Play with Knives

Play With Knives takes place in Sydney's Western Suburbs and focuses on Clare Collins, a young woman released from prison, after murdering her siblings at the age of nine.

[2] Recently, it was depicted in the Sydney Morning Herald as 'One of the most chilling but underrated Australian novels of the early 1990s' by critic Peter Pierce.

But the images of light and of sunshine are also appropriate because they come not from Dracula special effects but from a confident awareness of the aspirations, at once grubby and soaring, of that workhorse muscle, the human heart'.

[4] Compulsive Reader analysed the series' structure, stating 'the novels explore guilt and innocence, good and evil, and the individual versus the state or government, using changing tense and viewpoints... the characters swap positions, power matrices, emotional landscapes, and unravel the structures in which they work’.

[6] In the Sydney Morning Herald, the critic Geoff Page also announced the release of the third novel in the series, Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker.