Pride’s Harvest
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning Jon Cleary, a novel featuring Sydney detective Scobie Malone. Inspector Scobie Malones is called in to investigate the mysterious death of a Japanese industrialist whose factory has brought prosperity, but also tension, to a rural backwater in Australia
In the town of Collamundra, Australia, the corpse of Japanese farm manager Kenji Sagawa is found in one of his cotton mill’s threshing machines. The prosperity that his company had brought to the small town had also engendered racial tension, and the Detective Inspector Scobie Malone of the Sydney Police Department is called in to investigate – hardly a vacation.
The local corrupt government and law enforcement resent him, and the Aboriginal population gets ever more restless. When the only Aboriginal police officer becomes the target of everyone’s frustration, Scobie becomes increasingly sympathetic – as well as increasingly involved with the cold murder case of the wife of Collamundra’s most famous citizen seventeen years prior.
As more and more people flock to this dry town for its annual horse race, the list of suspects becomes longer and longer… Can Malone the visitor crack the case?
Reviews
PRAISE FOR JON CLEARY:
'When the ruminants and the lucre-chasers are growing lichen on library shelves Jon Cleary will continue to be read'
LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Enough plot twists and conspiracy-making ingredients to satisfy the most demanding aficionado of the genre'
IRISH TIMES
‘The business of a novelist is to tell a story. Jon Cleary has that talent in abundance’ SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘The Malone stories come alive through their setting … Cleary’s writing is seamless and his plots imaginative and mature’ MIAMI HERALD
‘Cleary is a national literary institution… If Australia has a crime writer who deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell, and P.D James, then it is Cleary’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
About the author
Jon Cleary, who died in July 2010, was the author of over fifty novels, including The High Commissioner, which was the first in a popular detective fiction series featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. In 1996 he was awarded the Inaugural Ned Kelly Award for his lifetime contribution to crime fiction in Australia. His last novel, FOUR-CORNERED CIRLCE, was published in 2007.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This tightly woven mystery brings back Sydney detective Scobie Malone (from Murder Song , etc.) to solve a politically sensitive murder in Australia's cotton country. The victim, Ken Sagawa, ran a Japanese-controlled cotton company in Collamundra. Although the citizens have reaped financial rewards from the company's presence, many are prejudiced against the Japanese. But who would have shot the outgoing Sagawa and dumped his body into the teeth of a cotton gin? Aware that the region needs Japanese investment, the police chief is determined to find the killer and calls on Scobie and his partner. Most of the Collamundrans they question are either unwilling to talk or offer weak alibis for their whereabouts at the time of the murder. Worse, there are no physical clues and any number of people seem to have had motives, among them, medical examiner Max Nothling, whose father died at the hands of Sagawa's father, a war criminal; and the local aristocrat, Chess Hardstaff. A strange plot twist unfolds as an old man's disclosures prompt Scobie to reexamine the murder of Hardstaff's wife 17 years earlier. Just before the big weekend of the year, the Collamundra Cup horse races, an attempt on Malone's life sheds a surprising new light on the two murders. The ensuing resolution is strong indeed, rewarding the effort required to keep track of the many players.
