The Tattooed Man (Alex Palmer, Harpercollins, $29.99 tpb, ISBN 97800732285722, February 2008) ***

The Tattooed Man opens with a grisly tableau—a table is set, dinner is served, and all seated at the table have been murdered. Sitting with them is the mummified body of a missing detective, identifiable by his distinctive tattoo, with a bloodstained booklet in his hand. Paul Harrigan is called to the scene to investigate this strange crime and what unfolds is a mysterious set of events with politics, corruption, big business, espionage and illicit biotechnology thrown into the mix. Grace Riordan, Harrigan's companion and undercover intelligence worker, is inadvertently drawn into an investigation where no-one can be sure who’s telling the truth. While the plot twists and turns are numerous, the pace at times gets bogged down by a somewhat convoluted storyline that involves a large cast of characters, and appears to be trying to include too many of the requisite crime fiction cliches and red herrings to be believable. The complex plot of The Tattooed Man is constructed with an assured hand, however, and there is some accomplished writing within the book’s pages. This novel will appeal to fans of Alex Palmer’s award-winning debut novel Blood Redemption and lovers of crime fiction in general.

Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based fiction writer and bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker