Good Money by JM Green review – crime, grime and dark humour in Melbourne's west

Stella Hardy, the social worker sleuth of this new series, typifies recent Australian crime fiction – she knows her subject because her own life is in tatters

Crime solvers come in all shapes and sizes, from the demure knitter Miss Marple to the besieged Clara Starling. They are divorcees, smokers, alcoholics, recovering alcoholics, drug abusers, bent cops and vigilantes. How does an unpublished writer make her sleuth stand out in a field littered with the detritus of human depravity?

A clue to the freshness of JM Green’s writing is that Good Money, the first in the Stella Hardy series, was shortlisted in 2014 for the Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript. This quickly led to a two-book deal with her publisher.

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