Luke Preston

Loved this idea when I first heard about it - a set of fictional adventures for a real-life movie star. And one that even I've heard of!

Making a man like Lee Marvin star in these adventures obviously means that these are going to be noir stories, hard-boiled as a rock, with a dark sense of humour in some cases. Based, it seems, on events from his real life, the stories range through a varied set of scenarios, timeframes and locations, although there is a propensity for hard-drinking and dedicated womanising to show up frequently.

A collection that is obviously going to work better for fans of Marvin, it also worked well for this reader - whose knowledge of the man himself is sketchy at best. Alternatively, if you are a fan of darker, noir styled story telling, this is a clever concept that's executed very elegantly.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-lee-crime-factory… (lisätietoja)

OUT OF EXILE is the second Tom Bishop book from local author Luke Preston.

Let's focus on that. The second book.

It follows on from DARK CITY BLUE, taking the dangerous, damaged and deeply conflicted ex-cop Tom Bishop back, ever so slightly, onto the side of the angels.

In two books Preston has ripped Tom Bishop's life, family and sanity apart, taken him down as low as an ex-cop in jail could possibly go. And then set him up in a no win situation blurring law and order and justice to the point where picking the good from the bad and the winners from the losers is no easy task. Even with Bishop's fundamental desire to do the right thing.

Dark and about as noir as the streets of Australia could ever be envisioned, OUT OF EXILE delivers a strong message in an utterly uncompromising style. Broken out of prison for the express purpose of outing corrupt police, Bishop must side with the wrong in order to achieve the right. It's a difficult position for anybody to be placed in. Make that person a man with little left to lose and a lot to regret, it is impossible not to entertain the possibility that Bishop will ignore the desire.

But back to the second book thing. Both books are action packed, violent and beautifully written. Economical with words, the reader is never in doubt about motivations and constantly wondering about outcomes. There is plenty of follow through from the first book in this one, with many of the characters still breathing returning and events carrying forward in the minds and actions of the main players. Whilst it might be possible to read OUT OF EXILE on its own, I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Whilst there's enough detail in the second book to give you an idea of what's gone before, DARK CITY BLUE fleshes it all out, and besides, why deny yourself the chance.

Why the constant references to two books? OUT OF EXILE very nearly became a single sitting read. And when I was really struggling to put it down, I realised that part of the reason was the way it was moving forward so rapidly. The other reason was I really cared what happened to Tom Bishop. In two noir style action books, creating a reader / character connection like that's quite an achievement.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/out-exile-luke-preston… (lisätietoja)

Forty year old Tom Bishop is a rare beast in VPD (The Victoria Police Department) - he is an honest cop. But honesty has come at a price.

Patterson leant back in his chair. Picked up Bishop’s personnel file. It was three inches thick.

‘I read this and I see two things. I see a career detective who’s brought down some heavy hitters. Benny Eastwell, Rob Black – Jesus, you hunted Terry Vass halfway across the country and copped two bullets in the back for your trouble, and you still brought him in.

I look at this and see a hero cop with more commendations than twenty cops put together.
Then I read between the lines and do you know what else I see?’ Bishop shook his head.

‘I see bruised suspects and others in body bags. I see corners cut and laws bent—’

‘I never broke the law.’

‘You’ve skimmed the edges of it. The question I ask myself is, who is the real Tom Bishop?
The hero cop on these pages or the violent man hidden between the lines?’

He put the lid on his pen and the pen in his pocket.

The VPD plays host to a network of corrupt police, from the top to the bottom. The head of this network is called Justice, his identity unknown, although his minions in the police force are more obvious. When the takings from Melbourne's Casino are hijacked, and an innocent sex worker is killed in cold blood, Tom Bishop decides to hunt the villains even if it means he has to work on his own. And worse than working on his own is not knowing who his enemies are.

The author raises an interesting issue in asking whether Tom Bishop, who leaves behind him a trail of death and destruction, is any better than those he is hunting down.

DARK CITY BLUE is very topical for Australian readers. Investigations into police corruption and connections between the police and organised crime have received considerable publicity both in investigative journalism and television semi-fiction.

Most readers will find the violence in DARK CITY BLUE confronting, and I think there were a few issues with the jigsawed time frame the author uses. But there can be no doubt that Luke Preston is a writer to watch, this being his debut novel.… (lisätietoja)

Sometimes you just have to start off a book review with a bunch of warnings - so let's get the public service announcements out of the road now. Don't read DARK CITY BLUE if:

a) you're going to need sleep in the immediate future;
b) you're about to cough up the annual Christmas Policeman's Fund donation;
c) your tolerance for violence is more on the Midsummer end of the scale; or
d) you've got an allergy to adrenaline.

Ignore the warnings if you're looking for something that is action-packed, violent, sparse, and tense with a serious Australian sensibility. You're most definitely in the right territory.

The positives, are exactly the things right up the alley out the back of our place (okay so it's a gravel track but any analogy in a tight spot...). For a start, Preston is one of those authors who leave you pondering their relationship with their central character. Tom Bishop is a good-old fashioned honest cop, with no self-preservation instincts whatsoever. And apparently no pain receptors in his body and a stubbornly one-track mind. There's nothing particularly surprising about a hardboiled, noir sort of a cop that doesn't play nice with his superiors, and has a fractious relationship with his colleagues. What is interesting here is the level of corruption that Bishop starts kicking the covers from. It's pretty extreme - from armed robbery and sexual slavery to good old fashioned standover and more than a bit of general menacing and lurking. The idea that there is a high ranking officer controlling the network of corruption is very real, how high up this officer goes intriguing and what is really most of the mystery from the get go.

It's actually quite hard to tell who is on which side, and for how long for most of the book, and that, and the sheer lunacy of the action means that everything clips along at a tremendous pace. But it's not all hard, mad and bad. Bishop's tentative building of a relationship with his teenage daughter, until recently completely estranged from him, is a nice touch, giving the hard man a bit of a gooey core. It's also that relationship that provides some real moments of hope and sadness. There's also something disconcerting about aspects of the resolution that actually say quite a bit about motivation and why good people do bad things. I actually found that, in the middle of all of the mayhem, quite a thought provoker.

Whilst there is something vaguely cinematic about the action scenes in the book, it's not overdone or jarring, and DARK CITY BLUE mercifully doesn't read like a film script bashed into a book. In fact it reads like a hell of an action-packed, hard boiled, mean streets story, with a believable protagonist, tight and realistic dialogue and a plot that has a sobering credibility to it.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/dark-city-blue-luke-preston… (lisätietoja)