How far would you go to save a friend?
Peter Tanner, a cynical, world-weary lawyer, receives a phone call from the wife of an old friend and is dragged into the murky underworld of corporate corruption, environmental disasters and cover-ups. As a defence lawyer in Sydney, Tanner is well and truly sick of his clientele – underworld gangsters, drug dealers, you name it – yet he still does his job. After his wife died, he has simply continued existing to support his son and, to stop himself from thinking, he has continued working in criminal defence.
The phone call from Melissa Cheung to say that her husband has been arrested in China and is facing the rest of his life in prison drags him out of his apathy and starts him investigating why Joe has been be taken into custody, who has got it in for him, and what is happening behind the scenes. With every trail he follows, every thread he pulls, the situation becomes more sleazy, more grotty and more downright wrong.
Listed as Book 1 in the Peter Tanner series, Cyanide Games is an uncomfortable insight into how far corporate greed can go. If some of this sounds like a familiar theme – jaded lawyer against the corrupt corporate world – it is because Richard Beasley’s first novel was the excellent Hell Has Harbour Views, released in 2001, which was also made into a telemovie for the ABC. (Trivia snap: the telemovie was produced by Peter Duncan, who also produces Rake).
This time, rather than looking inwards at the corruption within a law firm, Beasley looks further outward with a more modern scenario of a monstrously huge and greedy multinational company that hides environmental damage with media spin and murder.
Beasley clearly is comfortable writing about what he knows, as the descriptions of people, meetings and processes are clear and realistic. It’s not surprising as he was a lawyer up who grew up in Adelaide and attended the University of Adelaide prior to moving to Sydney. Some of the character depictions were somewhat lacking or one-dimensional – Peter Tanner himself isn’t fully painted but is still a black and white pencil drawing; John Richter, son of the owner of the multinational company, is a stereotypically awful spoilt rich boy with no redeeming features. We know Peter’s wife has died, he is determined to be a good father to his son, that he is excellent at his job yet hates his clientele, but we don’t know a lot about his personality or his relationship with his son, other than the odd conversation with him. Hopefully, there will be more books in the series to flesh out his character and give us some more good stories to get our teeth into.
Cyanide Games is an enjoyable, fast-paced and involved crime thriller, a welcome return for a good Australian author. It will be released in paperback and eBook from August 2016.
Reviewed by Michelle Baylis
Rating out of 10: 7
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: 1 August 2016
RRP: $29.99 paperback; $9.99 eBook
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