 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Rubdown
Leigh Redhead
Allen & Unwin $29.95
When you're on a good thing, stick to it, and after penning the best-selling Peepshow last year, Leigh Redhead (apparently!) has come up with a worthy sequel, again starring the stripper-turned-private eye, Simone Kirsch.
In advance of her debut novel the colourful author let it be known that she had lived in Europe as a child, then on an alternative North Coast community and later developed a successful career as a stripper and table dancer in Melbourne - while getting a BA majoring in communications.
A publicist's dream, assuming she could write, and as it happened she could, and readers loved it, with the added benefit that she photographs very well for a back cover. The debut crime romp was a heady mix of explicit sex, bent cops, dastardly crims and a city backdrop worthy of the best of Peter Corris's Cliff Hardy capers.
Now Simone Kirsch is back to weave her way through the byways of the sex trade, along the way falling foul of various Mr Bigs and falling in lust with a hunky detective of Greek extraction (no coarse jokes, please).
Making a return appearance from the previous book, Simone's best friend Chloe, a raunchy lap-dancer who had been grabbed by the sex industry mafia, tries to entice her friend back to a life of petty vice.
She finds the 'little vixen' at the back of the bar, racking up pool balls, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses at the ready.
'I need more girls and a driver,' Chloe says. 'Start of the footy season and people keep getting married... Want to do a show Friday? You can be the warm-up bitch for a buck's. One-fifty and I won't take any fees.'
Instead, Simone takes a commission from a prominent Melbourne lawyer, Emery Wade, whose daughter Tamara has apparently taken to drugs and is working in the sex industry to pay her bills.
But not for long, as she is discovered in her bathtub, water flowing through the flat, with both wrists slashed and blood everywhere. Suicide or foul play? Suspecting the latter, Simone embarks on a twisted trail in pursuit of the truth, one that takes her through Chinatown on an undercover jaunt through the sex industry, more than a few bars and several men's beds.
It's a sexy romp made all the more real by the author's revelation that in Brisbane, where she now lives, she 'splits her time between stripping and writing'. Clearly the research is paying dividends.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore and at Lismore Shopping
Square.
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