Stiff is the most recent instalment of Shane Maloney's hugely popular Australian crime series. Featuring Murray Whelan, Australia's answer to Rankin's Rebus, this fast paced and darkly comic plot involves not only the criminal underworld, but also antipodean political intrigue and double-dealing.
Whelan already leads a colourful professional life as a political advisor when personal circumstances take a turn for the worse, his ex-wife instigating a custody battle over his beloved son. However, intimations of corruption among the party powerful, coupled with a Turk found snap-frozen in a local meat plant, can only serve to enhance what is already a less-than-mundane existence. The conceit intensifies as planted drugs, a killer car, blood-sucking parasites and fascist funeral rites enter the equation. Suddenly things are hurtling out of control. Then the stunning and sexy Ayisha taps on the door...

Lush and uninhibited, the island of Samoa provides the atmospheric setting for Manguel's colourful but scholarly novella, already praised in Europe, South America and Canada as a literary, philosophical, and psychological masterpiece.
As Stevenson languishes on the island with the disease that will surely kill him, his celebrity status seems to secure his unblemished reputation. However, as a series of crimes against the native population coincide with the appearance of Mr Baker, Stevenson's doppelganger and fire and brimstone preacher, Stevenson's moral standing becomes as shaky as his Edinburgh roots, long ago abandoned for the palm trees.

Manguel masterfully weaves the Scottish literary tradition of the doppelganger and Stevenson's own writings, with biographical details with which he plays and jokes - but always carefully and always skilfully. Against the juxtaposed backdrops of sensual, liberal Samoa and stiflingly conservative Presbyterian post-reformation Edinburgh, the final days of Stevenson's life are played out. Beautifully and hauntingly, Manguel teaches that no longer may anybody walk innocently under the palm trees.