Sydney Morning Herald: Headline: "Black deaths, black lives" "... unless there's something I don't know about, Philip McLaren's excellent Scream Black Murder is still only the second crime fiction novel by an Aboriginal writer." "Some of the incidents had me thinking, 'this couldn't possibly happen in Australia', then when I thought about it a bit more, I realised how naive I was being. "... Scream Black Murder is a superb novel that's both tough and tender. In it we're presented with a straight-from-the-shoulder novel of criminality that's as evocative and powerful as Walter Mosley's series about the black ghettos of Los Angeles. High praise but McLaren deserves it."

The best books are the ones that after you read, you realize you've learned a great many things you didn't know before. Such is the case with Scream Black Murder, by Aboriginal writer Philip McLaren.

To begin with, this is a suspensful, white-knuckled thriller. The author does an amazing job getting in the head of a deranged killer who targets aboriginal women in and around Sydney, Australia. Assigned to crack the case is Gary and Lisa, the first aboriginal detectives in the history of the force. Not only must they compete in a thrilling game of cat and mouse with the killer, but they must also perform under a prejudiced police department, many of which would like to see them fail.

Apart from a superb story, McLaren also succeeds in illuminating the social and racial issues of Australia--a history of a people oppressed that isn't included in most high school textbooks. It is a relevent, realistic story that will give you a glimpse of a culture suffering from many of the same prejudices as our own.

I highly recommend this book; and I am looking forward to "investigating" the other WorldKrime books put out by the publisher, all of which apparently offer similiar multi-culured views of different countries.

Sydney Morning Herald:(28 August, '93) Book released.Headline: "Love and death in the bush" "It is always a pleasure to encounter a new work which attempts to tell the story of Australia's pastoral expansion as it really was. This is especially the case when the story is told by a new Aboriginal writer who gives the Aboriginal people an appropriate emphasis and is explicit about how they were treated. It is even more satisfying when that writer retains his or her sense of balance and does not oversimplify the situation. All of these are rewards that readers will experience from Philip McLaren's first novel. The novel is not an easy one to classify. The tradition it is closest to is probably the Australian pastoral family saga. To this popular but relatively unsubtle genre, McLaren has added a crucial, previously missing dimension. Whereas in earlier works of this kind, Aboriginal people were marginal and often reduced to 'faithful servants' or 'dangerous myalls', McLaren tells at least half the story from the viewpoint of his Aboriginal characters. Like other books in the tradition, this one is strong on plot and narrative momentum."