Townsville

is hot and humid. I walked for over half an hour to find a supermarket which closed the instant I approached the doors - 5.58pm is the closing time of North Ward's BiLo on a Sunday. How bizarre! However, on the way back to the hotel I was rewarded with a tree full of the most beautiful little birds - chlorine blue backs, green breasts, rufous under-wings and a bright yellow around the eye. They had honey-eater beaks, I think. There were about thirty of them. Also some of the big black cockatooes that eat the palm nuts down on the Strand - they look shabby until they take off, revealing a huge bright orange V on their wings.

But I'm not actually writing this to tell you about the bird life of Townsville but to alert the crime readers amongst you to a wonderful book -
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I daren't start the next one of his Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, because I won't sleep until I finish it.

Larsson was a Swedish journalist. He delivered the three manuscripts of the trilogy to his Swedish publisher and shortly after that died. He was only in his early fifties. The book features a wonderful team Mikael Bomkvist, an investigative journo and Lisbeth Salander - a feisty and mysterious computer hacker. The plotting is brilliant as two stories unfold side by side. Read it!

Not daring to start the next Larsson, I've begun reading Qiu Xiaolong's When Red is Black. Qiu Xiaolong is a Chinese poet and crime writer living in America. I met him at the Brisbane Writer's Festival a few years ago - that's how I was introduced to his work because the Festival sends you copies of the other panellists works. Although I don't find his books unputdownable, they are fabulous, too. There's a lot of commentaary about China and politics, official hierarchies, customs - historical and contemporary, food and his Chinese police detective (a poet) quotes Chinese poetry throughout. What's not to love?

So there you are, crime fiction lovers - head straight to your nearest bookstore!