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The Scholar

26/4/2019

 
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Dervla McTiernan: HarperCollins $32.99
 
CARLINE Darcy is a bona fide genius – a once-in-a-generation undergraduate of exceptional aptitude, poised to complete her degree at twice the usual pace and in her final year already fine-tuning the text of a PhD thesis.
Her ability is hardly surprising, though, given her family background: as the granddaughter and assumed heir of Irish billionaire therapeutic products baron John Darcy she has enormous footsteps in which to follow, both academically and within the world of business.
The discovery of the young woman’s corpse, therefore, shocks not only the medical researcher who finds it lying on a public road late one night, Detective Cormac Reilly’s girlfriend Dr Emma Sweeney, but the National University of Ireland’s entire combined student and faculty body in Galway.
Who could have wanted this phenomenal talent dead – and in exceptionally gory circumstances, too?
Within hours, however, the preliminary identification is reversed, leaving police slightly embarrassed by their haste in reaching an incorrect conclusion.
Darcy, it seems, is alive and well – so who, then, is the victim, killed while carrying Darcy’s laboratory access card and wearing a designer cardigan worth many times more than the average 20-something can afford? The physical similarities between the girls are uncanny.
With Reilly and Sweeney still recovering from the after-effects of their involvement in a police investigation a year earlier, being drawn into a second murder case so unexpectedly unsettles both. The trauma is intensified when Reilly’s colleagues begin to circulate shadowy rumours of serious wrongdoing by the couple, threatening their individual careers and placing enormous strain on their relationship.
In the midst of this upheaval, official attempts to delve deeper are leading nowhere.
Reilly is frustrated, Sweeny is spooked and the police force hierarchy is being deliberately misdirected by the senior Darcy. The odds of unravelling the truth behind this crime seem slim.

Fled

19/4/2019

 
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Meg Keneally: Echo Publishing $29.99
 
MORE than 231 years after Cornish highwaywoman and thief Mary Bryant arrived in Sydney Cove with the First Fleet, only the barest details of her life are known. In an age when full literacy was relatively rare, Bryant’s own words, thoughts and feelings were certainly not written down and nothing beyond the sketchiest facts of her crimes and sentence were documented officially.
In choosing to use Bryant as inspiration for the fictitious Jenny Trelawney-Gwyn, the heroine of her first solo novel, however, Meg Keneally has reprised one of early Australia’s most remarkable characters, fleshing out the skeleton of Trelawney’s experiences and achievements with exhaustive research into the circumstances of female transportees in the late 1700s.
When the death of her fisherman father leaves the teenaged Trelawney desperate to support a grief-stricken household, she takes up robbing lone travellers near her coastal village in Cornwall. Her work, though successful, is predictably short-lived; within months Trelawney is arrested, convicted and incarcerated on a rotting convict hulk, Dunkirk, in Plymouth harbour, where unscrupulous guards are ever-willing to take advantage of an attractive young woman’s desperation.
Pregnant and severely malnourished, she is transferred to the tall ship Charlotte and despatched to an as-yet-unestablished British colony on the far side of the world.
While Trelawney and her fellow convicts at first think conditions on board are unbearable, worse looms. Their disembarkation in Sydney is truly hellish as, back on dry land for the first time in years, they encounter a subsistence infinitely more foul than anything imagined in England, with starvation, brutality and abuse commonplace and the chances of a small child surviving to adulthood almost nil.
With only street cunning and grim determination in her favour, Trelawney must find a way to feed and defend not only herself but a daughter born at sea and, later, a tiny son.

Cold Bones

5/4/2019

 
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David Mark: Mullholand Books $45.00 hardback or $19.99 Kindle
 
HULL is freezing – literally. Straddling the muddy estuary of the River Humber in northern England, this once-rich cod fishing port is experiencing its coldest winter in years.
At first it is hardly surprising that an elderly woman living alone is found dead, apparently having been unable to save herself after losing her balance in a bathful of rapidly cooling water.
Detective Sergeant Aector ‘Hector’ McAvoy quickly becomes suspicious, however. Small clues scattered around the site suggest at least one other person was present either during or immediately after former social worker Enid Chappell’s drowning.
More than 1600km to the north-west, McAvoy’s superior, Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, is on the isolated, wind-ravaged Skagi Peninsula in Iceland investigating the discovery of another body: that of a journalist believed to have a tenuous connection with Hull.
Not too many decades earlier the two locations were waging an unofficial war as newly independent Iceland turned its gunships against the English trawlers that threatened to strip its territorial waters of irreplaceable fish stocks. Now Icelandic police are being pressured to co-operate with Pharaoh in a covert alliance.
With his attempts to uncover a potential motive for the murder of Chappell stagnating McAvoy finds his attention diverted by a series of gruesome attacks on elderly fishermen throughout the city – longtime crewmates who once served together on one of Hull’s most tragically infamous cod boats. Who could possibly have cause to harm feeble old men who by all accounts have been working to create a public tribute to the industry that for generations supported thousands of Hull residents?
A failed bid to uncover the identity of two corpses washed ashore in the Russian Arctic is yet another frustration for McAvoy’s colleagues at Humberside Police.
It seems progress has stalled on every front – and time is running short as powerful people demand results.

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