The Big Ask: A Murray Whelan Mystery [Hardcover]

Shane Maloney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2001

Murray Whelan is in trouble. A disastrous election is looming, and his days as advisor to Angelo Agnelli, minister for transport, may be numbered. His son, on loan to his ex-wife, is missing and may be in danger. His ex-fling, Heather, is prowling for his inner prince. And on an icy Melbourne winter morning, he has a rendezvous with a renegade driver in the corrupt truckers union. After that meeting, and a possible run-in with a well-known Italian self-help organization, nothing can save him from another wildly funny, fresh, and fast-paced comic misadventure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shane Maloney (Nice Try) presents The Big Ask: A Murray Whelan Mystery, the fourth raucous adventure featuring the charming and reckless Australian political adviser. Murray makes dizzying, sleep-deprived leaps between high-stakes union infighting, his missing 13-year-old son, various love interests, his boss's potential public disgrace and his old friend's murder.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The latest Murray Whelan mystery is perhaps a little too much like its predecessors. Like Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy novels, in which Gash seemed to be writing the same novel over and over again, the Whelan series seems to have fallen into something of a rut. Once again Whelan, the political advisor who always seems to wind up in mortal jeopardy, has to solve a mystery with his odd combination of luck and wit; this one requires him to infiltrate a powerful trade union. Once again there's plenty of politics, some seedy characters, and lots of wisecracking. Maloney is a perfectly accomplished writer in the hard-boiled mode (The Brush-Off, one of his earlier Whelan novels, won Australia's Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction), but he's facing a dilemma common to authors of series: how to keep it fresh without giving up a successful formula. Maloney hasn't found the answer yet, but his series is good enough to give him time to keep looking. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 243 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (May 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705604
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705608
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly amusing, January 3, 2002

By 

Tom Munro "tomfrombrunswick" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Ask: A Murray Whelan Mystery (Hardcover)

Shane Molondy is one of Australia's newer and more succesful crime writers. This book is set in the dying days of the Victorian Labour government in the early 90's before it was voted out of office in a landslide. The hero Murray Whelan works as a staffer to a Labour Cabinet minister and faces the problems of a dying government.

In addition to these problems he is divorced and his son goes missing. A short time later the son of a rich transport magnate is murdered and Whelan becomes a suspect.

The book is hysterically funny a sort of Australian Carl Hiaasen.
It also conveys a feel for both the political world and the inner suburbs of Melbourne. One of the more enjoyable crime novels to come out in some time.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging Aussie crime novel, May 7, 2005

By 

F. J. Harvey "Cricket ,country music and a go... (Birmingham England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Big Ask: A Murray Whelan Mystery (Hardcover)

The dominant nations of contemporary crime writing are America and the UK at least in terms of critical and commercial acclaim .I wouild suggest that if anyone were minded to analyse reviews of crime novels on this site by authorial nationality they would finD at least 90% of reviews were of books by authors from these two nations .In the process many writers from nations outside the Transatlantic axis are neglected and several fine Australian writers are too little known outside Australia .Shane Maloney is a good example of what I mean .His crime novels feature Murray Whelan and are set in Melbourne during the 1980'S
Murray is not a tradtional protagonist of the crime series type -he is not in law enforcement being neither a cop ,a P.I or a medical examiner .Nor is he the gifted amateur exposing the blinkered police force by meddling in crime and solving it be brilliant ratiocinative powers .Rather ,he is a political adviser to Angelo Agneli ,the state Transport Minister ,and his criminous cases arise from his job and more by accident that desire .
In "The Big Ask " -volume 4 in the series ,but a stand alone work , he is asked by the Minister to help him get re-selected for his safe seat in Parliament .Agnelli wishes to use him as a stalking horse to gauge the strength of opposition and also for him to find a rival candidate to run against the head of the Hauliers Union his strongest critic .Whelan fixes on an old friend and mentor ,an independent trucker named Donny Maitland and sets him up with a slush fund to run a campaign .
One evening he is viciously attacked and beaten by an unknown man in a nightclub ;when he subsequently encounters him again there is a further altercation and his assilant winds up dead .He was a ne'er -do-well named Darren Stuhl ,the son of the biggest haulier boss in the state
The police suspect Murray ,Stuhl's cronies suspect Donny and exert presure on Murray to lie about having seen Maitland kill Darren
The result is tragedy with Maitland being killed and the event set up to look like suicide ,the result of remorse for having murdered Darren .
Whelan sets out to get to the bottom of the case and clear his old friend's name
There is a sub -plot involving Murrays son ,Red ,who absconds from the private school to which his mother ,Murray's ex-wife has sent him
The book is enjoyable and amusing with a distinctly Cart Hiaasen feel to it -it is cheerfully cynical about politics and politicians .I would serve two cautionary notes however -the book while not relentlessly foul mouthed does have its share of expletives and there is some violence .Nor would I recommend the book for lovers of the traditional whodunnit -the killer is identified quite early on and the book is more about how justice will be served than about deducing the culprit
Its funny ,sharp and cynical making a change from the usual crime novel in setting and ambience
As an aside I would urge crime readers to try mure Aussie writers -there are some good ones out there as per example Marele Day and Barry Maitland

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Australian SF Reader, July 31, 2007

By 

Blue Tyson "- Research Finished" (Legion clubhouse) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Ask: A Murray Whelan Mystery (Hardcover)

Angelo Agnelli wants Murray to set up a sacrifical political campaign, so he can gauge the current politics of the place to help work on his own re-election campaign.

Murray goes to an old trucker friend for help with this, but soon gets caught up in some reasonably scary associated violence.