3.5 stars

Off Season is a crime novel set in Australia. It mostly revolves around a detective sent to investigate a cold case in a small town, which coincidentally ends up having multiple murders over the weeks he is there.

Ultimately, I enjoyed reading this novel. The annoyances I had with it weren't enough for me to stop reading. I enjoyed the setting and the constant reference to the weather, it added a calming effect to the novel. You can tell that the author spent a lot of time thinking through structure and plot which I think paid off.

I wish it had been 3 or 4 separate novels in a 'Detective Ramesh Ryan' series because my main gripe was that there was just too much going on. Too many characters and too many storylines loosely put together. There was very little character development and due to being introduced to a new character almost every chapter (and the chapters are very short) I probably missed a lot of attempt at character development due to not being able to keep up with all the details being told about each character. The author would also benefit from giving more depth to the female characters as they would not have passed the Bechdel test.

I found that the plot dragged a bit and, as mentioned above, it would have been a lot more interesting if each murder was actually a completely separate story. I think this novel could have easily just been about the detective being sent to investigate the cold case of the missing teen, but instead there was a whole other drug underworld thrown in that just seemed to be put together a bit flimsily. For example, I'm still not even sure what happened with the foot that washed up on shore - I don't recall that being resolved. A lot of good ideas, they just didn't all need to be in one novel.

One homophobic slur and one racial slur which was surprising and not appreciated in a modern novel. There were also quite a few grammar errors - words missing or misspelled, in one instance a character's entire name was spelt incorrectly.

I definitely think the front cover could be more inspired.

I will be looking out for the author's next novel, hopefully with a bit more refining! Worthwhile read for those who enjoy the crime genre. ( )

An ARC was provided in exchange for an honest review. This did not influence my thoughts in any way.

Off Season by Clive Fleury is a crime fiction story that takes place in Australia. Detective Ramesh Ryan is banished from Sydney after losing a court case against a drug kingpin. He is sent to the small beach town of Barton. What follows are dead bodies, severed limbs, a vicious ferret and an unsolved cold case. I enjoyed the characters and the story. I'd be interested in reading more from this author. ( )

I enjoyed this mystery that takes place in a coastal town near Sydney Australia. The protagonist, Ramesh Ryan, is sent down from the Sydney Organized Crime Office to the small town where he discovers and gets involved in dealing with the deaths of a couple of locals. Australian mobsters and drug dealers are involved with some vindictive unpleasantness and there are hints to deeper doings. The characters seem a bit one-dimensional, but that dimension is well developed. I would have liked to have gotten to know the characters better, but there just wasn't that chance. The location is described enough to help the plot but not overwhelm it. There was a satisfactory ending. It will be interesting to see where this series goes in the future as both the protagonist and the author develop. ( )

It's hard to point to a specific example and say, "This is why the book never drew me in," but it didn't.

The general plot was fine. I'd classify it as summer reading: it's not going to make your Best Books list, but it's diverting. There was a little too much in the way of coincidence, but that's not unusual for summer-reading thrillers. The author (inadvertently?) tipped his hand on who one of the real baddies was far too early, but maybe that can be ignored. The backdrop of Barton was well-done.

The real problem for me was that the characters had shells around them. We learned facts about them, but they never came alive. We never got to experience them as three-dimensional people. It was largely "tell" and seldom "show." And so, while the concept of Inspector Ryan, with his somewhat-minority background and obvious attraction to a place he never thought he'd fit in, appeals, the reality is that I'm not hooked on this as a series. I'm pretty sure it will be a series, since there's a minor thread left hanging at the end.

And I was constantly distracted by the editing quality. This not only refers to the numerous typos; it was also characters' names changing, misspelled words, punctuation mistakes galore, etc. The number of missing or extra quotation marks around dialogue was particularly noticeable.

It was also the malapropisms. The very first paragraph opens with someone careful about their appearance being "facetious" instead of "fastidious." It goes on through several more examples ranging from an athlete repeatedly being an "Olympiad" (instead of "Olympian") to the person receiving a bequest being a "benefactor" (instead of a "beneficiary"), to name just a few of the several I noticed. The author needs someone with a better command of vocabulary to take a pass through the writing. ( )

{first in Detective Ryan series; crime, gangsters, Sydney, detective, LTER} (2024)

I received this e-book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. To be honest, crime isn't my preferred genre; I requested it because I have family in Australia and because I was curious about the lead character, detective Ramesh Ryan.

The story is set in 2021 (though it was published 2024). Ryan is a high-flying Sydney detective - until he loses a guaranteed-win high profile case against a drug king-pin and is asked to temporarily move to the Central Coast town of Barton, several hours' drive north of Sydney, 'for his safety'. Coincidentally at the same time a drug shipment is mishandled just off the coast from Sydney and then bodies start turning up in Barton just after Ryan arrives there. Plus there's a fifteen year old mystery to be solved. The title 'Off Season' is because Barton thrives off the tourist trade in the summer but the story takes place during the off season when only the local residents are in town.

I thought the writing was decent enough, the plotting was good and the action flowed well. I found it easy to put down but easy to pick up again (though it took me a bit longer to read than I was initially expecting, looking at my e-reader page count) and I liked the little continuity links between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next (maybe the author's screenplay experience coming through?). I thought the seaside town was depicted well (Ryan's partial ethnicity is noticed) though I couldn't say either way how accurate the portrayal of gangsters in Sydney is.

However, the book could have done with better editing. Towards the beginning of the book there were several random, awkward exclamation marks! And though the story was told from the third person point of view, I noticed one chapter where it switched from the attacker to the victim within the same scene which was disorienting. There were many examples of odd or wrong word choices (four is a number, not a letter; 'revelry' is not the same as 'reverie'; I'm not quite sure what a 'blood wrenching cry' is and so on) which jarred me out of the story whenever I came across them and sentences were often quite short which chopped up the flow of the narrative. There were a few brand names scattered through; three or four specific ones cropped up frequently which had me wondering if they sponsored the book.

I do find it a bit hard to believe that a silver medalist Olympian (not Olympiad) from the last games could go missing without it being noticed (not a spoiler; this happens at the beginning of the story). And while I appreciate that this was a crime novel, there was the odd gruesome bit (such as a victim's face being smashed by a propeller) which felt added in just to try to make it more gritty; they cropped up very occasionally and felt out of place. Either do gruesome all the way - which would be a different type of book - or (my personal preference) don't make it gratuitously gory at all.

These were all small issues but distracted from the story.

Overall, a decent book with a lot going on.

(March 2024)
3-3.25 stars ( )