Jon Cleary is one of the most prolific mystery novelists in the world, and it wouldn't be a surprise to find you've never heard of him. He's probably best known in the States for having written the adventure novel High Road to China, which was made into a Tom Selleck movie. In his native Australia, though, he's best known for a long series of police procedurals featuring Scobie Malone, a Sydney homicide inspector. According to the by the same author section of the front of this book, this is the 17th Scobie Malone mystery, and they're all good, and suspenseful. This one is especially intriguing and enigmatic.

Aussie politics are apparently somewhat dirty, but down under there are lines you don't cross, and political assasination is one of them. When a major Australian politician is gunned down eight months before the Olympics visit Sydney, everyone in politics is a suspect, and there are opportunities galore. Things are complicated for Malone by the involvement of two of his daughters, and his wife, in the Olympic preparations or the coverage of the assassination. Only his son is unentangled. When Scobie and his partner Russ Clements unravel things and begin to zero in on the shooter, this only intensifies the mystery, because no one is clear who hired him.

I enjoy Jon Cleary a great deal. The one thing that may be jarring is his habit of jumping to different points of view, which some may find jarring. I don't, personally, and I enjoy it. I would highly recommend this book.

Australian fiction is the best you will ever find (and I've read everything from King to Koontz) but 99% of books from Down Under are not released here in the United States. Why? I don't know. But I DO know what I've discovered. Jon Cleary's The Bear Pit : A Scobie Malone Mystery is fantastic! I've hunted down more Scobie Malone Mysteries over the internet and they're all great.

Other must reads by Australian authors are:

Any book written by Robert G. Barrett! (The Stephen King of Australia)
Peter Corris' Cliff Hardy stories! (As good as anything written by Nelson DeMille)
Blood Junction by Caroline Carver (As good as anything written by Dean Koontz)
Every book written by Peter Doyle! (Move over John Grisham)

My fellow Americans, fight to read the books the US publishers won't let you see! You will be glad you did.

My wife and I are huge Jon Cleary fans - we discovered him when we lived in Australia from 1990-97, and have ALL of the 'Scobie Malone' books in our collection. This is one of the best Cleary has done - the action is swift, the plot thickens with each page and a satisfying ending ensues.

This is great book to gather some insight into the Australian way of life - their attitudes, surrounds and politics. It is also just a 'great read' (as they say in Oz), and timely with the upcoming Olympics - check out Dilemma too - it's great! Scobie is a very real, likable character that you will become attached to.

This is another top class mystery by Jon Cleary. Inspector Scobie Malone is back and facing one of his toughest cases yet - and must deal with the potential danger this causes to his family. This book is excellent, and keeps the pace and plot twists the whole way through. The ending is impossible to guess, but is plausable, and ties up all the loose ends. Inspector Scobie Malone is an excellent character - he has fallabilities and could be just like any police person that you know. He solves his cases with legwork, teamwork with his fellow detectives and piecing the puzzle together, not with excessive violence or by implausible events. Even if you have never read a Jon Cleary or Scobie Malone book before, read this one - you'll soon be hooked.

Great fun and captures the Aussie spirit

Despite the criticisms levelled at Trollope for his "authorial intrusions" (see Henry James for example) this novel is always a pleasure to read. The characters take precedence over the plot, as in any Trollopian fiction and this is what makes a novel like BARCHESTER more palatable to the modern reader, as compared to any of Dickens's. Some readers may find the ecclesiastical terms confusing at first but with a little help (see the Penguin introduction for example), all becomes clear. What is important, however, is the interaction between the all-too-human characters and in this novel there are plenty of situations to keep you, the reader, amused.

Do yourself a favour and take a trip back into Nineteenth century where technology is just a blink in everyone's eye. What you will discover, however, is that human beings have not really changed, just the conventions have.

I rushed home every day after work to read a little more of this Trollope comedy. The book starts out with the death of a bishop during a change in political power. The new bishop is a puppet to his wife Mrs. Proudie and her protégé Mr. Slope. Along the way we meet outrageous clergymen, a seductive invalid from Italy, and a whole host of delightfully ridiculous characters. Trollope has designed most of these characters to be "over the top". I kept wondering what a film version starring the Monty Python characters would look like. He wrote an equivalent of a soap opera, only it doesn't take place at the "hospital", it takes place with the bishops. Some of the characters you love, some of the characters you hate, and then there are those you love to hate. Trollope speaks to the reader throughout the novel using the mimetic voice, so we feel like we are at a cocktail party and these 19th century characters are our friends (or at least the people we're avoiding at the party!). The themes and characters are timeless. The book deals with power, especially power struggles between the sexes. We encounter greed, love, desperation, seductive sirens, and generosity. Like many books of this time period however, the modern reader has to give it a chance. No one is murdered on the first page, and it takes quite a few chapters for the action to pick up. But pick up it does by page 70, and accelerates into a raucously funny novel from there. Although I didn't read the Warden, I didn't feel lost and I'm curious to read the rest of this series after finishing this book. Enjoy!

This is the second of the six Barsetshire novels, and the first great novel in that series. THE WARDEN, while pleasant, primarily serves as a prequel to this novel. To be honest, if Trollope had not gone on to write BARCHESTER TOWERS, there would not be any real reason to read THE WARDEN. But because it introduces us to characters and situations that are crucial to BARCHESTER TOWERS, one really ought to have read THE WARDEN before reading this novel.

Trollope presents a dilemma for most readers. On the one hand, he wrote an enormous number of very good novels. On the other hand, he wrote no masterpieces. None of Trollope's books can stand comparison with the best work of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. On the other hand, none of those writers wrote anywhere near as many excellent as Trollope did. He may not have been a very great writer, but he was a very good one, and perhaps the most prolific good novelist who ever lived. Conservatively assessing his output, Trollope wrote at least 20 good novels. Trollope may not have been a genius, but he did possess a genius for consistency.

So, what to read? Trollope's wrote two very good series, two other novels that could be considered minor classics, and several other first rate novels. I recommend to friends that they try the Barsetshire novels, and then, if they find themselves hooked, to go on to read the Political series of novels (sometimes called the Palliser novels, which I feel uncomfortable with, since it exaggerates the role of that family in most of the novels). The two "minor classics" are THE WAY WE LIVE NOW and HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT. The former is a marvelous portrait of Victorian social life, and the latter is perhaps the finest study of human jealousy since Shakespeare's OTHELLO. BARSETSHIRE TOWERS is, therefore, coupled with THE WARDEN, a magnificent place, and perhaps the best place to enter Trollope's world.

There are many, many reasons to read Trollope. He probably is the great spokesperson for the Victorian Mind. Like most Victorians, he is a bit parochial, with no interest in Europe, and very little interest in the rest of the world. Despite THE AMERICAN SENATOR, he has few American's or colonials in his novels, and close to no foreigners of any type. He is politically liberal in a conservative way, and is focussed almost exclusively on the upper middle class and gentry. He writes a good deal about young men and women needing and hoping to marry, but with a far more complex approach than we find in Jane Austen. His characters are often compelling, with very human problems, subject to morally complex situations that we would not find unfamiliar. Trollope is especially good with female characters, and in his sympathy for and liking of very independent, strong females he is somewhat an exception of the Victorian stereotype.

Anyone wanting to read Trollope, and I heartily believe that anyone who loves Dickens, Austen, Eliot, Hardy, and Thackery will want to, could find no better place to start than with reading the first two books in the Barsetshire Chronicles, beginning first with the rather short THE WARDEN and then progressing to this very, very fun and enjoyable novel.

This book purports to be a true account of a British WWI ace's postwar adventures, but despite a few years of effort I have been unable to turn up the name of William Bede O'Malley on any list of British WWI aces - which often include pilots with lower scores than the 32 victories O'Malley is said to have had. The same is true regarding Conrad von Kern and the German lists.

I am forced to conclude that, alas, it is all fiction.

It's still a great story though.

I picked up a copy of HIGH ROAD TO CHINA at the time it coincided with the release of the film (during the 1980's). After reading the book, I was anticipating the motion picture ... only to be horrifically disappointed. The film takes a mere few chapters of the book and tries to quilt a makeshift adventure vehicle for Tom Selleck, whilst the novel is actually a factual account of the pilot with fiction filling the gaps of his unpublished memoirs. It's a fascinating read and well worth the exploration for history buffs.

In 1994, evidence pointed towards Ron Glaze killing his wife Norma. However, Ron vanishes into the night until several years later Inspector Scobie Malone learns that Ron is hiding in the bush town of Collamundra. Scobie travels from Sydney and arrests Ron for killing his wife. At the same time, Scobie heads an investigation into the kidnap-murder of five year old Lucybelle Vanheusen, a child model. A bit shaken by the little girl's death, Scobie, also a father soon learns the Australian child celebrity did not live quite the idyllic life her fame and fortune would lead one to believe.

If that is not enough to keep Scobie busy, he receives a tip that the prosecutor in the Glazer case young hotshot Tim Pierpont may be the real murderer of Norma. As Scobie begins to investigate Tim, he wonders where that will take him, especially since the potential perpetrator is popular and wealthy.

The sixteenth Scobie Malone novel provides the audience with a deep look into modern day Australia on the verge of the Olympics. The multiple story lines blend together due to Scobie remaining a fresh character. However, the three mysteries seem to take a backseat to Mr. Cleary's nostalgic search for a simpler time in Australia. Still, the mysteries are all well written and the posturing about the path his country has recently traveled brings depth to the tale.

Quite a while back I discovered Jon Cleary's newer books and became a fan. Since then I have been reading his earlier novels and thoroughly enjoying them.
This book shows, once again, how meticulous Cleary is in his research for background to his books and the story line is exciting to follow.

Except for some minute cursing, A wonderful story line.

Jon Cleary has been writing books for centuries, seemingly, and this book (published in the early 90s) lists 41 previous books. He's probably best known in the states for having written High Road to China, which was made into a Tom Selleck movie. In Australia, he's much better known (so I'm told) and has a large following. He writes suspense, some military novels, and a long and prolific series of detective novels with a main character who's Sydney's chief homicide inspector. This book, Winter Chill, is one of those books, and Scobie Malone, the main character, has a real plateful in this book.

First, he's got a convention of a thousand American lawyers in town, and the president of the organization they all belong to gets murdered in the night, bizarrely placed in a monorail that mindlessly runs around the part repeatedly. As soon as they begin to sort out the first killing, Sydney's finest are confronted by a second one, apparently connected but they can't tell how. And on top of that, Malone has personal problems at home that distract him even further.

Cleary is a very good writer. The stories he does are intelligent, and there are usually characters in them who are interesting, and complex. His style of writing is a bit strange: he follows not only Malone, but some of the other characters, and bounces back and forth between them at will. This gives you insight into what they are thinking, but some readers may find it a bit disconcerting.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will now look for others.

Average. Workmanlike, I suppose, but the people never become more than characters. Some are also laughable, such as the gratuitously voracious SS guy's wife (she's with a Nazi: there must be something perverse about her). The plot runs on not one (which would be OK), but several pretty absurd co-incidences - the central one being a perfectly timed road accident. The hero falls for the heroine because she's a babe, but this is, of course, classed as a deep and abiding love. Maybe I'm a bit jaded after years of TV, but the action sequences aren't that gripping, and without humour, insight or personality to make up for it, well, it's average.

Oh, by the way, it follows a group of ex-Concentration Camp Jews escaping post war immigration restrictions to get to Israel.

This book is so well written that it should not be out of print. I was so captivated by it that I simply could not put it down. When I could tear myself away, the characters stayed with me and haunted me untill I could return to the book again. The book begins in postwar Austria, in a Displaced Persons camp. The occupants have just recently been released from such places as Auschwitz and Dachau. Mainly comprised of Jews, they dream of leaving the camp and travelling to Palestine. Aided by the underground movement, Bricha, a small group leaves in secret. When the leader of the group kills two American soldiers to prevent them from stopping their escape, they are persued by the brother of one of the Americans, Major Dunleavy, who himself, is in love with one of the D.P.s. At the same time, a Nazi doctor, who was responsible for the execution of thousands of jews is attempting to leave for South America with his family to start a new life, by aid of the underground Nazi relocation movement, Spinne. Both parties, being pursued by various people that don't want them to escape Europe, continually bump into the other, and the Jews wish justice to be served to the man that was responsible for the death of their loved ones. The novel comes to a dramatic climax when it is discovered that both Bricha and Spinne are using the same safehouse in Italy, owned by a Countess who is only interested in money. This book will grip you from the first chapter to the terribly satisfying conclusion.