Book reviewer ANNA CREER reckons Chris Hammer’s latest book, Full Circle, a complex story of revenge and redemption, is his best novel to date.

Chris Hammer is one of Australia’s most successful crime writers, with worldwide sales of 1.5 million copies since the publication of his debut, and breakthrough, novel Scrublands in 2018.

Seven mysteries have followed, featuring either journalist Martin Scarsden or police detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan.

However, Hammer’s latest, Full Circle (Simon and Shuster) is his first standalone thriller, in which he takes his readers into the complex world of financial markets, powerful companies and the influential individuals who own them.

As the novel begins, former policeman Travis Somerland is recovering from the violent ending of his undercover AFP mission within the Murtrie empire.

His former boss, Chief Inspector Baptiste Thoreau, has found him a job driving for Felix Clapton, a hedge fund manager who lives in Montechino, a grand Georgian style mansion near Sorrento.

Thoreau tells Travis, “he might get a chance to hit back at the Murtries, the untouchable bastards who had murdered his girlfriend and ruined his life”.

Murtrie Corp, ruled by the ruthless patriarch Randall Murtrie, owns coal mines in Australia and the US, a carbon and capture storage technology, valued at close to a billion dollars, as well as mainstream media assets including newspapers and radio stations. 

However, there are plans to become an integrated energy company. “Everything from mining to generation to transmission. Batteries, data centres, retail, the works”. Their weakness is the hidden debt they are carrying.

For Felix Clapton, that’s their flaw. His hedge fund, Titanic Research, specialises in taking “short positions” on companies that may be overvalued, betting that the price of a company’s shares will fall, making money when the price goes down rather than up.

Titanic, as a result, has made millions and Clapton enemies in the process. His next target is Murtrie Corp and Travis realises why he’s been hired.

Full Circle is a complex story of revenge and redemption, told through a multi-layered narrative structure that loops backwards and forwards in time. It is, for this reviewer, Hammer’s best novel to date. It is clever, tightly plotted and as a result, utterly engrossing.

BRITISH author and retired English teacher Peter Grainger is the best-selling crime writer you’ve probably never heard of. He’s already sold more than a million books, on both Kindle and Audible. 

Now his books are being published in paperback and hardback by HutchisonHeinemann beginning with Some Sort of Justice, introducing his meticulous police procedurals, set in fictional Kingslake in Norfolk, to a wider audience.

It’s curious that Grainger’s publishers have chosen Some Sort of Justice as the first to appear in bookshops. It’s Grainger’s latest mystery, number 17 in the series, as well as a sequel to The Late Lord Thorpe, number 16 (2024). 

Grainger’s early novels feature Detective Sergeant DC Smith. However, in this novel, he only plays a secondary role, as he has retired and works for Diver and Diver, a local detective agency.

Instead, DCI Cara Freeman takes centre stage leading the county’s murder squad.

They are tasked with reinvestigating the death of Lord Frederick Thorpe, found drowned in a swimming pool the morning after a party on a country estate 18 months ago.

The first inquest determined it was an accident. His sister Caroline tells Freeman that the decision “seemed wrong to me… I know there was something more. Something else was going on”. She discovered his recent emails had been deleted as well as calls and texts on his phone. She then asked “The Divers” for help.

However, initially Freeman and her team seem to face insurmountable problems. There’s no body, as Thorpe was cremated and the pathologist only carried out basic tests because the police had made certain assumptions, “party, drink and drugs, young people, swimming pool”. 

Freeman and her team soon realise that considerable effort has gone into the destruction of the evidence to cover up what happened at the party that night and how Freddie Thorpe died. Influential people have been protected as a result.

Grainger, while working on number 18 in his Kingslake series, has announced that he is considering something new, featuring a former female M15 agent.

He describes it as “a bit Slow Horses… a group of people who do the really dirty work that none of us want to think is being done to keep us safe”.

Once you’ve read Some Sort of Justice, you’ll understand who prompted this idea.

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