Nominations for April 2024 Group Read

[Dan, Hardboiled]

What shall we as a group read for April 2024. Please nominate up to two hardboiled or noir titles for the group to consider by March 20. I want to run the poll on March 21. This marks a significant opening of the nominations for this April. I place no limit on nationality, time period of publishing, or genre other than the nomination be crime fiction of a hard-boiled or noir nature. Even repeating an author we have previously read is okay, just not a specific work.

[Dan, Hardboiled]

I wish to nominate Wild Dogs by Michael Trant. It is supposed to be a good example of outback noir. In keeping with the name of our group I feel obliged to nominate an international noir book from time to time.

[Dan, Hardboiled]

My second nomination is The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie. Another outback noir book, this one with a 36-weeks pregnant detective as protagonist.

[Dan, Hardboiled]

Aw nuts! Wild Dogs, the winner, is not available in Kindle and costs around $30 for the paperback. That's out of my price range for experimenting on an author I have never read before. I imagine it's out of the range of most members, too. What to do? The one book by this author available on Kindle looks good, but it's not in the Outback Noir subgenre. I'm going to have to cancel this. So sorry.

Researching carefully this time, I see most lists of Outback Noir novels do not have Kindle versions. In fact, most don't have that many ratings or reviews. The sole exception is The Dry by Jane Harper. I've read it. It's an excellent book. But that is a blockbuster best seller that starts a very popular series. If I have a choice, I don't want to do that for our group. It's already been done in ten other groups. Why re-invent the wheel?

After a lot of searching, I found a promising Outback Noir novel with an affordable Kindle price: Hermit by S.R. White. Let's go with this one. Sorry for having to switch things up this way.

[Paul]

Wild Dogs is available in my neck of the woods (Australasia), Amazon, for $13.75 ($NZ).

[Dan, Hardboiled]

Paul wrote: "Wild Dogs is available in my neck of the woods (Australasia), Amazon, for $13.75 ($NZ)."

That's good to know. Thank you for telling me that. Tell you what, I hate to bait and switch. Wild Dogs won the poll, such as it was. I'm going to make both books group reads starting April 10. I personally will start with Hermit. But I may order Wild Dogs in the next week or two. I'm undecided right now. It might be worth $30 to me. I really did want to read it.

EDIT: I went ahead and ordered the book. There are not many copies for a used edition available in the U.S., and brand new ones are only obtainable from Australia and the U.K. Libraries here with there 33,000 available e-books to check out have never heard of Michael Trant. So I plunked down $29.25, including tax and shipping, for my copy. That's less than a gas tank fill-up right now, I figure. I can rationalize just about anything that way. Looking forward to joining fellow splurging Americans and our group members down under on this one.