrillers but was a definite catalyst in me realising that the place I grew up in would make the perfect little murder town to set a crime novel.

Buy it here

The Coffin Dancer

by Jeffery Deaver

The first crime novel I ever read (at the tender age of twelve) after I stole it from my mum in an attempt to look cool when presenting a book report to my peers. I don’t think it earned me any schoolyard cred, but the intricately plotted twists and genuinely creepy antagonist started a life-long obsession with the genre.

Buy it here

The Chase

by Candice Fox

The queen of Australian crime fiction, Candice Fox’s latest novel is her best yet (which, given her formidable output, is really saying something.) The Chase is a high-octane thriller about the prison break to end all prison breaks and basically makes Con Air look like a bunch of hapless puppies escaping a pound.

Buy it here

The Lady in the Lake

by Raymond Chandler

Chandler’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe, may be most well-known for his Los Angeles-based investigations, but it’s this fish-out-of-water story of police corruption set in a small mountain town that made me fall in love with the character. Fun fact: my own protagonist, Marlowe Robertson, was named after this noir icon.

Buy it here

Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s novels are brutal in the best possible way, and I adore how she never shies away from exploring the monstrous side of her female characters. I’ll never forget the gut-punch I felt when the killer in Sharp Objects was revealed, and I promised myself that one day I’d strive to elicit the same response in my own readers.

Buy it here

The Hunted

by Gabriel Bergmoser

This isn’t a book – it’s a time travel device. I devoured this propulsive novel in one sitting and was so invested that I barely registered the hours ticking by. If you like your thrillers with a side of horror (and a whole heap of delightfully imaginative gore), you’ll love The Hunted.

Buy it here

Picnic at Hanging Rock

by Joan Lindsay

No other work of fiction captures the haunting yet beguiling nature of this country’s landscape better than Picnic at Hanging Rock. I have always been fascinated by the way this book transformed a real-world location into a thing of legend, which ultimately led me to set my own novel in the bucolic coastal town I grew up in.

Buy it here

Nicola Nicola

Catch Us the Foxes

by Nicola West

Ambitious young journalist Marlowe ‘Lo’ Robertson would do anything to escape the suffocating confines of her small home town.

While begrudgingly covering the annual show for the local paper, Lo is horrified to discover the mutilated corpse of Lily Williams, the reigning showgirl and Lo’s best friend. Seven strange symbols have been ruthlessly carved into Lily’s back. But when Lo reports her grisly find to the town’s police chief, he makes her promise not to tell anyone about the symbols. Lo obliges, though it’s not like she has much of a choice – after all, he is also her father...

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