Stiff : A Murray Whelan Mystery - Softcover

Shane Maloney is deputy director of the Brunswick Institute, a weather board think-tank financed by his wife. The Brush-Off was awarded the 1996 Ned Kelly Prize for Best Crime Novel, and short-listed for the 1996 Vance Palmer Prize for fiction. Shane Maloney is also the author of Something Fishy, Stiff, Nice Try, The Big Ask and Sucked In.

It's no skin off Murray Whelan's nose when gargantuan Ekrem Bayraktar, shift supervisor at the Pacific Pastoral meat-packing plant in Coolaroo, is found squeezed among the higher-grade meats in Pacific's #3 freezer. But when you're the electorate officer serving the constituents of Charlene Wills, Australia's Minister for Industry, you never know which constituents may need service. Soon, Charlene's Machiavellian adviser Angelo Agnelli is hissing that Murray (The Brush-Off, 1998) needs to investigate the possibility of labor discontents at the Pacific Pastoral plant in order to keep rising municipal councillor Joe Collicato from challenging Charlene. It's a circuitous route to an investigation, but once Murray discovers that Bayraktar's crew included the Turkish equivalents of Robert Redford and Santa Claus, nothing can pull him off the scentnot his impending divorce and child-custody suit; not his budding friendship with Ayisha Celik, of the Australian Turkish Welfare League; not the episodes in which his house gets broken into and he nearly gets run down by somebody driving Bayraktar's car; and certainly not the unsought and comically premature confession he hears to Bayraktar's murder. Americans willing to take in the dirty linen of the political system Down Under will come away with a middling mystery, some finely honed action scenes, and an earful of Maloney's lovely epitomes of the Australian Labor Party, ``an organization which, next to itself, loves the working man best.'' -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.