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​One by One

25/12/2020

 
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Ruth Ware: Harvill Secker $32.99
 
CORPORATE retreats are divisive. People generally either love them or loathe them – but in the case of music-tech start-up Snoop’s week-long outing to an exclusive French Alps resort, the participants’ loathing is directed more at each other rather than at the bonding exercise itself.
The company’s co-founders, Eva and Topher, are openly feuding, one determined to accept a lucrative buy-out offer while the other is doggedly opposed to relinquishing control. The shareholder group is split exactly down the middle with a single vote still swinging, guaranteeing that the leaders’ time at Chalet Perce-Neige will be spent lobbying and/or bullying in an attempt to sway their former colleague’s decision. With a billion dollars at stake, neither side is going to concede defeat while ever there’s a chance of claiming former personal assistant Liz’s all-important support.
Chef Danny and hostess Erin are the only onsite staff, responsible for catering to their visitors’ every whim – and there are whims aplenty among these privileged millennials with their unfathomable job titles, demanding diets and haute couture skiwear. Not only do the Snoopers arrive with an extra person to be accommodated without warning but now the weather forecast is dire, derailing their plans to spend the first afternoon out skiing.
It’s a scenario that could easily turn murderous – figuratively, at least.
There’s nothing figurative about one woman’s sudden disappearance, however: one minute she’s there in their midst, right among them on the slope, and the next she’s gone. Trying to trace when and how she vanished is thrown further into chaos when an avalanche sweeps down the mountainside, cutting the party off from any chance of seeking help.
Alone, hungry, cold and at loggerheads – and with one of that morning’s breakfast companions now missing, presumed dead – the Snoop team members and their hosts are living an Agatha Christie-like nightmare.

The Runes of Destiny

18/12/2020

 
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 Christina Courtenay: Headline Review $22.99
 
ONE minute Linnea Berger is pitching in to help her father Haakon’s boss at an archaeological dig near their family home in central Sweden, the next she’s waking up on the ground with a stranger standing over her.
Regaining consciousness after an apparent blackout, Linnea is accused of having stolen the local jarl’s silver brooch – the same brooch she had just located with the help of a metal detector and dug out of the soil.
Now she’s surrounded by a group of Swedes dressed as some sort of throwback to the Viking era. It’s clear to Linnea that these people take their role-playing seriously – very seriously.
Not only are they wearing the clothing of ninth-century Svía villagers but they’re actually speaking Old Norse too. History student Linnea is capable of holding her own linguistically but the characters of this make-believe setting are absolutely fluent.
This can’t be happening. Nobody has spoken Old Norse like this since… well, not since it evolved into the group of modern-day Scandinavian languages roughly a millennium ago.
Her captors are taking this fantasy way too far, even referring to her as their “thrall” and discussing plans to sell her in a slave market in Miklagarðr – known in Linnea’s world of 2017 as Istanbul.
Surely they don’t actually believe they’re living in Viking-Age Svíaríki, do they?
If this is real, then she’s somehow been catapulted 1200 years into the past: a past in which expeditioners from this part of Sweden routinely navigate their way across the Baltic, along the rivers of western Russia and Ukraine and across the Black Sea to the heart of the Ottoman Empire and in some cases even to Iran.
Being immersed in a Norse community such as this is every historian’s dream but for Linnea the experience she’s now having feels much more like the worst possible nightmare. 

Winterkill

11/12/2020

 
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Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books $6.64 ebook
 
INSPECTOR Ari Thór Arason’s picture-perfect Easter is about to implode.
With his former partner and their son due to fly in for a short visit, Ari Thór has been anticipating a few days of happy family downtime. Since the dissolution of the couple’s on-off relationship, Kristín and little Stefnir have been living in Sweden. Ari Thór has waited for months for this reunion with Stefnir and is determined to make the most of their too-few days together.
Woken well before dawn, however, he’s now in the early stages of opening an enquiry into the death of a teenage student whose body has been found lying in an iced-over street.
Siglufjörður is not normally a hotbed of crime – in fact, it’s anything but. In Ari Thór’s six years in this remote fishing town on the north coast of Iceland he’s had to deal with only a handful of serious incidents.
This is his first real challenge as head of the local police team of two. With his former boss now comfortably settled in Reykjavík, the newly promoted Ari Thór has only an impertinent junior officer, Ögmundur, for backup.
Leaving a potential murder investigation in Ögmundur’s inexperienced hands isn’t ideal, but if he’s to have the bonding time he desperately wants with his son, Ari Thór will need to insist that this young upstart shoulders his share of responsibility while his boss is off-duty.
But, with a blizzard looming and a past lover resurfacing, the planned break is fast becoming far more complicated than any simple long-weekend at home should be.
Winterkill is the sixth and final book in Ragnar Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series of crime thrillers, translated into English by David Warriner. It features characters and storylines established in Snowblind, Nightblind, Blackout, Rupture and Whiteout but can easily be read in isolation.

Dark Tides

4/12/2020

 
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Philippa Gregory: Simon & Schuster Australia $32.99
 
TWENTY-ONE years have elapsed since Alinor Reekie and her teenage daughter Alys left Foulmire in a hurry – both pregnant and both deeply in disgrace.
Alinor has never fully recovered from her very public near-drowning as a suspected witch at the hands of Foulmire’s elders. Plagued by poor health, in 1670 she is a frail impersonation of the woman she was during her time as a healer and midwife on the south coast of England.
Now the pair support themselves as wharfingers: mistresses of a ramshackle little warehouse on the River Thames on the eastern fringe of London. Their clients are the second-tier traders whose goods aren’t required to go directly to the government wharves closer to the city centre for official customs inspection.
Alinor’s son Rob has been working as a doctor in Venice and her brother Ned – the one-time ferrymaster at Foulmire – is making a fresh life for himself as a New World settler, having been forced to flee their hamlet after the king he had opposed was restored to the throne and embarked on a purge of all known adversaries.
Suddenly an inordinately attractive young Venetian woman arrives by ship in Southwark claiming to be Rob’s widow Livia, the Nobildonna da Ricci. Her husband, she says, has drowned in a lagoon in Venice, leaving her all alone with their newborn baby to raise. Her only remaining family are Alinor, Alys and Alys’s adult twins.
When the vivacious Livia crosses paths with a man from Alinor’s past, the aristocratic landholder Sir James Avery, her prospects start to look brighter – but her desires are the polar opposite of her inlaws’ wishes.
Dark Tides is the sequel to Tidelands, the novel that introduced the Reekies and James Avery (then a Catholic priest travelling under the assumed name ‘Summers’) during King Charles’ exile on the Isle of Wight.

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