Iain Ryan, The Strip.

- I very much enjoyed Iain Ryan's previous novels, The Student, and The Spiral, but this one is a cut above. It's brilliant. How on earth does a crime writer who is not, and never has been, a cop, write a novel as intricate and informed as this? It's so real, and the characters so believable. There are none of your tired and empty cliches. 

- The setting is the Gold Coast in the early 80’s - the criminal underclass, the corrupt police, and the deadening conservative culture and society more generally. We're a decade or two prior to the reforms introduced by the Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie governments. As the key criminal player says at one point: One day, everything I do here on the coast will be legal. The fucking, the gambling, abortions, drugs. The lot.

- A serial killer is on the loose. Detective Constable Lana Cohen from Sydney has been sent up north to work with a bunch of detectives investigating the deaths of eight victims of a serial killer. But the police on the Gold Coast are incompetent, lazy and stupidly blokey. Beer and prostitutes is all they care about. The place is known as a ‘punishment posting’. It is where the Force sends its weakest officers. ‘They’re dogs, each and all’.

- Ryan thickens the story with a lot of characters and twists, so the reader is challenged to stay with it. But that pays off in spades. He builds an extremely satisfying resolution with some stunning reveals.

- This is a masterful piece of work. It is easily one of the best crime novels I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. 

- Here are some reviews from authors who know what they're talking about: 

Steeped in the bitter lore of old-school policing and backlit by the gaudy neon of the Gold Coast streets, The Strip is hands done one the the finest Australian crime novels you'll ever read. (David Whish-Wilson)

Tense and compelling. (Garry Disher)

Iain Ryan's The Strip is an eye popping, nightmarish miasma that sets a new bar for Australian crime. Drenched in sweat, despair and corruption, think David Fincher's Seven, set on the Gold Coast in the 1980's. Except weirder and with more tension. A total triumph in every respect. (Chris Flynn)

The Strip is bingeworthy reading - a gritty crime thriller reeking of corruption, murder and sex. If you like your heroines flawed and kick-ass and your cops dirty as hell, you'll love Iain Ryan's gripping foray into the underworld of the Gold Coast. Hardly took a breath from first page to last. (Kate Mildenhall)

If David Peace wrote a novel set in Queensland's Gold Coast in the 1980's, the result would be The Strip. Fast paced, gritty, sharply observed noir that goes hard into the sleaze and corruption of the moonlight state. (Andrew Nette)