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Tamam Shud - The Somerton Man Mystery
Kerry Greenwood, NewSouth, $247.99
The Tower Mill
James Moloney, UQP, $29.995
Prolific Melbourne crime writer Kerry Greenwood ascribes her love of story to her late father, a great teller of tall tales, but she was surprised to find that one of his stories was absolutely true: the unsolved mystery of the man found dead on Somerton Beach in December 1948. He had no wallet or identification, just a tiny piece of torn and folded paper in his fob pocket bearing the last two words of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - "tamam shud".
Opening each chapter with a pertinent stanza from the Rubaiyat, Greenwood interweaves a celebration of her father with the known details of the murder, her own theories and those of the...