The Coast Road (Cliff Hardy series) [Paperback]

Peter Corris (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cliff Hardy series | Publication Date: June 1, 2005

Cliff Hardy trades the mean streets of Sydney for the Illawarra escarpment, a rugged undeveloped area of Australia, in this latest hard-boiled detective novel. First hired by the daughter of the late, wealthy Frederick Farmer to investigate his mysterious and fiery death, Hardy is then called in on a second case—the disappearance of the young daughter of Marisha Karatsky, an exotic, dark-eyed interpreter who gets under Hardy's thick skin. Questionable insurance agents and feral bikers round out the colorful cast as Hardy battles through personal turmoil on the road to justice.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

After a couple of decades, your typical mystery series tends to get a little stale. But there are exceptions: Westlake's Dortmunder novels (35 years), McBain's 87th Precinct series (49 years), and Corris' Cliff Hardy series, which is now at the quarter-century mark and still going strong. Unlike the oft-reprinted novels of Westlake and McBain, however, Australian Corris' work is not widely available in the U.S. The publication of this representative Hardy novel should help change that. In The Coast Road, a wealthy man dies, and his daughter asks Sydney PI Hardy to find out whether it really was an accident, as the police have ruled. Does the daughter know something, or is she merely jealous of her father's second wife, who now stands to inherit a fortune? Before he can get a handle on the case, another one drops into his lap, and this one, involving a missing person, hits Cliff on an emotional as well as a professional level. The novel is sharply written in the classic gumshoe tradition, and it generates enough energy to keep readers plowing forward. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"'I don't know how many Cliff Hardy novels there are, but there aren't enough.' Kerry Greenwood, The Sydney Morning Herald 'Hardy is a wonderful creation still, under Corris's magisterial narrative control, capable of those odd echoes and resonances, the elegiac interlude, that characterise the best crime writing.' Graeme Blundell, The Weekend Australian 'There has been no more efficient, entertaining and amusing writer of detective thrillers in Australia than Peter Corris.' The Age"

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1741143845
• ISBN-13: 978-1741143843
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars First-rate hard-boiled PI yarn, August 19, 2010

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D. R. M. "wicmar" (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Coast Road (Cliff Hardy series) (Paperback)

Peter Corris's Cliff Hardy may be the best classic hard-boiled PI operating in the literary world these days. I mean, he's up there with Archer and Spenser and Spade and McGee and Marlowe. But he's the only one with a living author. Through 40 some adventures down under, this gumshoe turns over all the rocks, hammers what crawls out and gets hammered himself. This tale is as good a place to start as any. A great series that deserves to be better known outside its native Australia.