If there's one thing I'm a huge fan of it's dialogue that's realistic. Crisp, authentic and realistic. That and plots and the behaviour of characters that are consistent.

MURDER ON DISPLAY is obviously based sort of loosely (very loosely in some parts) around true events in the not-too-distant past in Adelaide. A number of different elements from a number of different true life cases appear to have sort of been melded together to create the story of an Adelaide cop, DS Dan Brennan.

Therein lies a lot of the problem with MURDER ON DISPLAY as I'm not 100% sure which story was the point of the book in the end. Was it the piles of bodies building up in the Adelaide Hills (? some sort of Truro / Snowtown combination perhaps), something about the homosexual sub-plot (? the Family murders), or the attack on Brennan in a restaurant that killed his wife (by that time I'd given up drawing the lines with real-life crimes)?

Whilst I've got no problem at all with fictionalising facts, especially when it's pretty obvious that's what's going on, the problem is that you've got to tell a solid story along the way. Perhaps avoid some of the overblown crime fiction clichés doing the rounds like the unsupportive boss. But probably what didn't work for me most of all was some of the weird comments made by characters along the way - there seemed to be some sort of dissociative syndrome going on at points that just lost me completely and left me battling to maintain interest. Especially as problems with the dialogue and plot had already given me way too much to struggle with already.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/murder-display-reece-pocock ( )

What reviewers are forced to use for the "blurb" on this book is actually a prologue, a glimpse into events that took place three years earlier, that have become the driving force in Adelaide police investigator Detective Sergeant Dan Brennan's life.

Readers who live in Adelaide or who have taken an interest in the macabre events in Adelaide's recent past like the operations of the the "Family", the Truro murders and the "bodies in the barrels" cases will recognise the fictionalised background in this first novel from Reece Pocok. For me it was all a bit too close to the truth and not sufficiently original.

Where I thought it might have got a bit interesting was in the premise that the police might not have tracked down all the perpetrators of the earlier crimes - the culmination of which, the attack by the Flynn brothers on Dan Brennan and his wife at a restaurant, is the opening page, and the backcover blurb, for this novel. But the author seemed to lose sight of this thread and to embark on too many others.

The main story opens promisingly enough with the body of a the wife of a courtroom defence barrister being found in the parklands that surround the city. But then more bodies begin to turn up in nearby Kuitpo forest in the Adelaide Hills. The sniffer dogs turn up more in shallow graves and at that point it feels like the investigation is wallowing in blood, too much blood, not enough connecting threads. The main plot is complicated by the connections, homosexual and otherwise, between the police hierarchy and the judiciary. When the author tried to add a human interest to Dan Brennan's life, in the form a daughter who returns home and becomes an assistant to the pathologist, and then a relationship with one of his staff, he lost me.The narrative seems to get away from the author, and the twist at the end is quite bizarre.

In short, a novel with promising passages but not quite my cup of tea. ( )