Digging deep into the dark heart of Sydney, King’s Cross in particular, during the dissolute years of what could almost be considered as unbridled debauchery and crime of the 1930’s, Julian Leatherdale has carefully pieced together a slice of history to create an engrossing novel of passion, bohemian culture and corruption.
Death In The Ladies’ Goddess Club offers a peek back at a time when history was in the making, politics was as corrupt in many ways, as the Police force and unbridled, exotic and drug fueled violence was overseen by drug lords and cartels operating out of Kings Cross; a time when life was lived on a knifes edge, as the central character Joan Linderman is soon to discover, when her life as a ‘crime writer’ becomes a little too real for comfort.
A sub-editor in her day job with a prestigious women magazine and aspiring crime writer by night, Joan and her flatmate Bernice Becker flirt with the bohemian side of life in King’s Cross, living life to the fullest. It is not until she finds her neighbor Ellie dead, definitely not from natural causes, she decides the best way to become a realist crime writer, is to take on the job of trying to find Ellie’s killer. Meanwhile Sergeant Lillian Armfield has been assigned to the case, and as she is a woman, she is not expected to discover the killer, after all Murder is men’s work!
As layer upon layer of the underworld become exposed in Joan’s hunt for the killer, she begins to realise that nothing is as it seems, and that the King’s Cross she thought she knew was nothing more than a shallow façade, designed carefully to cover up blackmail, drugs, sex cults and murder.
So many strands of a history that still permeates Kings Cross today come vividly to life, as Joan and Lillian struggle to solve what is rapidly becoming far more than a simple murder, which eventually will see a side of Joan’s family revealed in the most shocking manner.
Brilliant, riveting and fascinating, this historical fiction set against the flamboyance and decadence of King’s Cross during the 1930’s will have a wide appeal to lovers of noir literature, as the facts interwoven within the fiction present a situation that was more than likely all too real in those dark, destructive and divisive days of Australian politics.
