Category: British Isles

The Driftwood Girls

19/2/2021

Mark Douglas-Home: Michael Joseph $19.99

FOR 23 years Kate and Flora Tolmie have lived as orphans, left parentless in the UK when their mother Christina disappeared from a French ferry port. Now adults, the sisters have never truly recovered from the trauma.
At roughly the same time, in an apparently unrelated incident teenager Ruth Jones went missing in south-eastern England. When Jones vanished it was assumed she had run away from a dysfunctional homelife with her drunken father, Mikey. Days later, when her body washed ashore she was found to have drowned.
On the opposite side of the English Channel, in the Netherlands Sarah Allison and her neighbour Lotte Rouhof have ‘adopted’ itinerant artist Olaf Haugen and given him a creative space of his own in their coastal hamlet. Their community is idyllic but for one sad construction: a beach hut erected to commemorate the discovery of a dead girl on the other-wise postcard-perfect stretch of sand.
Three watery mysteries, each connected in its own way to the sea – and now a new question has been raised. A suitcase once owned by Christina Tolmie has resurfaced, picked up by an English beachcomber decades earlier but then forgotten until after his death.
Oceanographer Dr Cal McGill is determined to trace the luggage’s movements to determine where and when it entered the Channel. Using his understanding of currents, tides and winds, McGill is uncannily skilled at pinpointing the routes taken by individual items held captive by the waves – be they simple flotsam and jetsam or, in the most gruesome of circumstances, human corpses.
McGill can’t afford to turn down this potentially lucrative job, however much he might want to walk away from his unsettling line of business.
The fourth release in Douglas-Home’s Sea Detective series, The Driftwood Girl combines the suspense of criminal investigation with the nebulous balance of relationships strained by grief.

Mountain Ghost

1/1/2021

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $6.99 ebook

PEOPLE who disapear in the midst of an Arctic winter generally don’t resurface until the spring thaw begins.
When police data analyst Mats Lindström vanishes onto the slopes of Sweden’s highest mountain, Kebnekaise, leaving behind his wife Márjá and their infant son, it’s assumed he has walked off into the wilderness to commit suicide. His body will be found by hikers months from now.
In their home in Gällivare, a mining town above the Arctic Circle, Márjá isn’t convinced, however.
And when Lindström’s social media accounts are suddenly reactivated, she’s not alone in questioning the circumstances and seeking an investigation.
In Québec Inspector Etienne Gagnon recalls that around the time of his unexplained departure from Gällivare, Lindström was applying to join Polarpol, the elite multinational law-enforcement agency of which Gagnon is currently acting commander. Surely taking his own life isn’t the logical act of a man who is at the exact same time pursuing his next career move.
Determined to lead a private search for the missing policeman, the Canadian Mountie prepares to cross the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, in London Gagnon’s senior officer Constable Hákon Sigurðarsson – on leave as he struggles to recover from injuries suffered during a Polarpol operation in Iceland only days earlier – is making use of his time off duty to pursue a ‘ghost’ of his own: notorious assassin-for-hire Byrne Cantrell.
Cantrell has threatened Sigurðarsson’s sister and daughter; he cannot be allowed to remain at large.
On the run since slipping through the Polarpol net in Reykjavík, Cantrell has been exhausted by too many sleepless nights of moving constantly in his desperation to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, both official and otherwise.
This is the second instalment in Christoffer Petersen’s series of Polarpol Arctic thrillers, picking up the storyline immediately after the first novel, Northern Light, ends.

Dark Tides

4/12/2020

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.

The Evening and the Morning

2/10/2020

Ken Follett: Macmillan $17.99 ebook

THERE’S a first time for everything, so the saying goes – and in the case of unfortunate Combe, the ‘first’ this season is its first Viking attack.
Although a terror of pillaging Norsemen has hung over the settlements of western England for many years, never before has Combe been targeted. Finally, however, in mid 997 the village’s luck runs out.
At 17 Edgar is already a fully grown man, the youngest of three brothers apprenticed to their master-boatbuilder father.
When the marauders arrive, he is away from his parents’ home, waiting desperately at dawn on the far shore of the bay for his beloved Sungifu to join him. Edgar has constructed a sturdy wooden vessel to carry the young couple away together and can already imagine the happiness they will soon share. Today’s elopement will be the start of a new life for them both.
On the opposite side of the English Channel, the high-spirited Lady Ragnhild is ensconced safely inside Count Hubert and Countess Ginnilaug’s castle at Cherbourg.
Themselves the descendants of Viking conquerors, the Norman nobles are proud of their Norse heritage and feel no need to turn away the longships that visit their port en route to rich, undefended pastures nearby.
They are on friendly terms with the English at the same time and often welcome delegations led by clergymen.
As the fallout from the Viking plundering of Combe begins to solidify, the ruling families of the two communities are drawn closer together.
Wilwulf, ealdorman of Shiring, needs help. His coastline is being ravaged and Combe’s destruction has left its mark on his finances.
Gaining the co-operation of Cherbourg could be an important step towards stemming the flow of aggressors from the north but in order to forge an alliance he must be able to offer something to the Normans in return.

Echoes of the Runes

4/9/2020

Christina Courtenay: Hachette Australia $22.99

CURVING possessively around the index finger of Mia Maddox’s right hand, the delicate serpent-head ring is exquisite. As an heirloom inherited from her late grandmother Elin it has special significance for British Museum conservator Mia.
The ring in the display case is equally impressive, if significantly bigger; in fact, the size disparity notwithstanding, it is all but identical. This one, however, is part of an exhibition of Viking-era jewellery in Stockholm, where Swedish-born Mia is spending a few hours before attending Gran’s funeral.
As she stares in astonishment at the thousand-year-old twin bands of gold, Mia is interrupted by a stranger who has also noted the similarity.
Archaeologist Haakon Berger’s head is swirling with questions. Is this Englishwoman wearing an unauthorised replica, or is it an unreported – and therefore stolen – piece of Norse heritage?
Inspired to try to trace the origins of Mia’s ring, the pair decide to embark on an excavation of her family’s land on the shore of Lake Mälaren, an area known for its rich seafarer roots.
The physical signs suggest this could have been the site of a settlement presided over by a chieftain: a man powerful enough to have raided kingdoms far afield in search of precious metals and human slaves.
Unbeknown to the research team, one such local jarl, Haukr Erlendrsson, did indeed set out a-viking from this waterfront stronghold, returning many weeks later with a valuable hostage among his spoils. As the sister of a high-ranking Welshman, Ceridwen – Ceri – was destined to spend winter in the Norse community before being ransomed by her people.
The further Mia and Haakon investigate, the more clues to Haukr and Ceri’s long-ago presence emerge from the soil.
But, as Mia becomes increasingly invested in uncovering the stories of these past generations, her life in London recedes in importance. Could her future lie in rural Sweden instead?

The Governess

28/8/2020

Wendy Holden: Welbeck $39.99

ONE minute Marion Crawford is turning down a marriage proposal from a long-time friend in Edinburgh and preparing to complete her final year of teacher training, the next she is being whisked by train to London as the newly appointed governess to the world’s most famous siblings: the ‘little princesses’ Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.
King George V and his formidable consort Mary occupy the English throne when Crawford is introduced to royal circles as a favour to her college principal in the summer of 1932. Recommended to ‘Bertie’ and Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of York, by relatives in Scotland, she agrees to work an initial four weeks’ trial as the sole tutor of six-year-old ‘Lilibet’ and toddler ‘Bud’.
One month becomes several, then those several transition into 1933. As the Yorks move between their weekday residence within walking distance of Buckingham Palace and their country home in Windsor, ‘Crawfie’ travels with them. Hers is far from the glamorous fairytale existence observers on the outside assume it to be, however, as she struggles to add a degree of normalcy to the girls’ cosseted lives.
An overflowing schedule of competing activities means classes are often abandoned without notice, leaving Crawford frustrated that educating the princesses seems to be the least of the family’s priorities. At this point Lilibet is, after all, merely the daughter of a second son and the niece of the dashing playboy who will be the British Empire’s next king; Margaret ranks even lower in intellectual importance. Deportment and grooming are essential attributes; an ability to read, write and reason is irrelevant.
A work of fiction with historical figures and events at its core, The Governess imagines Crawford’s 16-year career within the royal household in an era of political and social upheaval set against a backdrop of abdication, blanket bombing, betrayal and romance.

Dragon in the Snow

21/8/2020

Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press £12.99

FEW things of note ever happen on quiet little Shapinsay, one of the lesser islands of the Orkney group off the north-eastern tip of Scotland, known for the quality of its sheep and little else.
This lack of genuine news doesn’t prevent Beinir, the community’s designated scribe, inundating Earl Thorfinn with detailed accounts of Shapinsay’s trivial comings and goings, however. As one of the few fully literate men in Orkney, Beinir is exceedingly proud of his ability to present handwritten parchment records to his master at the Norse stronghold on Birsay.
Now Beinir is about to have something of true interest occur in his otherwise-routine life: Thorfinn has despatched the widow Sigrid, a renowned wool-worker, to Shapinsay on a reconnaissance mission. Her assignment is to weigh up whether she can see herself settling there as Beinir’s wife.
The timing of Sigrid’s arrival is unfortunate: no sooner has she unpacked in her temporary residence than a neighbour’s longhouse catches alight.
Fire is one of the worst things that can happen to an 11th-century dwelling, constructed from timber clad with strips of turf and fitted out with wooden furniture, furs and straw. So careful are householders in Orkney that a single blaze is unusual; that a second hut should burn less than 24 hours later is unthinkable.
And as two bodies are being pulled from the smouldering remains, assuming themselves to be under attack, the surviving residents do not hesitate to trigger the signal beacon that summons help from Birsay – help in this instance in the form of Sigrid’s childhood friend Ketil, newly engaged without his consent to Thorfinn’s only daughter, Asgerdr, and thankful for the hastily forced separation.
What – or who – could be responsible for such a rash of ill-luck in a small out-of-the-way hamlet where the half-dozen households are all closely inter-linked?

Darkness Falls

3/7/2020

David Mark: Amazon £2.99 Kindle e-book

SIMPLE, straightforward everyday murder – a shooting, a knifing, a strangulation – is one thing; the macabre, repellent, debauched torture and dismemberment of bride-to-be Ella Butterworth is quite another.
A decade into his police career Sergeant Aector McAvoy is shell-shocked by the scene he uncovers in a nondescript flat in suburban Hull.
Once the offshore fishing capital of the world, Hull in early 2012 is a city in decay, ravaged by unemployment, disinterest and organised crime.
The abduction and subsequent discovery of Ella is merely the latest in a seemingly endless parade of atrocities. This time, however, the offender has been caught.
For once, opinion in Hull is undivided: the public, the media and the law agree almost to a person that Shane Cadbury – ‘The Chocolate Boy’ – is the despicable pervert who killed this beautiful young woman.
Or is he? McAvoy, as a lone dissenting voice, is not entirely sure.
As the officer whose investigation uncovered the corpse in Cadbury’s bedroom, McAvoy struggles to blot out the heinous scene he witnessed.
Yet, deep within himself he is uneasy. It is undeniable that the lumbering, intellectually awkward social misfit was in possession of the body, but is it possible that by the time he first crossed paths with Ella she was already dead?
Complicating matters, this is not the only case in front of McAvoy and his colleagues.
Press Association journalist Owen Lee could not have chosen a worse time to die. Having driven to a carpark at the northern end of the Humber Bridge, intent on diving into the murky, tempestuous estuary, Lee blunders into the midst of a gangland assassination. In a Sliding Doors moment, an instinctive desperation supplants despair and he reacts without thinking.
Now, his unintended survival is the trigger for a growing trail of missteps that explodes when professional duty draws him into Cadbury’s courtroom.

Lockdown

15/5/2020

Peter May: Riverrun $22.99

LONDON is in lockdown: nobody is allowed out and almost nobody wishes to be allowed in, with the rare exception of the few contractors for whom a frenzy of emergency construction has created an earning bonanza.
Early on the morning of his last full day on the job, Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil is called to a building site where a sports bag full of human bones has just been found. It’s an unpopular discovery: the building team is on an almost-impossibly tight deadline to compete a new overflow hospital facility and any interruption to the schedule is both politically and financially awkward.
MacNeil’s priority, however, lies with discovering the identity of the victim and then tracking down the killer. But at precisely 7am tomorrow he will clock off from his role with London’s Metropolitan Police for good. Finally, he will have time to spend with his son, who is presently living in isolation with MacNeil’s estranged wife as residents voluntarily cut themselves off from all outside contact in an effort to evade near-certain death.
The strain of bird flu that has infected London is incredibly contagious and is fatal in roughly 80 per cent of cases. The odds for anyone unfortunate enough to contract it are dismal.
Yet MacNeil must continue to go about his work in as professional a way he can manage under a crippling state of martial law.
Eerily accurate in its depiction of a life-threatening 21st-century epidemic, the manuscript of this novel had been sitting completely ignored in bestselling author Peter May’s files for years, having failed to attract the support of any mainstream publisher when it was first completed.
The arrival of the novel coronavirus saw it reborn and green-lit through the production and distribution process in a matter of only weeks, and it has now been translated into several languages, including German and Portuguese.

Tidelands

1/5/2020

Philippa Gregory: Simon & Schuster $19.99

BEING female in 1648 is dangerous for even the most reputable of women; being a deserted wife suspected of practising witchcraft in a devoutly puritan community is almost certain to be fatal.
Medieval England is in turmoil, enveloped by a malicious civil war: the hereditary monarch, Charles I, is under house arrest in exile on the Isle of Wight, the Catholic queen consort is with her family across the channel in France and control of the country is in the hands of a renegade parliament backed by the army of Oliver Cromwell, a “middling farmer from Cambridgeshire”.
Alinor Reekie’s household is equally dishevelled. Alinor’s husband is missing, presumed drowned after having disappeared while fishing off the south coast of England months earlier. A herbalist and midwife, Alinor treads a perilously fine line between earning an honest shilling here and there dispensing natural remedies to neighbours and assisting in home births, and finding herself ostracised or worse for allegedly perpetuating ‘the old ways’. As she scrounges together a subsistence for herself and her two children on the edge of a tidal wasteland, Alinor’s days are back-breakingly long and uneventful.
When a stranger appears in the churchyard in the twilight of Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor has two choices: denounce this papist foreigner’s presence to the godly people of Foulmire or take the enormous risk of helping him to reach the apparent safety of the local lord’s manorhouse. It’s the type of potentially life-altering decision no-one can afford take lightly, but for Alinor the correct course of action is clear.
Known around the world for her historical fiction pen-portraits of the English nobility, Philippa Gregory delves for the first time into the lives of everyday Britons with The Fairmile Series, established with Tidelands and soon to include a second instalment in the saga of the desperate Reekies, Dark Tides.

The Good Turn

21/2/2020

Dervla McTiernan: HarperCollins $32.99

LIFE for Anna has reached its lowest possible ebb: her daughter Tilly is refusing to communicate, apparently traumatised by some unspeakably scarring ordeal; her drug-addicted brother Niall is incapable of leaving the bed of the flat the siblings share in Dublin; and she is broke to the point of being too poor to afford a proper midday meal for herself and her child.
On the other side of Ireland, Detective Garda Peter Fisher is frantic. A 12-year-old girl has been snatched from a footpath and thrown into the boot of a vehicle in Galway.
Fisher’s mentor, Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly, is being denied the police resources the pair need to start a search – payback, they assume, for the straight-laced Reilly having fallen foul of the unscrupulous hierarchy at their station during previous incidents. Both men know that time is all-important when attempting to solve an abduction.
With Reilly temporarily diverted to interview the distraught parents, Fisher must decide on his own what to do next. Dusk is falling and a potential suspect’s car has been sighted heading away from the city and towards an isolated wilderness area. Should he try to follow it now, before any more daylight is lost, or wait for Reilly to return his call?
The consequences of the young detective’s choice will have ramifications not only for himself but also for those around him, spinning Fisher out of his comfortable Galway existence and into the village of his early years, Roundstone, where he finds two strangers living in his grandmother Maggie’s house.
Is the scattering of recent events somehow connected?
Dervla McTiernan’s third Cormack Reilly novel (building on the success of The Rúin and The Scholar) promotes Fisher to the front line as a key character for the first time while Reilly takes a sideways step into a parallel investigation.

A Silent Death

10/1/2020

Peter May: Hachette Australia $19.99

SPAIN'S southeastern-most stretch of beaches is known with good reason as the ‘Costa del Crime’. Between Málaga and the Gibraltar border, resort towns dot the sandy coastline, sheltering tens of thousands of seasonal tourists and more than the occasional expat desperado.
For Cristina Sánchez, this reality is part of everyday policing in Marviña.
Yet, despite the presence of these uninvited gangsters within her community, Sánchez is not expecting that a standard callout will lead to an encounter with one of Europe’s most wanted men. The incident starts as a routine response to a simple break-in, but within minutes of arriving at an upmarket development, Sánchez is embroiled in a fatal shooting.
The victim is not an officer or even a suspect, however; rather, the body crumpled awkwardly on the cold tiled floor of the villa is that of a woman who has been living there – and the person holding the gun is her English partner Ian Templeton. Having mistaken his girlfriend for an intruder, Templeton has killed her in error.
An added complication soon emerges: the shooter, Templeton, does not actually exist. Instead, this attractive, charming foreigner is the alter ego of the UK’s number one fugitive, Jack Cleland, cocaine trafficker extraordinaire and police assassin.
At home in London, Scottish-born investigator John Mackenzie is assigned to the case. The National Crime Agency needs a specialist courier. Mackenzie’s mission is to fly to Spain and return later the same day with Cleland in custody.
For Mackenzie, the timing is dreadful: the aunt who raised him is due to be buried in Glasgow, his estranged wife is working to alienate him from his son and daughter, and nightmares about his late father’s death are robbing him of a solid night’s sleep.
Now, he’s being forced to play in-flight escort to some lowlife drug lord.

The Stone Circle

18/10/2019

Elly Griffiths: Hachette Australia $19.99

FORENSIC archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway and her cohort were never intended to go on sleuthing beyond case number 10 so the appearance of an 11th novel in the murder-mystery series is a bonus for fans of Elly Griffiths’ books.
Now, in the new instalment of this long-running police drama, Ruth finds herself at the centre of another possible crime when two female skeletons – dated several millennia apart – are exhumed from a Neolithic circle near King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The area is best known as the seat of the British royal family’s country estate, Sandringham, yet death is all too common in this pretty stretch of seaside villages and softly undulating farms.
The first young woman is found to have been buried inside a stone cist in keeping with Bronze Age tradition.
The second set of bones, however, is much more recent, leading Detective Inspector Harry Nelson and his team in King’s Lynn to believe it might be the remains of Margaret Lacey, a local girl who went missing as a 12-year-old on the evening of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding in 1981.
Various suspects were interviewed at the time of her disappearance, including Margaret’s father and brother and a highly eccentric neighbourhood loner, yet no trace of the well-liked young student has ever surfaced.
But how could this modern-day corpse, regardless of its origin, have become intertwined with a sacred site laid out thousands of years before the birth of Christ?
Disentangling the details around the twin burials’ discovery will take every trick in Harry’s professional book and every ounce of concentration, not least of all as his wife of 20-odd years is due to give birth any day to a child that might not be his, and Ruth’s daughter Kate – who definitely is his biological daughter – is growing up fast.

A Wolf at the Gate

6/9/2019

Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press $5.44 Kindle e-book

BARELY have Ketil Gunnarson and the coastal raiding party he’s helping to lead landed on English soil when a stranger appears at their riverside camp with a message from the remote Norse settlement Orkney. Earl Thorfinn, no less, is requesting Ketil’s immediate return to the islands.
Struggling to cling to power in the midst of would-be usurpers’ relentless attacks against him, Thorfinn has welcomed the appearance of an influential religious delegation from Colonia in Saxony – a northwestern region of continental Europe that nearly a thousand years later will be part of Germany.
Ketil’s arrival back at the earl’s stronghold in Birsay a few days later is ill-timed, however.
With his Icelandic offsider, Lambi, he has scarcely had time to resume feasting in the familiar hall of Thorfinn and his wife Ingibjorg when a death is reported. A neighbour of Ketil’s childhood friend Sigrid has been found dead – and the presence of an axe protruding from his skill suggests it wasn’t accidental.
Suspicion is cast in a multitude of directions, not least of all at Lambi: a foreigner with an unknown past who has been accused of stealing a valuable drinking cup from a fellow Norseman.
Further complicating an already-uncomfortable situation, one of the Saxon visitors is an acquaintance Ketil had been hoping to avoid seeing again.
In the second instalment of her Orkneyinga Murders series, Scottish author Lexie Conyngham overlays a cast of complex characters on the real-life backdrop of 11th-century Orkney as described in detail in one of Iceland’s best known Old Norse sagas.
Both Thorfinn and Ingibjorg are documented historical figures, first introduced to Conyngham’s readers in Tomb for an Eagle, and the tumbledown-stone remains of their quarters and wider community at Birsay can still be visited, injecting an added dash of factual fascination to this fast-moving mystery.

The Long Call

23/8/2019

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $17.99

BODIES being found on beaches and girls disappearing from community arts centres are not typically part of the idyllic lifestyle that lures sea-changers to the North Devon coastline where the rivers Taw and Torridge meet.
For Matthew Venn, however, proximity to murder and abduction is the unavoidable downside of being a detective.
Freshly returned from honeymooning with his new husband, Jonathan, Venn is one of the first investigators called in when a corpse is discovered only a few hundred metres from the couple’s cottage.
It’s a horrible escalation of an already-difficult day for Venn, who has had to stand alone outside the chapel of the local crematorium during his estranged father’s funeral service.
Now, when he should be starting to unwind over dinner, he has an unexplained stabbing almost literally on his doorstep.
Although the victim is identified quickly, neither of the man’s former housemates is able to provide any worthwhile clues as to why he might have been targeted. He is remembered as a rather reclusive introvert who shared little with those around him aside from a restaurant-quality home-cooked meal every Friday.
And for Venn, the complications don’t end there. When a developmentally challenged young woman vanishes after spending an afternoon at the cultural facility that Jonathan manages, the conscientious police officer wonders whether he should recuse himself for the sake of propriety from handling the enquiry. Is he at risk of becoming dangerously close to this case?
With one person dead and another missing, Venn and his small team in the pretty village of Barnstaple are being stretched almost to the point of snapping.
The Long Call is the debut novel in Ann Cleeves’ new British crime-fighting series, introduced when she chose to step away from Shetland as a setting after the release of her eight – and, for now, final – Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez book.

The Lions' Torment

7/6/2019

Blanche d’Alpuget: Ventura $32.99

ON BOTH sides of the Narrow Sea that separates continental Europe and Britain, the 1160s are a tumultuous decade for the nobles who rule not only Normandy and England but also an enormous, sprawling region stretching all the way south around the Bay of Biscay to Spain.
Henry II, jointly Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and King of England, is supported on the throne by his siblings Hamelin the Merlin (an illegitimate half-brother) and Viscount William, the youngest of the late Count Geoffrey the Handsome and Matilda’s three sons. On the periphery hovers Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England, skilful financier and fawning sycophant – a man obsessed with Henry, fortune and fame in equal measure.
With so much land under its control, the Norman Plantagenet dynasty is feeling threatened. To the east French king Louis VII (whose ex-wife Eleanor is now married to Henry) is disgruntled by the Normans’ attack on the city of Toulouse; further north the Germans, under the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, are massing troops for a possible invasion; and in the Vatican Christianity is cannibalising itself as rival factions squabble over the legitimacy or otherwise of two opposing Popes.
England, too, is in political turmoil: the Archbishop of Canterbury is dying and the church is riddled with self-serving degenerates positioned beyond the reach of Henry’s secular laws.
From his base on the River Seine at Rouen, Henry reigns over one of the biggest kingdoms his world has ever known.
In a melee of beautiful, entitled men and powerful, rich women, the Plantagenets and their courtiers jostle for position and favour, surrounded by intrigue and espionage, lasciviousness and piety.
One of Australia’s most multi-faceted authors, Blanche d’Alpuget couples the exacting skills of biography and saga with the irreverence of pop-fiction to breathe life into characters who lived almost a millennium ago.

The Scholar

26/4/2019

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

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

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.

The Forgotten Children

8/2/2019

Isabella Muir: Outset Publishing $29.50

LOSING an unborn child and having her boyfriend propose marriage within the same few days is more emotional upheaval than Emily Carpenter can handle.
Emily’s fresh wave of mourning reopens painful memories of a previous pregnancy and a tiny boy entrusted to the care of nuns 20 years earlier. Back then, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl she had no choice in the matter, the decision made without consultation by her conservative parents.
Now grieving all over again, Emily – an outwardly successful author – flees her home in Brighton, England, and in a single day drives until she runs out of road. There, on the western edge of Britain, in the island of Anglesea, Wales, she settles into a rented cottage in a village where her days are filled with taking long walks with her dog Ralph and teaching reading. It’s an opportunity for a new beginning, albeit temporarily, free from constant reminders of the ways in which her life has stalled.
After a series of stilted chats with a stranger on a clifftop, however, she realises the time has come to stop running and instead address her regrets and frustrations in person.
As Emily begins to pursue the truth about her surrendered son her research uncovers a trail of circumstances she could never have imagined. Not only is he no longer in the Brighton area but it seems children from the facility in which he had been living were among those sent to the far side of the world as part of a decades-long program to relocate unwanted British youngsters to Commonwealth countries including Australia. No records survive, leaving Emily with few options for tracing his whereabouts.
Whether she will now be able, so many years later, to make her peace with those events (and with her own mother’s role in them) is uncertain.

Tomb for an Eagle

1/2/2019

Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press $18.61 (paperback) or $1.41 (ebook)

NEARLY a thousand years after his death, Thorfinn Sigurdarson – aka Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney – and his wife Ingiborg have been resurrected from their Viking graves.
One of the greatest power-couples of the 11th century is at the centre of historical novelist Lexie Conyngham’s new work of heavily fact-based fiction.
Thorfinn rules over Orkney from his base at Birsay on the north-western tip of the archipelago’s biggest island. It’s a turbulent time for Thorfinn, among the earliest Norse Christians and a man who has completed a personal pilgrimage to Rome; a rival earl, his nephew Rognvald, has been ambushed and slaughtered on Thorfinn’s orders and Rognvald’s surviving loyalists are percolating trouble. The settlement at Birsay – the de facto Orcadian capital – is on alert.
When widowed woolworker Sigrid finds the corpse of a stranger hidden under rocks in a nearby gully a quest to unearth the victim’s identity begins. Where had he come from, and when and why was he killed?
Ketil Gunnarson, formerly of Heithabyr in Denmark and more recently of Norway, has just landed in Orkney claiming to be a trader of carved wooden drinking cups – a rare and precious commodity in a region without trees.
It soon emerges, however, that Ketil – a childhood acquaintance of Sigrid’s – is not a merchant at all but one of Thorfinn’s most trusted assassins, hired for the attack on Rognvald and now back in Orkney many months later on a mission of his own.
Tomb for an Eagle fleshes out accounts of actual people and events recorded in Orkneyinga Saga, a section of the world-famous Icelandic chronicle written on parchment in the late 1300s, Flateyjarbók.
This is the first title in Conyngham’s planned Orkneyinga Murder series. The second book, A Wolf at the Gate, is scheduled for release later in the year.

The Distant Shore

16/11/2018

Suzannah Thirlwall: $4.99 (Kindle edition)

IN ORPHIR, Orkney, it’s 1391.
Slipping away from his widowed mother after church one Sunday, Thorfinn races with his friend Thora ahead of an approaching storm across a treeless, otherwise-deserted moor, desperate to find shelter. Together they huddle in the entryway of a stone burial chamber, terrified of the fury raging outside but equally panic-stricken at the prospect of being haunted forever by the graves’ evil spirits.
The same merciless gale brings good fortune to the band of Orcadians who prowl the churning shoreline praying that fate delivers an undefended shipwreck to plunder. Their target this time is a galley from Venice laden with riches rarely seen in this subsistence settlement on the fringe of civilisation.
Years later, Finn and Thora find themselves together again, this time in the capital, Kirkwall, where the community’s ruler, a Scottish earl, is preparing to lead his people in a celebration whose character is as clearly Norse in origin as the now-teenagers’ names. Joining in the festivities is one of the few survivors of the Venetian vessel’s stranding, the youthful sailor Matteo.
Finn barely remembers his father, a fisherman who early in his son’s childhood failed to return from a routine expedition, presumably drowned at sea.
When a bedraggled stranger shows up in the revellers’ midst, however, Finn knows instantly that he is back. But where has the old man been all this time? Could a carved tablet in his odd-looking skiff hold the answer?
Soon Finn is on the move, setting sail with Matteo and the earl in a quest that will take them across the open Atlantic Ocean all the way to the land that centuries later will become Nova Scotia, Canada.
It’s there that the expeditioners’ ordeal really begins, pitting Finn and his companions not only against fierce native tribes but against themselves.

Wild Fire

28/9/2018

Ann Cleeves: Macmillan $29.99

IN THE lead-up to her new novel’s release, Ann Cleeves had long teased readers that one of the world’s most beloved homicide detectives, Jimmy Perez, may not survive his upcoming Shetland murder case.
A playful Cleeves resurrected that threat to her character’s wellbeing when speaking at the Bendigo Writers Festival last month.
Wild Fire is the story of that fateful investigation.
The final instalment in the second of two quartets of Shetland crime books, it draws to a close a set of four with “elements” as their theme.
The mystery begins in May, three months after Detective Inspector Perez and his on-off lover and police superior Willow Reeves last worked together in Cold Earth.
It takes place largely in fictitious Deltaness, a hamlet in the north-western corner of Shetland’s main island, where the body of young nanny Emma Shearer has been found hanging in an English-incomer family’s shed.
Gossip suggests that Shearer – who cared for the four children of a local doctor and a part-time-publicist – and the newly arrived father, architect Daniel Fleming, were more than merely friends.
In a departure from tradition for Cleeves, part of the action this time extends beyond Shetland’s shores to neighbouring Orkney as Perez researches the Orcadian victim’s teenage years.
As the team begins to track the killer, Fleming finds himself struggling to hold together his relationship with his celebrity knitwear-designer wife Helena – who by coincidence was acquainted many years earlier with Perez’s now-deceased fiancée, Fran.
Unscrambling the evidence trail is complicated in itself but being forced to work side by side with Reeves again adds an entirely new level of difficulty to the situation for Perez, a man once described as “emotionally incontinent” by his former wife.
Will this in fact be the last hurrah for the moody policeman with the tragic past?

I’ll Keep You Safe

2/3/2018

Peter May: Riverrun $32.99

AN ACCUSATION of infidelity will forever more haunt Niamh Macfarlane as the last thing shouted at her late husband Ruairidh (‘Rory’) before he was killed in a car bombing in central Paris. With him in the vehicle at the time was his alleged lover, Russian clothing designer Irina Vetrov.
Niamh had first learned of the affair only a couple of days before Rory’s death, shattering the faith she had always had in the strength of their supposedly rock-solid combined personal and business partnership.
Now she is a widow, returning with his remains from France to the Isle of Lewis and Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
It is there, in a tiny hamlet facing the wind-churned, brutal North Sea, that the Macfarlanes had established their own traditional cloth-weaving operation, Ranish Tweed. With their product keenly sought-after in the world of high fashion, Niamh and Rory had crafted for themselves a seemingly idyllic lifestyle based in a stunningly beautiful home on an isolated headland outside the tiny capital, Stornoway.
The one downside for the seemingly happy young couple had always been the barely contained antagonism keeping their two families apart. With Rory gone, Niamh is torn more than ever between her openly warring relatives and in-laws.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, French detective Sylvie Braque arrives in Lewis and Harris to investigate the explosion for which Irina’s now-missing husband Georgy is being held provisionally responsible.
But is Georgy Vetrov really the only credible suspect? Could tensions either within the closely bonded island community or stemming from a commercial deal turned sour be behind Rory’s death instead?
In partnership with local police officer George Gunn, the Frenchwoman sets to work scrutinising every aspect of the Macfarlanes’ movements leading up to the killing – but despite its modest dimensions, Lewis and Harris is surprisingly adept at maintaining secrets.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

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