Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell famously deplores Ernest’s loss of not one but both parents. The great polymath would approve of Peter Temple’s easy mastery of not just two but three popular literary genres. In the Jack Irish series, Temple created a likeable rogue who approximates a Melbourne private eye, and with The Broken Shore (2005) he won crime writing awards for a disciplined police procedural set in rural Victoria. In the Evil Day is an international thriller that moves mainly between Hamburg and London. Again, Temple’s control is strong and deft.

Temple assembles a large cast for this drama, and each character is distinctive and credible. Temple’s fine eye for observing and depicting human traits and idiosyncrasies ensures that not even his most minor players can be dismissed as caricatures. He also displays great skill in establishing settings and allowing scenes to unfold gradually, so that the reader’s imagination runs freely and every action seems natural. Temple has characters walk in the wind under ‘a sky to eternity, torn-tissue clouds’. A genre that sets stringent guidelines for authors quickly exposes weak writing as farcical, but Temple meets these demands without descending into cliché or resorting to parody.