After Christmas, book reviewer ANNA CREER started reading some of the remaining books on the review shelf… and discovered four real gems.

Donna Leon first introduced her detective Commissario Brunetti, of the Venice Questura, in 1992.

A Refiner’s Fire is the 34th mystery in the series.

Venice is plagued by gangs of teenage boys fighting at night, using social media to organise time and place. When a fight takes place near a police station, the gangs are arrested, their phones confiscated and their parents contacted. One boy, Orlando Monforte, remains when all the others have left with their parents and Commissario Claudia Griffoni takes him to his home.

When Orlando’s father makes a complaint against Griffoni, Brunetti investigates and discovers that Dario Monforte is the national “Hero of Nasiriyah”, who on service in Iraq, on a peacekeeping mission, saved two of his comrades when their base was struck by a suicide bomber. But is Monforte the hero the Italian government created?

Brunetti becomes involved in another investigation when a colleague is brutally attacked by a member of a teenage gang. Eventually the two strands combine in a night of violence and tragedy. Leon is an accomplished story teller and A Refiner’s Fire is literary crime fiction at its best.

AUSTRALIAN author Pip Fioretti is a newcomer in the world of crime fiction .

Her debut novel in the genre, Bone Lands, is set in 1911, in the arid north west of NSW, policed by a single mounted trooper Augustus (Gus) Hawkins, a traumatised veteran of the Boer War. One night he discovers the bodies of three young people brutally murdered on a road he would have been patrolling if he hadn’t been in bed with the local schoolteacher. 

James Kirkbride and his two younger sisters Nessie and Grace are the children of Robert Kirkbride, who owns the biggest sheep station in the district. He’s rich and influential and his children are like “local royalty”.

Two detectives arrive from Sydney to investigate the murders but it’s Hawkins with his local knowledge who is determined to uncover the truth, revealing dark and disturbing secrets in the process. 

In Bone Lands Fioretti explores a brutal, violent time in Australian history. Bleak and shocking, it’s compulsive reading.

EQUALLY bleak is Iain Ryan’s The Dream, the second in his series that he says are “directly inspired by the idea that Australia doesn’t have a hardboiled noir canon”.

He believes Australian crime fiction tends to be “quite aspirational and ‘quiet’ ”. Peter Temple and Peter Corris would disagree.

In 1982, the glittering façade of Queensland’s Gold Coast is underpinned by a world of greed and corruption, as it prepares to host the Commonwealth Games. It’s the era of the White Shoe Brigade and corrupt Police Commissioner Terry Lewis.

Ryan interweaves three plot lines involving a murder, missing police files and a stalled major development, Fantasyland.

Ryan’s novel reveals a dangerous world dominated by men with money, who control the police and development projects with lavish parties, sex and drugs. The Gold Coast at the time was a developers’ dream but it was no paradise.

AFTER all the sleaze of the Gold Coast, it’s a relief to enter the cosy crime world of British author Sally Smith, who sets her debut novel A Case of Mice and Murder in London’s Inner Temple, where she practised as a barrister and King’s Counsel.

Smith sets her novel, the first in a series, in 1901, introducing her detective Sir Gabriel Ward KC, a barrister with “a highly trained analytical mind and a reputation for exceptional forensic objectivity”.

Gabreil is a confirmed bachelor, living and working in the Inner Temple. He’s a man of fixed routines and behaviour. But one May morning he discovers the barefoot body of the Chief Justice, Lord Norman Dunning, on the doorstep of his chambers, a carving knife in his chest.

However, the police can only enter the Inner Temple with consent and Sir William Waring, the Master Treasurer believes the crime should be “investigated internally by a senior member of our community”. He has chosen Gabriel because he has a cast iron alibi and because of his skills in cross-examination.

Gabriel is pressured to agree and work with a young police constable from the Met who has modern ideas about detection. 

With its intriguing insights into a different time and place, fans of Richard Osman and Richard Cole will welcome Smith’s entry into the world of cosy crime.