Category: Suspense

Water Memory

5/3/2021

Daniel Pyne: Amazon Publishing $6.48 ebook

IF ONLY the pirates had known what they were getting themselves into they might have chosen a different mark.
Now it’s too late: they’re already committed. They’ve singled out their target and closed in, approaching the massive vessel in three battered aluminium fast-boats, intent on capturing the officers and crew and taking control of the bridge.
A haul of this size will be the making of these until-now-smalltime criminals. In the grimy backstreets of Porto Pequeno, a frontier town clinging to no-man’s-land between Venezuela and Guyana, the men holding the mighty Jeddah will be heroes. The ransom its owner will pay will be a literal fortune by local standards.
Aubrey Sentro first learns of the attack when unfamiliar voices fill the corridor outside her cabin.
She certainly hasn’t been expecting this. The voyage started normally enough for Sentro and her companions, a handful of paying passengers aboard a working cargo ship, with a quick call in port in Georgia before heading out across the Caribbean towards South America’s north-easternmost tip.
It’s supposed to be a long-overdue break for Sentro, recently returned from yet another infiltration-and-extraction mission in a scruffy part of the world and experiencing memory lapses courtesy of several concussions too many. Ex-military, Sentro now uses the skills developed in army intelligence to operate covertly for a private firm that specialises in hostage retrieval.
As far as her family knows, however, she works in something called “reinsurance” and travels frequently for a white-collar desk job. Back home in Maryland, Sentro’s adult children think she’s on a leisure cruise, no doubt sipping cocktails by the pool on some 21st-century version of Hollywood’s Love Boat.
Not in their wildest nightmares could they imagine their mother pitting herself against 13 heavily armed mercenaries in a battle for survival.
Little do they know what she’s capable of doing.

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.

One by One

25/12/2020

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.

City of Spies

20/11/2020

Mara Timon: Zaffre $29.99

NATHALIE Lafontaine’s luck has just run out. A neighbour in Paris, offended by her rebuffing of his unwanted advances, has made a complaint against her to the occupying Germans and now she is being hunted by the dreaded Gestapo.
After a desperate flight south through the countryside she is fortunate to escape onto a fishing boat that delivers her to Spain. There she is received by the British Consul-General in Madrid as Elizabeth de Mornay, codename ‘Cécile’, a highly trained member of the Special Operations Executive who has been working behind enemy lines in France.
Rather than send her home to London, however, her superiors assign Elizabeth yet another alias and divert her to theoretically neutral Portugal. The Portuguese ruler, António de Oliveira Salazar, is maintaining a delicate balancing act, welcoming refugees from both sides of the war and maintaining regular contact with the Allied countries while hedging his bets by turning a blind eye to Axis actions within his own border.
In Lisbon Elizabeth emerges with a new identity: that of Solange Verin, a French widow in need of safe shelter far from the dangers of the Nazi occupation of her homeland. Her brief is to meld into the expat German community – a relatively easy assignment for an attractive 20-something woman guaranteed to catch the attention of any number of German intelligence officers.
Lisbon, she quickly finds, is a city in which watching one’s neighbours is an everyday obsession. People appear – and, all too often, disappear – suddenly and without explanation.
Everywhere she goes brunette Solange is being observed – so much so that with the help of a wig she disguises herself as blonde Veronica Sinclair on occasion in order to evade the bufos who constantly monitor her movements on behalf of various parties, some more or less friendly, some definitely not.
Under such close scrutiny, can she actually achieve anything worthwhile?

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.

Camino Winds

19/6/2020

John Grisham: Hodder & Staughton $32.99

RARELY does John Grisham revisit a set of characters, regardless of how successful that cast’s original exploits have been. In Camino Winds, Grisham makes an exception.
The fact readers are served up a second helping of Mercer Mann and Bruce Cable is a gift in itself; that their reinvigorated storyline takes an entirely new direction makes this sequel an intriguing contrast to the original novel, Camino Island, and at the same time a release that deserves to stand independently on merit.
In this instalment bookstore owner Cable is the key to the plot while Mann takes a sideways step into a peripheral role.
Hurricane Leo has just carved its way across Camino, twisting, churning and inflicting on the pretty seaside village of Santa Rosa catastrophic destruction and at least one death.
When Cable is called to the property of lawyer-turned-novelist Nelson Kerr to identify a battered body, it seems his friend has become an unwitting victim of the storm’s ferocity.
However, prompted by local author Bob Cobb and college student Nick Sutton, Cable soon starts to question whether the fatal injuries were indeed inflicted by flying debris. Could at least three separate blows to the head really have been caused by windborne branches? Surely the odds of this having happened must be extraordinarily low, so what – or who – actually did kill Kerr?
In the chaotic aftermath of Leo, Cable, Sutton and Cobb start to examine the circumstances surrounding his demise and workshop credible explanations.
Kerr – a former FBI whistleblower known for focusing on corporate wrongdoing – had just put the final touches to his next best-seller-in-waiting so could its imminent publication have spooked someone into wanting him silenced? In theory nobody has yet seen this freshly completed manuscript and so far the police have not considered it worth investigating. It could well be the motive they’ve been lacking, however.

Virusi

17/4/2020

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $0.99 Kindle e-book

GREENLAND is on red alert.
Clinging as it is on the outermost rim of the inhabited world, this enormous but sparsely populated island is just about as far removed from the tropical diseases of central Africa as it’s possible to be.
The arrival home of one infected traveller is all it takes to change that, however. Suddenly, with the identification of a critically ill returnee, a tiny islet off the mainland’s east coast is a potential threat to thousands of scattered Greenlanders stretching from far-flung settlements to the capital, Nuuk.
Aid worker Navana – now known officially as “patient zero” – is presenting with all the classic symptoms of a fast-moving virus. The fact she has only recently left a developing area of South Sudan bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo is particularly troubling to the health department.
Responsibility for ensuring residents of Niisarnaq comply with a hastily ordered lockdown rests with Constable David Maratse, a loner in the Greenlandic police force who finds himself on assignment in the minuscule community at exactly the wrong time.
Only hours earlier Maratse’s sole mission had been keeping the peace between two warring neighbours – a fisherman and a hunter – engaged a long-running local feud.
But with no law-enforcement backup available, insufficient protective clothing on hand and only an inexperienced trainee nurse on duty, corralling Niisarnaq’s population and at the same time stabilising Navana until help can be flown in is a nearly insurmountable challenge.
Petersen’s release of the 17th novella in his Arctic Shorts series is a timely gift to readers weathering the coronavirus pandemic in isolation, desperate to find a few hours of relief through a storyline that develops as quickly as its subject matter and in an exotic setting. Virusi’s skilful mirroring of real-world events makes for a perfect few hours of diversionary escapism.

The Tenth Girl

3/4/2020

Sara Faring: St Martin’s Press $20.72 Kindle e-book

TALES of ghostly hauntings are not unheard of in remote boarding schools – but when the facility in question has been abandoned for decades, the first wave of new teachers deployed to its musty classrooms is justifiably skittish.
Perched at the southernmost tip of South America, surrounded by inhospitable mountains and fields of jagged ice and accessible only by water, the ramshackle cluster of buildings is rundown and eerie.
Among those recruited to teach an elite class of 10 handpicked teenage girls is Mavi, the orphaned and destitute daughter of an anti-establishment couple ‘disappeared’ by Argentina’s ruling dictatorship. Mavi’s only ally against disengaged students and disaffected colleagues is Yesi, an aspiring author who spends every non-teaching moment adding to her manuscript.
It’s not long, however, before Mavi also attracts the attention of Domenic, the overly privileged wastrel son of the current principal.
The Vaccaro School was once one of Argentina’s most elite institutions – until its sudden closure ignited speculation that a curse had been cast upon it by the local indigenous Zapuche tribe, condemning it to fail as a business and leading to the outbreak of a fatal virus among its few remaining inhabitants.
Now, against the backdrop of the country’s crippling political turmoil, Carmela De Vaccaro has taken charge, denying outright the existence of all such paranormal phenomena and determined to reclaim her family legacy’s former prestige.
But with inexplicable happenings becoming increasingly evident around her, Mavi quickly starts to suspect there is more than a pinch of truth behind claims that the premises are populated by mysterious beings known as los Otros (the Others).
Told through the eyes of alternate narrators, The Tenth Girl is an up-close chronicle of a chain of psychologically disturbing scenarios unfolding within the confines of an isolated community cut off from the wider world.

The Calendar Man | The Twelfth Night

29/11/2019

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $5.99 each Kindle e-books

DANISH-BASED author Christoffer Petersen’s Christmas offering to fans of Arctic noir is a pair of seasonally themed novellas designed to be enjoyed progressively across the Advent–New Year period.
The action in the first of the two releases, The Calendar Man, begins on December 1 and continues in bite-sized chapters that can be read in less than 15 minutes per day throughout the lead-up to Christmas, culminating on Christmas Eve, when Scandinavians (including Greenlanders) celebrate by sharing meals and opening gifts together. It is the literary equivalent of the 24-part Julekalendere programs broadcast on television every year and the internationally popular windowed wall calendars.
The second picks up the storyline on January 5 and runs for 48 hours to end early on the morning immediately after Twelfth Night, or Mitaartut.
Both feature a cast of central characters introduced in Petersen’s previous series, set in the same location a quarter of a century earlier: police colleagues Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Gaba Alatak, Aqqa Danielsen and Atii Napa and politician’s daughter Pipaluk Uutaaq from Greenland Crime, and Iiluuna Mattikalaat, a troubled child from Arctic Short Stories.
Even in 2042 serious crime is rare in Greenland – so rare that when an Advent calendar is found on a mutilated body in the capital, Nuuk, Commissioner Jensen is recalled to duty despite being on extended leave at the time.
First Minister Uutaaq is taking no chances with law and order in her rapidly developing city. A vote on independence from King Frederik’s Denmark is looming and nothing – not even a cryptic and very public corpse – can be allowed to derail the democratic process.
Juxtaposing the elements of a contemporary crime thriller with the warmth of traditional festivities in a remote, otherworldly setting, Petersen serves up a glimpse into a culture as exotic and mysterious to outsiders as it is rich and welcoming.

Five Midnights

4/10/2019

Ann Dávila Cardinal: Tor Teen $26.99

SO ENTRENCHED is Puerto Ricans’ belief in the mythical Latino bogeyman El Cuco that when first one, then another, teenage boy is murdered, natives of San Juan don’t doubt that this beast is the likely killer.
Lupe Dávila, on the other hand, a ‘Gringa Rican’ from Vermont newly arrived on holiday in the Caribbean, is not nearly so easily convinced. Surely in the 21st century people don’t actually believe that an imaginary monster wielded as a threat over misbehaving children is roaming the city’s streets?
Yet the deaths do seem to be frustrating the best investigative efforts of Lupe’s uncle, police chief Esteban.
When Lupe meets Javier, a longtime friend of the two dead youths, a side of San Juan seen by few foreign tourists begins to reveal itself. In the tattered remnants of the El Rubí neighbourhood with its delectable street food and peeling, colourful façades, in the garbage-strewn alleyways and crumbling warehouses dominated by a rampant drug trade, and in the ultra-glamorous ocean-front condominium of international reggaetón superstar Papi Gringo, Lupe finds the most extreme of contrasts.
Could the common denominator in these two horrific crimes be an informal quintet dubbed by their mothers Los Cangrejos (The Crabs) – five male babies born within a few days of each other under the star sign Cancer and raised almost as brothers? If so, could Javier’s life also be at risk?
Both young men died literally on the eve of turning 18 so, with his own birthday looming, Javier – now clean and sober and working to support community programs run by his parish priest – begins to think back over his years of drug abuse and the meaning behind the lyrics of Papi Gringo’s new hit song, “Retribución”.
This novel is partly autobiographical, reflecting author Dávila Cardinal’s experiences as a fair-skinned North American with Puerto Rican heritage.

Ghosts of the Past

26/7/2019

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $32.99

EDWARD Presgrave’s name has never been familiar to his fellow Australians but that could change quickly once readers start talking about Tony Park’s 17th novel, Ghosts of the Past.
Known for his love of southern Africa’s diverse landscapes and cultures, in his latest release Park combines a penchant for constructing adventure-rich storylines with an interest in military heritage.
In Ghosts, newly unemployed Sydneysider Nick Eatwell decides on a whim to travel to South Africa in the footsteps of a previously unknown great-great-uncle, Sergeant Cyril Blake – a young man accused of having tortured and murdered a prisoner before being executed in German South West Africa almost a century before it was reborn as modern-day Namibia.
A volunteer who served with the mounted British unit Steinaecker’s Horse during the Anglo-Boer War, Blake has been identified by an investigative journalist in Cape Town as a key player in an intriguing and dramatic search for Afrikaner President Paul Kruger’s vanished fortune: millions of dollars worth of solid gold bars.
Within hours of arriving in Kruger National Park, however, Eatwell has his safari cabin burgled and realises that both his family-historian aunt and a former colleague who’s assisting with document translation could also be potential targets. Clearly someone has a vested interest in staying several paces ahead of Eatwell in his attempts to retrace Blake’s movements across the continent.
As he strives to unravel the details of his relative’s time both in the army and later as a horse-trader, Eatwell must weigh up who can be trusted and who might want him and his contacts dead.
The character Blake is based closely on the real-life Presgrave, an Australian soldier who fought with British Empire forces in South Africa and eventually became embroiled in the slaughter of Nama tribespeople under German rule across the border in South West Africa.

The Shadow Writer

21/6/2019

Eliza Maxwell: Amazon $23.99

WITHIN a split second Gracie Thacker’s entire family ceased to exist, obliterated by a vicious teenaged murderer. Now, even Grace herself – “America’s sad little sweetheart” – has disappeared, leaving in her place an unrecognisable adult alter ego: creative writing graduate Graye Templeton.
As a nine-year-old eyewitness called on to testify in a high-profile trial, Grace was forced into hiding to escape a morbid public fascination with her tragic loss.
More than a decade later she has emerged as an anonymous, unremarkable young woman with no discernible past. Friendless and working as a teaching assistant in New York City, Graye is delighted to strike up an unlikely chance acquaintanceship with Laura West, a stylish, poised literary blogger whose husband David is a bestselling novelist.
When the Wests move to an island in Texas it seems the budding relationship between the two women will wither, but months later fate intervenes when Graye learns that a famous author in the same locality is recruiting. Seeking a professional reference from David she visits the couple and is quickly talked into working for Laura instead.
It’s Graye’s dream appointment: learning the publishing ropes from someone with influence, respect and a sharp eye for the ‘next big thing’ in books.
Sorting through the piles of unsolicited manuscripts delivered to Laura she decides to take the bold step of slipping a story of her own into the mix – and then waiting to hear her employer’s opinion of it. For Graye the pressure is almost unbearable. After all, her career prospects hinge solely on Laura’s reaction to the words on those pages, crafted on an old-fashioned manual typewriter and polished over and over through multiple drafts.
At the same time Graye is reacting to news of the killer’s release from jail. What will this mean for the future she has planned?

The Island

3/5/2019

Ragnar Jónasson: Michael Joseph $32.99

ON AN isolated volcanic plateau in Iceland’s Westman Islands, surrounded by open ocean and populated ordinarily by only seabirds and sheep, four childhood friends reunite.
It’s a bittersweet time for the group, gathered now to honour a fifth member of their teenage-years posse, Katla, killed at the age of 20 exactly a decade earlier while spending a quiet weekend at her family’s wilderness cabin.
Katla’s younger brother Dagur is finally taking steps to overcome the horrendous event and the cascade of misery it triggered. The siblings’ father, accused of having murdered Katla, committed suicide while in custody and their mother, distraught, slipped further and further into malaise until Dagur had no choice but to admit her to a care home, where she continues to languish.
Now living alone, Dagur welcomes the chance to spend a few days away with Benedikt, Klara and Alexandra – three people with whom he grew up in a small satellite town on the fringe of Reykjavík.
It’s been 10 years since Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir lost her own daughter, Dimma, and eight years since her husband, Jón, died. Hulda’s career has stalled, leaving her trapped in a too-small flat barely paid for by a meagre mid-level police salary, and her prospects of gaining a much-needed promotion are all but non-existent.
Tragedy for the reminiscing foursome brings an unexpected change of fortune for Hulda, however, when a body is found below an intimidatingly sheer cliff near their holiday cottage.
As the senior officer on duty when the incident is logged she has first call on the case. Could this be an opportunity for Hulda to demonstrate her true ability at last?
This is the second book in Ragnar Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland trilogy: a prequel set a quarter of a century before The Darkness. The final instalment is scheduled for release next year.

When Ashes Fall

22/3/2019

Marni Mann: published independently $14.99

AS A frontline paramedic turned telephone dispatcher for the Boston police department Alix Rayne is accustomed to remaining cool under pressure. Managing life-threatening situations is second nature for this attractive, vibrant, 30-something woman.
On her way out to meet a blind date one evening Alix stumbles onto a stranger on the brink of death in an alleyway, having mixed too much alcohol with an overdose of drugs. Using her professional training to assess and then respond to the emergency she calls for an ambulance and is relieved to learn later that the patient, Joe, has survived his transfer to hospital.
Alix recognises something special in the friend accompanying Joe, Smith Reid, and hesitates for only a split second before accepting an invitation from him to dinner as his way of thanking her for her help. After a pleasant meal they agree to meet again for a full day out in the city.
The pair’s budding relationship is complicated, however, by the constant dropping in and equally rapid vanishing of Alix’s partner, entrepreneurial airline owner Dylan Cole. Alix and Dylan’s romance had exploded three years earlier after they met by chance in a favourite restaurant.
Now, Alix is never entirely sure when Dylan will let himself into their apartment, appearing without notice and then departing just as quickly, leaving her alone again in the bed they share part time. Moving forward with Smith is impossible while Dylan remains in her life, yet Alix is certainly far from ready to have him leave.
Told in chapters from the perspectives of the three central players – Alix, Dylan and Smith – Marni Mann’s novel unfolds over a roughly three-year period as the story moves back and forth skilfully at a comfortably engaging, entertaining pace that never loses its way despite the frequent back-and-forth time shifts.

Liv

18/1/2019

Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99

FOR Swedish TV journalist Ellen Tamm, a few days at her family’s estate on a relatively isolated island about an hour’s drive outside Stockholm is supposed to form part of an emotional rehabilitation plan.
Crime reporter Tamm is still reeling from the after-effects of her entanglement in the disappearance and death of a young girl, Lycke (the subject and title of author Mikaela Bley’s debut novel), in the city earlier in the year and that case’s reawakening of memories of her own twin sister’s drowning when they were children.
For the past several months has been unable to work. In fact, she is barely holding her life together, leaving the rent on her apartment unpaid, eating poorly if at all and closing herself off from her friends and colleagues.
On her way to the island, however, Tamm drives straight into a tiny satellite community in upheaval. A woman’s body has been found in a vehicle that morning and police have an area of the roadway cordoned off.
Should Tamm continue on as scheduled to spend the allocated time being fussed over by her controlling mother, or should she instead give in to her professional instinct and start digging for information on this new victim? She is, after all, the first member of the media to have arrived on the scene, even if her presence there is due to sheer chance.
As details of motorist Liv’s identity are unravelled Tamm discovers a world of anti-social behaviour, unconventional relationships, public deception and personal betrayal that pushes her ever-deeper into the darkness of self-doubt, mistrust and fear. Has she made an error of judgement from which she will never be able to recover this time?
A psychological thriller with deeply disturbing themes at its heart, Liv inhabits the unseemly underbelly of the outwardly picture-perfect existence of middle-class Swedes.

Northern Light

21/12/2018

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24.99

CONSTABLE Hákan Sigurdsson is faced with an unpalatable choice: volunteer to join the world’s least-established multinational law enforcement task force, Polarpol, based at sea in the Arctic, or be dismissed from his position with the Icelandic police by none other than his own sister, Reykjavik’s commissioner.
To be fair, it’s not an ideal situation for Jenny Sigurdsdóttir, either. Since his marriage disintegrated her brother has been out of control – angry, disengaged, bitter and, increasingly often, at least half drunk.
For his daughter’s sake, if nothing else, Sigurdsson must refocus. Perhaps this unexpected posting will become his salvation.
At the same time, English IT genius Adrian Seabrook has a secret he’s desperate to spill. Seabrook has decided that a high-profile cybersecurity conference in Reykjavik will provide just the global audience he’s been seeking.
Not everyone is as eager as Seabrook to have the information shared, however.
As the date of his planned public revelation nears, the would-be whistleblower finds himself under attack. Assassination attempts are made; two of his closest aides are killed.
Among those with Seabrook in their sights are Byrne Cantrell and Edie Teal, a couple whose passion for each other is exceeded only by their passion for creating human carnage. Together they are one of the deadliest combinations for hire anywhere on the planet, determined to complete one last assignment before packing away their concealed weapons and settling down to a life of baby-raising bliss. The hit on Seabrook will be their spectacular finale.
Polarpol has barely been commissioned when suddenly Sigurdsson and his new colleagues – one representative each from Canada, Alaska and Russia – are called into action.
Now, Seabrook’s chances of leaving Iceland alive hinge solely on the efficacy of Polarpol’s untested team.
Northern Light is the first book in a series derived from Christoffer Petersen’s Greenland thrillers featuring Sergeant Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen.

The Lost Man

9/11/2018

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

LIFE is tough in the isolation of Queensland’s Channel Country – particularly for a single farmer trying to make a go of it almost entirely on his own.
As a social outcast Nathan Bright knows the predicament all too well. Nathan has spent the past decade ostracised by his neighbours and former friends for a split-second error of judgement he will never manage to undo, banished from the local pub, the general store and every form of community gathering.
Few people are surprised, then, when they hear one of Liz Bright’s boys has been found dead in a remote, arid paddock, having left the security and supplies of his vehicle to wander out into the sun-baked savannah seemingly by choice.
It does shock listeners, however, that the dehydrated corpse is that not of Nathan but his brother Cameron: two years younger and happily married with two healthy daughters, in charge of the family’s station and seemingly beloved by everyone within a thousand-kilometre radius of tiny Balamara.
Distraught, Cameron’s widow cannot accept that her husband would have willingly done such a reckless thing. He had grown up on the property; he understood perfectly the danger of exposing a human body to the Outback’s searing mid-summer heat.
Now it’s up to Nathan and his teenaged son – visiting for a few days from Brisbane, where Xander lives with his mother after his parents’ agonising divorce – to unravel for the benefit of the survivors the hows and whys of Cameron’s gruesome death.
While this is not an Aaron Falk police thriller, fans of Jane Harper’s writing with a memory for detail (or those who reread The Dry before picking up this third novel) might recognise an unexpected link in this story of regret and atonement to Falk’s Kiewarra, a tiny Wimmera town crippled by a toxic blend of distrust and drought.

Red Storm series

27/7/2018

James Rosone and Miranda Watson: Kindle ebooks – Battlefield Ukraine $6.50; Battlefield Korea $6.22; Battlefield Taiwan $6.55; Battlefield Pacific $6.43

AS 2017 draws to a close, Russian President Vladimir Petrov’s patience pays off.
Petrov has been biding his time, stealthily marking off the days, weeks and months until conditions are in perfect alignment for a strategic assault against the political thorn in his side: Ukraine. Now, with his forces primed with the latest in 21st-century weaponry and tactical know-how, Petrov makes his move.
Ukraine’s charismatic nationalist leader is one of the first targets, assassinated in a pre-emptive strike on the man most likely to stand against a Russian invasion.
Ukraine is not left entirely defenceless, however. At the United States’ urging, NATO troops flood in, and so ensues a bitter struggle for control of the entire eastern half of the country.
This is not the only territory being coveted by a neighbour. In Asia, China is eyeing off land directly to its south, including the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, Myanmar and its longstanding annoyance, independent Taiwan.
As the NATO allies stretch their resources across an increasingly broad front on two continents, the communist superpowers unite to unleash a brilliantly formulated covert offensive known as Operation Red Storm.
Against a backdrop of email hacking, electoral tampering, spiralling unemployment, social unrest and economies in collapse, immediately identifiable characters populate these novels: a vodka-swilling macho Russian oligarch; a fractured US administration of self-interested officials and corrupt double agents; a Chinese leadership intent on regaining pride eroded by the dissolution of its once-mighty empire; passionate service men and women on every side of the conflict.
The depth of military detail in these novels is particularly impressive.
The first four books cover events in Ukraine, Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific, focusing primarily on each theatre in turn but delivering sufficient crossover to maintain the overarching storyline in real-time.
The next instalment, Battlefield Russia, will be released in September.

No Going Back

30/3/2018

Lisa Kennedy: Echo Publishing $32.99

“I FEEL guilty and… ashamed. I’m one of those stories you hear about in the news.” Lisa Kennedy’s candid admission sums up the shock and humiliation of having been deceived absolutely by her partner of almost a decade.
Very few Australians know Kennedy’s name. The situation could have been quite different, however, had a story filmed by current affairs program 60 Minutes been broadcast as planned.
In 2010, during what was intended to be a brief visit to introduce baby Daniel to his grandparents and aunt in Istanbul, Kennedy’s Turkish-born husband announced without warning that he had initiated divorce proceedings against her and that their son would live with him. Daniel was seven months old at the time.
After eight years of marriage, Kennedy was completely alone in an unfamiliar country where she spoke only a few words of the local language and whose laws were at best confusing and at worst unashamedly biased against foreigners.
The Australian Government was unable to intervene in what was essentially a domestic matter as far as the Turkish legal system was concerned.
Without her own parents, siblings or friends around her, Kennedy was left to choose between two unpalatable options: concede that she would never regain her son and return quietly to her old life in Melbourne, or dig in stubbornly and weather the antagonism being directed towards her by her husband and his family to continue fighting an expensive and emotionally exhausting battle for Daniel’s custody. Kennedy chose the latter.
When their case was eventually referred to the Family Court in Australia, the report was placed on hold by 60 Minutes. Seventeen months later a film crew from the program was detained by the authorities and an Australian child-recovery operative was jailed for their role in an eerily similar situation involving two Australian-born children Lebanon.

Manhattan Beach

26/1/2018

Jennifer Egan: Hachette $19.99

ANNA Kerrigan is intimately acquainted with the unconventional side of life.
Not only has Anna grown up in an all-female household in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn with no man as its protector but her mother is a former Broadway chorus-line dancer, her younger sister is chronically disabled, her aunt is an aging alcoholic seductress whose looks are sagging and her now-absent father forged his way in the Great Depression by “running errands’ for one of New York City’s most notorious crime lords.
It’s hardly surprising that when Anna enters a workforce depleted by the demands of war she is not content to accept one of the menial conveyor-belt roles traditionally allotted to women.
Instead, Anna quickly sets her sights on becoming a Brooklyn Navy Yard maintenance diver – a position so elusive that far more men fail the rigorous training process than complete the life-threateningly dangerous and emotionally draining course.
Surviving in Brooklyn is a challenge for any young woman, let alone one employed on the waterfront. With her instructor manoeuvring openly against her and her classmates offering virtually no co-operation, let alone support, she appears to have little chance of succeeding.
Anna is single-minded in her determination to join the program, however, and equally set on investigating a wispy recollection from childhood that appears to link her late father, Eddie, with a handsome and charismatic New York club licensee and gang leader, Dexter Styles.
Her disregard for the social mores that reign in the 1940s pits Anna against not only conservative individuals within her own community but the broader New York hierarchy at large – a hierarchy that invariably favours men with influence or wealth over even the most resourceful and committed teenage girl.
Part family saga, part underworld thriller, Manhattan Beach delivers a masterfully imagined storyline fleshed out with intricate, factual historic detail.

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

STILL deeply shell-shocked in the wake of interviewing a genocidal Rwandan teacher, journalist Nora Sand decides to distract herself from reality with a couple of minutes of retail therapy. In the sleepy surroundings of a small seaside village it’s impossible to know the ramifications her impulsive decision to buy a battered old leather suitcase will have.
As Danish news magazine Globalt’s UK correspondent, Sand is on assignment with a photographer-friend on the south coast of England when she makes her purchase.
Much later, back home in her inner-city apartment in London, she discovers a bundle of Polaroid photographs secreted behind its frayed lining.
One in particular catches her attention. Its subjects are two teenagers standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Car Deck 2’ – but the language isn’t English; it’s Danish.
When Sand recognises the taller girl as one of two orphans who vanished in the mid 1980s from a cross-channel ferry from Denmark while on an outing with their carers, her professional curiosity and investigative instincts are piqued.
Attempting to piece together the background to Lisbeth and Lulu’s still-unsolved disappearance leads Sand into the law-enforcement world of her highschool classmate Andreas Jansson, a fellow Dane now based temporarily in London while studying anti-terrorism with the British police at New Scotland Yard. Complicating the situation, Sand and Jansson have never resolved an awkward conversation that scarred their once-rock-solid bond years earlier.
When the name of infamous UK serial killer William ‘Bill Hix’ Hickley surfaces in Sand’s research, the importance of retracing the Danish girls’ last known movements takes on renewed urgency.
Could this maniac – a man who kept the tongues of his female victims as trophies – have somehow crossed paths with Lisbeth and Lulu during their travels abroad, or might they instead have fallen victim to an unknown accomplice of Hickley’s, or perhaps a copycat?

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $1.30 / $3.99 Kindle e-books

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

I Am Watching You

24/11/2017

Teresa Driscoll: Thomas & Mercer £4.99

ON PUBLIC transport, it’s generally expected that passengers will keep to themselves: that they will behave discreetly, mind their own business and not interfere in the conversations of those around them.
Sometimes, however, the worst thing a fellow traveller can do is to do nothing at all.
When florist Ella Longfield encounters an unexpected and decidedly discomforting situation on an inter-regional train bound for London, her first instinct is to intervene. Sitting nearby, Ella overhears an approach being made to Cornish schoolgirls Anna and Sarah by two young men, Antony and Karl, who soon reveal that they have just been released from prison and are determined to make the most of their first night of freedom.
As the mother of a teenager of her own, Ella is immediately alarmed. Should she speak directly to the girls, she wonders, or instead bide her time until the train reaches its destination, then try to telephone one of the families back home in Cornwall? Surely these friends from far southwestern Britain cannot be allowed to head off into the city alone with these men?
Having observed them further, however, Ella eventually thinks better of interfering and decides to keep her concerns to herself, simply heading directly to her hotel after the long trip and quickly falling asleep.
When she wakes the following day she is sickened to hear that Anna, the more attractive, seemingly more reserved of the pair, has disappeared.
Is Ella somehow responsible for this? Did her inactivity allow two men with criminal records free reign to prey on these unsuspecting country girls?
Teresa Driscoll’s chilling tale of regret, consequence and deception is told through the eyes of four people with direct involvement in the case: the witness, the missing girl’s father, a private investigator and the remaining friend.

Force of Nature

3/11/2017

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

CORPORATE retreat. It’s a term almost guaranteed to set off a shiver of fear in all but the most upwardly mobile, single-mindedly ambitious go-getting employee.
For accounting clerk Beth McKenzie few things could be less inviting than the prospect of spending four days ‘team building’ in the remote upper reaches of Gippsland with colleagues from BaileyTennants – among them, her twin sister Bree.
Also taking part in the five-woman, five-man orienteering survival exercise is one of Beth’s least favourite managers, Alice Russell, who at the age of 45 rules through intimidation.
Despite her apparently unwavering commitment to the firm, Alice has no desire to be there, either; her attention is several hundred kilometres away, split between a domestic crisis in the suburbs and an ultimatum delivered by the Australian Federal Police.
With tensions already simmering, the two groups set off in mid-winter into the Giralang Ranges, three hours’ drive east of Melbourne – but when the women emerge four days later, cold, hungry, wet and limping, Alice is no longer with them.
Hasn’t she made her own way back to the agreed pickup point, her fellow walkers ask the men. She’s not actually lost or, worse, injured, alone in the bush with dusk descending, is she? Unpopular though Alice is, nobody at BaileyTennants really wishes her ill – surely not.
As Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives on the scene he’s barely recovered from a life-threatening event of his own on the opposite side of the state. Accompanied by investigative partner Carmen Cooper, Falk is as desperate as anyone to find the missing accountant – but his motivation is not purely concern for her personal safety.
This second instalment in Melbourne journalist-author Jane Harper’s ‘Aaron Falk’ series is a fitting sequel to her debut novel, The Dry, adroitly juggling two parallel timelines as the disappearance and its aftermath unfold side by side.

The Templars' Last Secret

27/10/2017

Martin Walker: Hachette Australia $32.99

TUCKED away in the southwestern corner of France is one of the world’s most impressive collections of prehistoric art. The départment of Dordogne is known in international circles for a trio of drawcards: more than 1500 castles, abundant black truffles and the 600-plus irreplaceable Paleolithic paintings that line the Cave of Lascaux.
Within the Dordogne, Périgord is a normally sleepy, peaceful region, but in 21st-century France, extremist violence can flare without warning. Now, it seems, the Vézère Valley is being targeted – in a fictitious sense, at least.
The 10th release in Martin Walker’s ‘Bruno’ series opens with soldier-turned-village-police-chief Bruno Courrèges preparing to host the wedding in St Denis of two archaeologists.
The drafting of his speech must fit around his official duties, but in small-town rural France, policing is more often a matter of gently guiding delinquent teenagers back into the classroom than of investigating life-or-death cross-border crime.
For Bruno, the working week preceding his friends’ nuptials turns out to be an exception, however.
When the body of an unfamiliar woman is found sprawled at the foot of the once-grand Château de Commarque, with its Templar connections, it is apparent that her death was no accident. Unsuccessful attempts to identify the victim at first frustrate Bruno and his fellow law enforcers, then drive them to explore far beyond their usual boundaries – all the way to Israel and North Africa.
The trail of evidence they assemble spans thousands of years of Vézère history, beginning with the creation of the valley’s priceless artworks and extending through the Middle Ages, when knights returning from the Crusades were rumoured to have secreted their legendary treasure somewhere within the chateau.
Accompanied by his trusty basset hound Balzac, Bruno knows that for this tiny community, time to solve the mysterious killing – and in so doing stave off an infinitely bigger attack – is running out.

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