BLAGGARD AVENUE - KINDLE EDITION

David Morriset's financial crime novel, 'Blaggard Avenue', is now available for $3.99 on Kindle via Amazon.

'Blaggard Avenue' is a simple yarn set against the complex backdrop of Australia's huge investment funds management industry and the nation's ambitions to become Asia's premier financial hub. The plot pits the naive, the gullible and the opportunistic against the ruthless, the arrogant and the powerful. Fund managers, commercial lawyers, financial regulators and criminal gangs match wits in a contest that will produce more losers than winners.

Morisset draws on his first hand knowledge of the financial services sector to create a fictional world where risk and return take on extreme dimensions.  The author worked for more than twenty years as an economist in the cut-throat arena of global funds management and still carries deep mental scars from his personal encounter with criminal elements.

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KURTZ IN TOOWOON - KINDLE EDITION

David Morriset's latest collection of poems, 'Kurtz in Toowoon', is now available for A$3.99 on Kindle via Amazon.

The poems were written during 2014.  They deal with the writer's journey through joy and depression, faith and hopelessness, and love and loneliness. Along the way he is immersed in lavish landscapes and encounters the best and worst of people.

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BUTCHERS PARADE - KINDLE EDITION

David Morisset's novel, 'Butchers Parade', is now available for $6.99 on Kindle via Amazon.

This revised edition of 'Butchers Parade' includes some new material and minor corrections. Like the original version it adopts a perspective sometimes described as nostalgic realism. It unfolds like a series of black and white photographs depicting a patchwork past.

Set in the third quarter of the twentieth century, most of the stories of 'Butchers Parade' take place in Redgate, a meatworks town in Australia's southeast. The narratives are united by the presence of Horrie, a young meatworker, who spends his spare time playing rugby league and drinking at the local pub. Horrie is conscripted to fight in Vietnam and, when he returns to Redgate, he struggles with to shake off his distorted memories of war and finds himself caught up in a romance that seems hopeless.

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OLD SHEMIRAN ROAD - KINDLE EDITION

David Morisset's novel, 'Old Shemiran Road', is now available for $4.99 on Kindle via Amazon.

A beautiful Persian woman and a naïve Western man are drawn together by love and desire in the rapidly changing Iran of the 1970s. But their romance is cut short when Manijeh and Ben are cruelly separated by family ties and cultural clashes. Just when all seems lost, violent revolution and political betrayal provide the incentive for them to start again, if they have the courage. 

In 2010 David Morisset published 'Conquest of the Persian Garden', a romantic thriller set in Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution. 'Old Shemiran Road' is a thoroughly revised version of that novel. The central story remains loosely based on Ferdowsi's epic tale of 'Bijan and Manijeh', but various alterations have been made in the light of recent research and ongoing political ferment in the Middle East and West Asia. 

'Old Shemiran Road’ takes the reader to revolutionary Tehran as the final months of the Shah's reign give way to a period of tumultuous upheavals while Iran's ruthless new leaders fortify the foundations for their rule of terror.

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DOG ACTS - KINDLE EDITION

David Morriset's novel, 'Dog Acts', is now available for $3.99 on Kindle via Amazon.

When a young man is king hit on the streets of Kings Cross by a drunken reveller the aftermath exposes failures in the legal system that prompt an unscrupulous group of men to implement their own model of justice. Set in the suburbs of twenty-first century Sydney ‘Dog Acts’ pits the hopes of youth against the fragility of life. It asks questions about vengeance and forgiveness in the context of the city’s loss of community. Modern Australia emerges as a nation without a heart and ripe for reconfiguration in the hands of entities with the determination to implement their own distorted visions.

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SEPTEMBER

Rainy days on a beach seem grey all ways,
As wet squalls cleave the bays like liquid curtains,
And horizons once sapphire and certain
Blur into a misty purple maze.
But the amazing face of velvet hills remains
Painted deep green and shaded verdant olive,
While technicolour petals droop and drip
Like jaded cascades or comely honeycombs.
Yellow sand is drenched into a pock-marked terracotta
As if it was a victim of a wild tsunami
Sent from fissures only seen by fishes,
Flattening the footprints of a vanquished army.
Last of all the sea takes on a motley hue
That blends liquorice with lolly blue,
And the surf still surges shoreward and crashes,
With white horses' briny manes and shiny sashes.

SHAMBLES

Parramatta Road is a shambles,

Proof that transport planners get it wrong.

Traffic lanes appear and disappear,

Most of them too narrow

For suburban buses,

Barely accommodating

A family car.

No right turn signs casually placed,

Possibly at the whim

Of local government tyrants.

Traffic lights seem to leap

Out of the ground

To stall the flow.

School zones speed limits

Are seldom threatened.

Petrol-heads move from lane to lane

As if they actually knew

What they were doing.

People movers full of kids

Pose as travelling slalom poles

For the enjoyment of hoons.

The air is not quite breathable.

Soon after Granville

The used car yards start to give way

To shopping centres for homewares

And fast food outlets.

The streetscape starts to look

As if was designed in a recent decade.

It is an illusion.

Modernity fades -

Derelict shopping strips of another age.

Boarded windows

And walls plastered with posters

Advertising concerts held long ago,

Telling tales of an earlier era

When people actually walked

On the footpaths of the western suburbs.

An old pub stands proud,

Fashionably remodelled

And typically empty of patrons,

Unless it sponsors a local football team

And the lads have won in a thriller.

Then more car yards -

European brands

And the most expensive Japanese models

Shine behind the plate-glass

Windows of dustless showrooms.

Then there are the first glimpses

Of elegant Annandale

And a landmark humble hotel –

A throwback to days

When working people lived here.

For the inner west is now a zone

Of dignified lifestyles

And supercilious good fortune.

Multiple university degrees paper the walls

Of faithful restorations

And post-modern follies.

OUTSIDE MY WINDOW

Outside my window,

Just beyond the open shutters,

A lofty palm tree’s frond flutters

Like a seabird’s ample wings

In the easy breeze that sings

A song of tender night and peace.

In the distance the ocean calls,

Waves advancing and receding

With a roar and then a growl,

Like a predator on the prowl

For senseless prey and fishermen

At careless play in the briny den.

The sky is defined by silver clouds,

That billow like the rising smoke

Of a furnace crammed with coke,

And rush northwards in upper airstreams,

Making it seem that the marvellous moon

Is flying south to polish the polar gloom.

DREAM CHEATS

Surely they won’t cheat you of your last dreams

After purloining coins you earned from birth,

And promising to use taxes for schemes

To build for you a paradise on earth.

So now your mature future seems threatened

By the greedy grasp of alleged leaders.

They bribed you, with a pittance they beckoned –

Meagre payments explained by their meters.

Once you stood in throngs of true believers,

When you were spit polished, strong and youthful.

Only gifted hands were on the levers

And you thought that you too could be useful.

But those first dreams were dashed and then some more

Yet you resisted and persisted still

‘Til your hopes were washed up on sorrow’s shore

Below winners’ triumphs upon the hill.

So now you can see they were crooks and fools

And you were not a member of their clubs.

You were a sharp chisel amongst blunt tools

But they spurned your carvings with only snubs.

All that is left is rest and slow decay

With others who fear their covetous rage.

You know they wish you dead or gone away -

For they will axe support for your old age.