Meet Jack Irish, criminal lawyer, debt collector, football lover, turf watcher, trainee cabinetmaker, and one of the best crime characters ever created.
When Jack receives a puzzling message from a jailed ex-client he’s too deep in misery over his football team’s latest loss to take much notice. Next thing Jack knows, the ex-client’s dead and he’s been drawn into a life-threatening investigation involving high-level corruption, dark sexual secrets, shonky property deals, and murder. With hitmen after him, shady ex-policemen at every turn, and the body count rising, Jack needs to find out what’s going on—and fast.
The first novel in the iconic Jack Irish series, Bad Debts was first published in 1996 and won the Australia’s crime writing prize, the Ned Kelly Award, for Best First Novel. Peter Temple went on to win Australia’s highest literary honor, the Miles Franklin Award, in 2010 for Truth as well many other awards and accolades both in Australia and internationally.
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- Used Book in Good Condition
Jack Irish Is An Across The Board Winner! I like Jack Irish. I like him a lot. Fortunately for me MacAdam/Cage now publishes author Peter Temple’s noir novels, featuring Mr. Irish, in the US. By the way, he is not Irish at all, but the great-grandson of I. Reich, a German Jewish immigrant to Australia. In a market chock-full of detective type anti-heroes, Jack stands above the pack as the only Renaissance sleuth. He’s also a man from Melbourne who gives great Aussie slang! Literary points for that! Professionally his moniker reads…
Unsung (in the US, that is) genius, due for a far bigger readership I love Peter Temple’s Jack Irish books, and have been evangelizing about them for the past year on my blog ([…] I’m so glad they’re being published now in the US. This is some of the best crime fiction–the best fiction, period–you will ever read. They are elegantly written and constructed, but they also pack a punch; and they’ve got this great Australian vocabulary thing going on that works as a kind of minor enjoyable brain-teaser as you’re luxuriating in the compelling first-person…
A complex and richly told tale with a fascinating protagonist It was somewhat distressing to discover that Peter Temple has been active for years in Australia with nary a whisper in the United States. He has won three Ned Kelly awards for crime fiction, including one for BAD DEBTS as “Best First Novel.” Indeed, with no slight to the other nominees that year, upon reading BAD DEBTS one can see why. It is a complex and richly told tale with a fascinating protagonist.That protagonist is the wonderfully named Jack Irish, a rumpled knight with an…