Dead Point by Peter Temple
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014 (originally published 2000) ISBN 9781922148384
As I write Victoria is going through yet another lockdown - my hometown's sixth. There is not much else to do in lockdowns other than to trawl streaming services for content (hint - most of it is not worth watching) or to read. I've been dividing my reading time between the "worthy" and the "easy", with the "easy" side of the ledger being taken up in the last month or so with Peter Temple's Jack Irish crime books.
Dead Point is the third book in the series, and doesn't stack up against the other two. While the plot is convoluted and interesting, the characterizations have become lazier, and at times the reader definitely feels that Temple is going through the motions. At some stages the noir manner is so clipped that the flow of a scene dries up as the reader becomes lost, and while in the first two books the horseman Harry Strang and the cabinet maker Charlie Taub are light relief, in Dead Point they don't really make an appearance.
The plot revolves around Irish's attempts to track down some salacious photographs that are being used to corrupt a local judge. There are all sorts of people involved - corrupt cops, shonky developers, former TV personalities, and a mysterious gigolo. At times the loops and whirls of who is doing what to whom and why can be confusing, although there are exciting moments throughout the story.
In Dead Point, Temple seems to have lost interest in evoking the milieu of Melbourne at the turn of the century, and his occasional non-sequitur - such as his quartermaster friend dealing out Tim Tams during the Vietnam War - can jar.
Dead Point is a disappointing follow-up to the first two Jack Irish books - I will go on to read the fourth, to see what happens to Irish, and to see if Temple picks up the ball he has dropped in this volume.
Disappointing compared to the others in the series, but still not bad as crime novels go.
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