A young man is released from prison and finds work in a cemetery. A family embarks on a beach holiday in New Zealand. In each scenario, there’s not a detective in sight, amateur or professional – although there are a few bodies to contend with.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, crime fiction today is a capacious genre, unconstrained by the conventional genre tropes, and all the more enthralling for that.

This is despite the fact that there have long been those determined to police the perimeters. In 1928, American author S.S. Van Dine ruled that there should be “no long descriptive passages” and definitely “no subtly worked out character analyses” or even the delightfully vague “atmospheric preoccupations”. More recently P.D. James declared that what the reader expects is a central mysterious crime, usually murder, “and a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it”.

Review: Eden – Mark Brandi (Hachette); A Beautiful Family – Jennifer Trevelyan (Allen & Unwin)

Mark Brandi broke many of the rules with Wimmera, his first book, my copy of which is blurbed “literary crime fiction at its best”.

“Literary”, or perhaps just genre-bending, Wimmera went on to win a swag of crime fiction awards, including the coveted British Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger in 2016 as well as the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime.

Having just re-read Wimmera, I think Eden, Brandi’s fifth book, is even better. While Wimmera told a grim story of innocence lost from two different perspectives in two different time frames with a conclusion involving a brutal court judgement, Eden for the most part maintains a single focus. Until the end, that is, when two newspaper articles tell us what we need to know.

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