Sue I. Williams

Cass Tuplin is back, muddling her way through another mystery in Rusty Bore, a small drought stricken town out on the middle of the Mallee.

"Dead men don’t order flake. But that’s exactly what Leo Stone asked for the April afternoon he strolled in, his gladiator shoulders filling up my shop doorway. A blast of cold wind whirled in behind him, slapping the fly strips against the wall."

Cass's old flame has walked back inter her life, her takeaway shop to be precise, after twenty years presumed to be dead.

"I stood there in gobsmacked silence. Twenty-odd years ago we had a top-notch memorial service for Leo. Every one of Rusty Bore’s hundred and forty-seven residents made it. The church was full of the sound of stifled sobs by the time Ernie got up to do the eulogy'

Full of mixed feelings, confused, angry that he hadn't attempted to contact her over those twenty years, wary over a potential partner Serena, Cass is unsure what to do so she charges him $9.50 for his fish and chips and tries to get some perspective.

All this is put on hold when she is asked by a grieving father to look into the death of his daughter, local reporter, in a single car accident involving a tree on the notorious Jensen Corner.

"I sat still a moment. Natalie Kellett. That’s why I knew the name: Natalie Kellett died in that car crash on Jensen Corner. It’s a renowned black spot; my own mother died there when I was a kid. Named after the first person that crashed and died there: Alistair Jensen, back in 1950-something, decades before my mum. Nice for the bloke to be remembered for something, I suppose. It doesn’t seem to matter how many accidents happen there, apparently there’s no money to fix that bit of road."

This simple request puts Cass into a mix of corruption, climate change coal versus solar investments, Government inquiries, fracking, more suspicious deaths, battles with her disbelieving son Senior Constable Dean and troubles with her environmentalists son Brad.

This novel is set some sixteen months after her first novel "Murder With The Lot". Williams again fills her mystery with an assortment of the odd characters found in any dead and dying country town. The wealthy town of Muddy Soak lording it over poor Rusty Bore.

It's a tongue in check take of the amateur meddling 'lady detective' transplanted into the most unlikely of small towns, Rusty Bore.
It's a delight.

p.s. Flake is a term used in Australia to indicate the flesh of any of several species of small shark, particularly the gummy shark. The term probably arose in the late 1920s when the large-scale commercial shark fishery off the coast of Victoria was established. Until that time, shark was generally an incidental catch rather than a targeted species. Its is the standard fish you receive when you order fish & chips.… (mere)

Quirky crime novel set in a drought affected small town called Rusty Bore in Victoria's Mallee. Rusty Bore is down to two shops, Cass Tuplin's takeaway and Vern's General Store.
Even the pub has gone.

Into Cass's takeaway, ordering a hamburger with the lot and chips, in a hurry, which immediately offended Cass's sensibilities, her hamburgers and chips are not to be rushed, came Clarence.
Gripping his briefcase with white knuckled desperation, Clarence further offended Cass by amending the order.
‘Oh, no onions,’ he said. ‘Or beetroot or egg. And I hate pineapple.’

His suit sleeve was torn and he was bleeding on her pristine floor and kept glancing out the door as if he was being followed.
Clarence refused offers of medical attention and asked if there was somewhere quite in the area he could rent to write his book.

Cass remembered Ernie's old shack up by Perry Lake, run down but serviceable. Paying Cass $5,000 in cash Clarence rushed off, asking that she keep his whereabouts quiet.

Then the body turned up, or did it. Cass is forced to solve this mystery on her own when he local Senior Sergent, her son Dean, refused to believe her, on account of the body not being there.

Williams cleverly captures small town people and the everyone knows everything atmosphere. Plot twists and misadventure abounds as more people go missing and Cass's credibility threatens to prevent anyone believing her. It doesn't help that Cass frequently jumps to the wrong conclusions, doesn't listen, and is fearlessly stubborn.… (mere)

There are times in life when you just need something frivolous, fun and slightly tongue in cheek. Australian readers are lucky to have the Cass Tuplin series from Sue Williams to fulfil that need.

The tongue in cheek bit is the important thing to remember when it comes to Cass Tuplin books - from the titles: MURDER WITH THE LOT / DEAD MEN DON'T ORDER FLAKE and now LIVE AND LET FRY you can kind of gather there's a good old-style fish and chip shop somewhere in the mix here. In this case in the fictional Victorian Mallee town of Rusty Bore, just down the road from Hustle, not far from Sheep Dip, and a few hours straight road travelling through Ouyen to Mildura. Some of us have probably taken an educated guess at the likely inspiration and one or two of us may have actually ordered a minimum chips in such a locale. Cass Tuplin is most definitely not a licensed investigator, she's a good neighbour, an inveterate sticky-nose with a sideline in caring about people, mother of two sons (one uptight cop / one laid back environmentalist) and she's most definitely not cut from the same cloth as a well-known ex-proprietor of a similar establishment from Queensland.

You expect with a Cass Tuplin book that you're going to get a hefty dose of daft fun and it's served up neatly wrapped in butchers paper in LIVE AND LET FRY. It would help a lot if you've read the two earlier books as the cast of eccentric locals is important, and their back stories interwined to the point of knotted. You might want to take a seat for a minute as this is going to get complicated but Vern (who runs the convenience store in Rusy Bore, is Cass's closest neighbour, once was suitor, now besotted with the new woman in Sheep Dip, who has opened a bookshop in an old church (why nobody can quite fathom)), wants Cass to help get to the bottom of odd phone calls and dumped mutilated rats on his Joanne's doorstep. Which leads Cass via Sheep Dip and a tattooed hitman, to a private detective named Mel, a dead bloke in a house fire, a dead woman in a river, a property developer and his chauffeur/helicopter pilot, a missing pump leading to lost love, Mildura based environmental consultants, a casino and harbour development, some odd photographs, a residence attached to a fish and chip shop filled with ferrets (not good for Health and Safety), her policeman son's marriage collapsing, his complicit boss, a long-distance love affair in trouble, a hefty belt over the head in a toilet block in Ouyen, a bus crash in Bolivia and a paddle steamer. And some solid connections between them all. I kid you not, and all in pretty rapid succession so you'd better be paying attention.

Needless to say madcap, fast paced, silly and fun. All delivered in Cass's own personal style which is a sort of combination caring, blithely unaware, manipulative, helpful, blundering, clever, self-deprecating, self-aware and blissfully unself-aware. Simultaneously.

This is one of those series that has developed into something delightfully entertaining, Cass's tone and style have matured into just the right level of personal daft, and the eccentricities are nicely balanced against a plot that's actually quite believable. Definitely one for fans of something that will make them laugh, and for those of us who live around the same locale, one that will make you wonder whether or not this author has been doing some ear-wigging around the local fish and chip shop.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/live-and-let-fry-sue-williams… (mere)