Diana Hockley: The Metamorphosis of Troubadour Merriwether: A short story

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This is a very charming but very short story about a young man who takes advice from a most unusual source that changes his life. The ending is very funny.

I wonder where Diana thought up the unusual name of Troubadour Merriwether - I wonder if it is a pet name of hers.

        

Diana Hockley: The Cloud

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Something has parked a black cloud of ectoplasm over Las Vegas, creating fear and chaos. What is it and what is it going to do?

This extremely short story is ingenious and has an very funny ending. LOL.

        

Diana Hockley: Christmas with Snoz

My prize for most unusual Christmas short story
This short story is probably the most unusual short story about Christmas that you will find anywhere. SNOZ is a pet rat that gets out of his cage at Christmas and plays havoc throughout the household especially with the Christmas Dinner.

SNOZ said "The first intimation that my day's activities were not going down well was when I climbed onto the table just as dinner was about to be served and hid under the meat tray with the Turkey......"

You will see from Diana Hockley's author profile that before she retired she toured Queensland with a mouse circus, which I guess also featured a few pet rats.

Diana Hockley: The Naked Room

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Fast paced, page-turning well written thriller
The Naked Room was one of my best surprise reads this year. Diana Hockley has created a fast paced page-turning thriller with as many twists and turns and ups and downs as playing snakes and ladders on a roller coaster.

Who would imagine that a plot based around the players in a Symphony Orchestra would make for a great thriller. This tight knit group of people quickly get ensnared when the orchestra's talented young solo pianist, Ally Carpenter, disappears.

We are introduced to Detective Sergeant Susan Prescott who realises that it is a race against time to find the young musician, who may have been kidnapped and be in mortal danger. The story swirls around the love affairs and both the good and strained friendships within Ally's family, close friends and musical collegues. The Carpenter family's long kept secrets are central to the plot and slowly get exposed and tested.

I thoroughly recommend this book as an easy but challenging story to keep your interest through to the end. It is extremely well written as Diana unfolds the story like peeling an orange to find a new unexpected slice under the skin. I really liked her use of mostly first person chapters which leave you in suspense at the end of each chapter as the plot moves to another person or time.

I am looking forward to reading Diana's next book, The Celibate Mouse, which also features Detective Sergeant Susan Prescott. I am on tenterhooks to find out the story behind the title - especially as Diana tells us in her author blurb that she used to run a Mouse Circus. The mind boggles! A search of You Tube for "mouse circus australia" will give you an insight into this amazing carnival type act.

Diana Hockley: The Celibate Mouse

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Another well written Australian thriller
This thriller is based in a small Australian country town which has been dominated  for many years by a large dysfunctional but close-knit family. The mystery starts when someone starts to kill off some family members and attack some outsiders. Is it a family member and why does that person turn to murder?

Detective Sergeant Susan Prescott (who played an important but secondary role in Diana Hockley's first excellent book, The Naked Room), has just arrived in town to recover from a broken second marriage and the death on duty of a close colleague.  While Susan tries to keep out of the case she is dragged into it when she is attacked. The arrival of her first husband Detective Inspector David Maguire (who she has not seen for many years) who is assigned to the case inexorably drags her further into the chase to find and stop the murderer before he kills again.

The description of the town's dynamics was memorable, as was the skilfully crafted range of characters both from the strange dysfunctional family and Susan's own family, especially her identical but very different teenage twin girls.  The plot was well crafted but sometimes a bit complex to follow.

Diana Hockley has shown us again that she can write an absorbing and entertaining Australian thriller.  I am still not sure that I really understand the title - maybe it is a bit too clever for my ageing brain to comprehend.