I thoroughly enjoyed this local crime thriller. Loved all the Melbourne references including one of my favourite Footscray Vietnamese places Thien An. ( )

Couldn’t find this in paperback so listened to it on audio which was one of the worst experiences of my life. The narrator was appalling and I was entertained only by her dreadful mispronunciation of words. I also lost count of the number of references to excrement. Never again ( )

I imagine it is pretty difficult to come up with a new angle from which to approach the crime genre. J.M. Green has achieved a genuinely refreshing take by introducing a social worker as the central protagonist in GOOD MONEY. Stella Hardy is forty-something, lives in Melbourne, works for WORMS, yearns for cheap wine and a good man and tries to do the right thing but doesn’t always succeed. In what I hope is the first of many appearances she is drawn into two investigations – the death of one of her young, migrant clients and the disappearance of a neighbour who was hiding some secrets – that lead her from the seedier parts of the city to, literally, the middle of nowhere.

Although there is much more besides it the element which established the book as realistic for me was the daft acronyms that the bureaucratic entities Stella deals with use. I’ve spent a good portion of my working life in similar surroundings to Stella and when, a few pages in, she heads off to her job at WORMS (you’ll have to read the book to find out what it stands for) I knew this was both a book I would ‘get’ and one I would believe. There’s an even more absurd (yet entirely credible) acronym further in. Delicious authenticity.

Stella is another strong factor in the credibility column. She is imperfect but not so dysfunctional that you wonder how she stays in a job let alone out of an institution where inhabitants are required to wear padded jackets that do up at the back. And none of her adventurous activities are so silly as to induce eye rolling. This might sound like a small thing but it isn’t. I’ve got a pile of books from this month alone that will remain forever unfinished because my eyes nearly rolled out of my head while reading them. I am well and truly done with authors who expect me to swallow the notion that the stupid things their characters do make them windswept and interesting. The minor characters here include Stella’s recently paroled brother, her policewoman best friend and an artistic love interest and all are engaging and help to give the book its natural feel.

At its core though GOOD MONEY is simply a great yarn, offering a mixture of humour, heart and action that should appeal to a wide audience. With its new migrant characters, drug dealing as an industry and mining executives behaving badly it is topical enough to be interesting but not so now as to ensure it is irretrievably dated within a few months. In short it’s a great read and if wishing can make it so the first of many tales featuring Stella Hardy.

GOOD MONEY was shortlisted in 2014 for the Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript.This led to two book deal, hence the blurb on the cover "The first Stella Hardy novel."

The novel is one of a batch of new titles by young Australian authors published recently which reflects the current mileu of Australian society: one that is struggling to adapt to new elements of multiculturalism; growing cities in which crime and corruption seem to thrive; rural communities in steady decline; a fragile mining industry with illusory riches where the naive are the prey of the organised crime.

The author's quirky sense of humour surfaces frequently as social worker Stella Hardy searches for her missing neighbour and is frequently summoned for help by an African client whose son has been murdered in what looks like a drug deal gone wrong. Small gobbets of Stella's background surface to flesh out her character. In this story Stella gets herself into some horrendous situations, and I'm amazed that she survived.

An interesting read from an author worth following. ( )

Set mostly in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, JM Green’s Good Money introduces Stella Hardy. A social worker by vocation, Hardy is the sort of laksa-loving, inner-city woman who fits into the role of accidental detective with considerable aplomb.

http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/2015/12/10/tania-chandler-please-dont-leave-m... ( )