A great read especially the 2nd half. Loved the characters and descriptions of people, places, stuff. ( )

About 30 pages from the end I gave up. I didn't have a clue what was going on. I didn't care about anyone or anything that I could discern in the story. A lot of the dialogue made no sense to me at all. The mix of a mystery, horse racing and Irish's personal life did not work for me at all. ( )

See my comments on Bad Debts. Temple is well worth a read. ( )

This is my second Jack Irish book. The character is a wonderful creation, even if the stories are sometimes hard to penetrate. Some of the difficulty is that there is so much Australian pidgin, along with getting immersed in the world's of horse racing and cabinet making. Sometimes the narrative gets a little lost. But Irish is the perfect balance of gun metal brandish and fragile sensibility. And the writing in this second book is elevated, achieving a more literary feel than the first. ( )

Peter Temple has a distinctive voice as a writer. As with its predecessor, Black Tide not only takes on a complicated tangle of shady operations that keep you guessing as to who's trustworthy and who's not, while the author manages to keep his well-crafted plot under a great deal of control. Temple holds the reins tightly as the disappearance of one man slowly begins to branch out into even more nefarious dealings, so that everything that Jack uncovers fits into the main plotline without going off into tangents. The author also weaves in different facets of Melbourne's population, from the very wealthy who prefer that the tradesmen use the back entrance to the aging Aussie rules football club fans who've lost their local team
Anything by Peter Temple is always an enjoyable read. A special voice in Australian crime. ( )